IT: Welcome To Derry manages to assemble something interesting from the leftover bits of the novel, but the deja vu is real.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. In a small city in Maine, something terrible is preying on the children. The adults seem blind to the monster in their midst, but a group of outcast kids come together to unravel the mystery, facing horrors beyond imagination in the sewers beneath the burg’s quiet streets. Also, there are balloons.
That’s the plot, in the broad strokes, of Stephen King‘s IT: book, prestige miniseries, and cinematic two-parter. It’s also the plot to IT: Welcome To Derry, the new HBO Max series from the director of the latter, Andy Muschietti, and his producer wife, Barbara. It makes a certain kind of sense. The mythology underpinning IT is cyclical: the ancient thing that likes to wear the malevolent face of Pennywise the Clown (Bill Skarsgård) wakes every 27 years to feed. Carve 27 years off the first film’s ’80s setting and you wind up in 1962, only four years on from the book’s 1958 chapters, and a story that feels hauntingly (but only occasionally annoyingly) familiar.
There, we get two connected storylines. The most salient follows young Lilly (newcomer Clara Stack, devastatingly vulnerable), who has already done a stretch in Derry’s Juniper Hill Asylum and been lumbered with the cruel nickname “Loony Lilly” as a result, trying to find a missing kid with the help of her few friends. The newest is a young Black kid, Will Hanlon (Blake Cameron James), who has just moved to town with his parents, who hope to escape the racism of the South. And, putting aside the fact that the Hanlon family eventually beget IT‘s Mike Hanlon, that’s where we get out second narrative path.
Will’s dad, Leroy (Jovan Adepo), is serving in the Air Force at a nearby base under James Remar’s General Shaw, and alongside fellow serviceman Dick Halloran (Chris Chalk). Constant readers will recognise the latter as The Shining’s psychic hotel cook, who had a cameo appearance in IT the novel. Here his role is heightened, which we see as Will is drawn into a military project involving Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. The air force are fully cognisant of Halloran’s telepathy, and at least somewhat aware of what lurks beneath Derry.
The notion that the government is futzing around with the supernatural is a fairly common theme for Stephen King. The shadowy organisation called the Shop shows up in a few of his works, with Firestarter being the most notable, while it was a secret military endeavour that unleashed The Mist. Here, we get the men in uniform trying to collar Pennywise, which is… well, let’s call it “ambitious” and leave it at that.
Yet it’s never as engaging as the material focusing on Welcome To Derry‘s kid cast, and that in itself struggles because, despite the talented performers on screen, they still feel like a light reskin of the Losers of the films. The result is that Welcome To Derry doesn’t feel like a prequel so much as a loose remake.
It does well in the spooky atmosphere department, though, and the horror set pieces are genuinely effective, although the overreliance on obvious CGI does them no favours when it comes to suspension of disbelief. But it can’t shake the strong impression that we’ve seen this story before, even if we haven’t seen this particular story before.
I’ve been going through a bit of a Stephen King phase myself the past few months, hooking into the surprisingly large number of books the guy has put out in the past couple of decades. And even when some of the stories aren’t as good as I might hope, I always dig his voice. King has a tone, a certain storytelling mode, that I connect with. That’s present here, and it’s a big part of my enjoyment of Welcome to Derry. It’s not an essential addition to the King canon, but if you’re a fan, you’ll have a good time.
IT: Welcome To Derry is streaming on HBO Max from October 24.
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