Welcome To Derry is The Stephen King Adaptation I’ve Been Waiting My Entire Life For
And It Continues A Welcome Trend of Making Horror TV Scary
If there’s a genre on television that has been sorely lacking in depiction during the 21st century it’s horror. I realize that there’ve been countless series on every channel dealing with the supernatural but let’s not kid ourselves: they are everything but scary.
To be sure much of this must be laid at the feet of Twilight which decided to suck all the life out of vampires and werewolves and turn into a really bad YA romance. The CW spent much of its peak giving every possible supernatural permutation of the vampires and turning into just another high school drama, making it clear all of them had forgotten the lessons of Buffy and The X-Files. But Ryan Murphy deserves his fair share of blame having spent so much of his tenure on FX going out of his way to argue that at the end of the day, all the witches and spooky monsters out there really just want to be loved and isn’t humanity scarier than any monster? Murphy’s essentially leaned is as far as to camp as possible and shows no signs of backing away. And don’t get me starting on AMC’s Walking Dead, which has no sign of ending even after countless shows dealing with ways of how to shoot the undead and making it clear humans are just as nasty even after the world end.
However as horror has entered a new renaissance in the past decade the rest of Peak TV is finally starting to catch up with it. Mike Flanagan has spent the last several years revitalizing the genre with brilliant limited series from The Haunting of Hill House to Midnight Mass. Paramount Plus blessed us by taking up the mantle of Evil from Robert and Michelle King and making the demonic and hellish look genuinely frightening. Since partnering with Showtime we’ve seen them take new dramatic leaps with the intriguing School Spirits which finally puts the supernatural in a high school setting and genuinely makes it frightening and the incredible Yellowjackets which among its many genres has fully embraced Grand Guignol as much as the spirit of David Lynch. And in the last few years HBO has been making steps to atone for its original sin which is True Blood which did everything possible to make vampires closer to pornographic then anything resembling Bram Stoker’s vision. At the start of the decade we got the superb The Outsider and the incredible Lovecraft County, the latter of which absolutely should have been renewed for a second season.
Now in Welcome To Derry HBO officially atones for forcing the world of Sookie Stackhouse on us for seven seasons by showing us another supernatural town that is just as possessed by evil as Bon Temps was but shows us the other side of the coin. True Blood showed us a world of vampires and demons struggling to find acceptance in a cruel human world. Welcome to Derry shows us a small town where the populace has, even if they have never actively realized it, completely accepted the world of the supernatural and all of the horrors that are associated with it — and makes it very clear just how truly frightening it likely would be.
Last week I made the argument that more than any other contemporary force Stephen King lay the groundwork for the idea of the multiverse that has been dominated Marvel and DC in the theaters and TV (whether we want it to or not) and has been playing out in Star Trek and Star Wars in a similar fashion. I could argue that King may have invented the Easter egg before the term had become ubiquitous but that because the movies and TV shows that have been made are (understandably) self-contained the average viewer might be unaware of that. TV has made attempts to try and show that world (most famously in the Hulu series Castle Rock) but there’s never been an effort like this in TV history.
One of the reasons Andor stood out among the multitude of Star Wars spin-offs is because it tried to do something no previous product had ever done: what was it like to live under the Empire and what was the cost of being part of the Rebellion? Welcome to Derry actually asks a question that only a prequel can truly ask: what was it like to live in one of those small towns in Maine in everyday life? IT the novel answered that question in greater detail than any King novel ever had and its clear that the Muschietti brothers, who gave us the most brilliant adaptation of a Stephen King novel, clearly wanted to explore it. The first two episodes of Welcome to Derry now answer that question — and it’s genuinely terrifying.
Pennywise was a manifestation of the monster that lived under Derry and while both films gave a picture of how it approached both the Losers and some of their friends and bullies, because by necessity it had to be focused on the fight against IT in both timelines, it never asked the question that you might wonder: what happened to all the other kids? Had they survived, would they have had similar tails to tell? In the first two episodes set in 1962, the writers give us an answer to that question multiple times and while the impact may diminish over the course of the season, individually each scene is horrifying.
We see it in the opening teaser when the first missing boy Matthew Clements (who actually was a victim of IT in the original novel) is watching The Music Man but theater jumping. He is spotted by Veronica Grogan (African-American in this version) but she doesn’t say anything. Matthew runs out into the highway and for reasons unknown he wants to run away. He ends up being picked up by a friendly family who say they’re going to Portland. The youngest boy can spell anything and he starts spelling increasing grotesque words as the car starts to drive back to Derry. Then the pregnant mother starts to give birth as the family chants in unison with grotesque smiles. Then a horrible, demonic baby comes out and starts flying at Matthew — and he is never seen again.
Matthew was clearly an unpopular child and only a few people in Derry were close to him, outsiders themselves. Teddy Uris (clearly a relative of Stanley who has a similar date with Pennywise twenty-eight years in the future) is obsessed with comic books and sci-fi, which horrifies his Orthodox parents. His friends Phil and Teddy are trying to move on; Phil’s clearly obsessed with aliens and Cold War paranoia. Lily, the only one who might have been friends with Matthew, is an outcast because her father died in a ‘freak machinery accident’ (nothing’s ever an accident in Derry) and she spent time in Juniper Hill. One night Lilly hears Matthew in the drainpipe.
This leads the children to try and figure out what’s happening to the kids in their town. Ronnie eventually decides to bring them to the Capitol Theater and puts up the reel of The Music Man which Lilly heard him singing in the movie. While they’re watching the same section they see Matthew in the film holding a baby. (I guarantee you’ll never hear ‘Trouble in River City’ the same way again’.) Matthew turns to them and tells them that it’s their fault that he ended up like this. The screen turns red and the demonic baby comes out flying. What happens there is unclear but afterwards Lilly is the only survivor and there is nothing but blood…but no bodies.
The second episode is more frightening not simply because it continues with its scares but because it makes it clear in a way the Pilot didn’t just how horrible Derry really is. The most frightening scene in the episode is not the one you might think. It comes when Charlotte Hanlon (I’ll get back to that) goes into town and decides to buy a roast. While she’s chatting with the store owner she sees a bunch of hoodlums beating up on a young man. There are many people on the street. No one moves, including the storekeeper. “Boys will be boys,” he shrugged. Charlotte runs out and pulls them off him. The young man runs off and the boys follow after it. No one does anything. Charlotte is understandably appalled by this. She doesn’t know that this typical Derry behavior.
By now the Derry police are standing watch outside Hank Grogan’s house, certain he did it because its his theater and you know, he’s colored. Chief Bowers (yes Henry’s grandfather) knows he did it but he needs evidence to arrest him. After undergoing political pressure he hauls in Lilly and makes it clear because she went to Juniper Hill and because she was the only survivor, well, if she doesn’t make things clear, she might be going back there. The terrified Lilly, barely 12 years old, gives in and sure enough Hank is arrested.
And of course she ends up going back to Juniper Hill anyway. In what is the tour de force scene of the second episode Lilly ends up going shopping for her mother. Throughout the episode the viewer sees (but critically Lilly doesn’t) her fellow shoppers getting grins that we know from a certain clown. It becomes clear that Pennywise is manipulating her into a trap and while I won’t give away the nature of it is a completely accurate description of the kind of thing King’s been doing on the page for years. It doesn’t end with Lilly being killed, no that’s not the point. We know what’s coming.
You shouldn’t get attached to any of the young people in this series, and any fan of King knows that going in. The names of the characters in this series are the victims of Pennywise in the original book. The fact that they are appearing in 1962 is no doubt deliberate; all of them were among the missing and dead in 1958 in the original. It’s clear the writers are trying to make clear that this is a pattern that must repeat over and over again and that the citizens in Derry are letting it happen, generation after generation.
This is clear with one of the few characters who you know will have to survive: Leroy Hanlon (Jovan Adepo), Mike Hanlon’s grandfather in the original story. In this version of it he has brought his wife and son Will to Derry and he is a member of the U.S. Air Force. (This is pretty close to canon in the original book; the Hanlon family moved to Derry because Will was serving in the military.) Leroy is part of a special project that is being led by General Shaw (James Remar playing another father figure who you know has darkness beneath him) The Cuban Missile crisis is a few months away from unfolding and the U.S. military is trying to find what they think is a weapon that can end the Cold War immediately.
This might seem a bit out of place in the story but it’s not out of place in the world of Stephen King. Fans of him know that there is a different universe that involves a paramilitary organization that involves the Supernatural known simply as The Shop. Around this time in King’s universe its coming into existence and will start experimenting in the parapsychological experiments, one of which one day will produce Charlie McGee. Considering that the military often has a vested interest in King’s small town (a lot of weird shit happens here!) all of this seems typical.
And for those of you who think that Chris Chalk’s Dick Hallorann is just the ultimate Easter egg to tying the universe together, this is also canon. In the original novel Dick Hallorann is in fact serving in the Derry military base at the exact same time Will Hanlon does. I won’t give the circumstances of how we know this because it may very well involve a spoiler for what Season 1 plans to have as its climax. Suffice to say while the writers are giving him an additional story point to be here, in IT he is here and he already has the gifts that will make him valuable to the Torrance family when they end up at the Overlook.
What strikes me the most daring move of the first season (the show is scheduled to have three) is that we have yet to see the most famous denizen of Derry Pennywise even though Bill Skarsgard is scheduled to show up on the show. That’s also pretty close to canon in the original book. Most of the victims we see killed in various segments are victims not of the clown but of their greatest fears. And Welcome to Derry makes it very clear that it is being close to canon here. Teddy Uris gets a horrific reminder of what his family has lived through by his visitation. Veronica gets a graphic reminder of just what her greatest terror is. We’ve already seen that Lilly has succumbed to it. And the series shows us over and over again what the film could only imply: how did all these happens and no one noticed? The answer, as we learned in the original novel is that Derry is IT.
For those of you thinking that Welcome to Derry is doubling down on political messages to the point of stridency, again this is not being woke but canon. The themes of racism, sexism, bullying, homophobia and turning a blind eye to what’s going on around you in the name of some form of civic loyalty were all themes of King’s original novel. They were true when King wrote the novel in 1985 and we all know they haven’t gone anywhere in forty years. The writers are being incredibly faithful to King’s novel even if they aren’t dealing with plot points yet. (Though based on the description of how the series is going to unfold in this season and others, I have faith that it’s going to come soon.)
Welcome To Derry is the Stephen King adaptation I’ve been waiting for my whole life, not just in television but something I’ve only occasionally gotten even in the better film versions. And it does so revitalizing the horror genre by reminding us that the things that go bump in the night might not be more complicated than just wanting to eat you alive and scare you to death. The fact that Bill Skarsgard is the brother of Alexander who famously broke out as Eric on True Blood is an easter egg I truly love even more than the references to King. A decade after that show ended with Alexander on camera saying the supernatural were good people Bill is producing an HBO drama where his character will use to the very same television to drive his subjects insane and force them to do horrific acts, or else come out of the screen and eat there still warm flesh. If that isn’t another reason to hail the King, I don’t know what is.
My score: 4.5 stars.