We are but a month away from the start of HBO’s Stephen King series, It: Welcome To Derry, arriving All Hallow’s Eve Eve, October 26, to tell the prequel story of killer clown Pennywise and the people of the town he ravages. So, at long last, we have our first coherent trailer for the show that goes beyond scene setting. And, well, it sure looks like a lot more It.
Previous trailers have certainly given us an overview of the town of Derry in 1962, 26 years prior to the events of 2017’s It and 53 years before 2019’s follow-up, It: Chapter Two. But this latest gets a lot more specific, introducing us to Charlotte and Leroy Hanlon and their son Will, a Black family moving to the very white town of Derry, renting a house so the army family no longer needs to live on base. After establishing that the show will not be shying away from issues surrounding race in the early ’60s, the trailer quickly moves on to establishing a very familiar set-up: A group of kids investigating the disappearances of a local child, while relating it to children who went missing 26 or 27 years earlier in mid-1930s, and indeed (from a very quick glimpse of a scrapbook), other kids vanishing in 1908. That’ll be that pesky Pennywise then.
With all that established, and word of 25 recent disappearances, things then devolve into a montage of horror tropes, from white-eyed children to rolling evil fog, spooky old houses to floors crawling with worms. And, of course, Pennywise, once more played by Bill Skarsgård, doing his spooky clown antics.
It all looks splendid, and I’m really looking forward to the show, but that said, nggghhhh—something’s bugging me.
I’ve mentioned before my hope that the show wouldn’t just be a full-on It rehash, given the wealth of incredible books that have been set in Derry. Stories like Bag of Bones, Secret Window Secret Garden, and Dreamcatcher all took place there, as well as the mindbending Insomnia, and while the mid-century setting means the TV series will take place before all of those, it really does underline that like Castle Rock, Derry is a place where an awful lot more weird stuff takes place than just one killer clown wreaking havoc every quarter-century. It seems such a waste if we’re just going to watch yet another group of kids obviously fail to stop Pennywise as they’re all put through their own personal hells. We did that already! Twice!
Given that each season of this show (should HBO break its recent habit of immediately cancelling everything) is intended to be set 26/27 years before the last, there’s a fear of diminishing returns as we simply follow the lives of the kids who were killed in the previous season. Clearly there’s a lot of room for depicting American life back through the ages, and I’m very interested to see a pre-war 1930s, and explore 1908 and the complexities of the Taft presidency. Should it manage all four seasons, we’ll get to see 1880, which will be fascinating, unless it’s just about a bunch of kids investigating the disappearance of local children after a meteor crashed into the town.
The fog in the trailer is my remaining hope for more. It’s hard to see how Pennywise could do that, unless it turns out just to be one person’s imagined fear, and then I’ll be furious. (The Mist was set in the real town of Bridgton, Maine, in case you were wondering.) Some kids not stopping a clown that makes you scared doesn’t exactly sound like a recipe that can sustain another 32 episodes across four seasons, especially given we’ll know the outcome of each before we see it!
We shall see. I’m really hoping that showrunners Jason Fuchs (Wonder Woman) and Brad Caleb Kane (Warrior, Tokyo Vice) have more ambition than that, boosted by the previous movies’ director, Andy Muschietti, helming a bunch of episodes. Just a month until we find out.
