Welcome to Derry’ Is Making the Same Unfortunate Mistake as the Movies
Editor’s note: The below contains spoilers for IT: Welcome to Derry.
IT has always been an outlier within Stephen King’s body of work. While the verifiable master of horror is known for writing quickly, IT is one of his longest novels and was completed after a lengthy process of several years. The result was a novel that was unwieldy, strange, and included a lot of dense mythology that would be nearly impossible to wade through within a single adaptation. Considering the complexity of the material, Andy Muschietti did a great job with both of his big-screen IT films, which also improved upon the miniseries that starred Tim Curry. Unfortunately, Muschietti’s prequel series IT: Welcome to Derry has repeated some of the films’ problems with an excessive use of jump scares and highly similar characters.
IT: Welcome to Derry jumps back to 1962, exploring a tragic massacre, in which several children are killed by an unseen evil entity, and its aftermath. Although General Francis Shaw (James Remar) employs the telepathic soldier Dick Hallorann (Chris Chalk) to investigate the growing evil that lurks somewhere in Derry, the massacre’s sole survivor, Lilly Bainbridge (Clara Stark), begins to look into the case herself alongside a new group of friends. IT: Welcome to Derry was initially able to stand out from other adaptations by examining some of the broader components of King’s mythology, but the series is also falling into the same trap of the shock horror that was so prevalent in Muschietti’s films.
‘IT: Welcome to Derry’ Is Using the Wrong Type of Horror
The first episode of IT: Welcome to Derry is a tremendous subversion of expectations that dispels the notion that Lilly and her gathered group of friends will be the protagonists of the show in the same way that the “Losers’ Club” was in the films. By violently killing off the cast of younger characters so early on, IT: Welcome to Derry suggests why the secret of the entity has been covered up for so long, and why virtually no one is aware of it by the time that the Losers’ Club goes on their adventures in the 1980s. IT: Welcome to Derry ultimately resets with a new cast of younger characters that befriend Lilly, including Ronnie (Amanda Christine), Will (Blake Cameron Smith), and Rich (Arian S. Cartaya). It’s an obvious attempt to create a new version of the Losers Club, especially given that all four characters are outsiders at school who aren’t held in high regard by their peers. Given that it would not make sense for these characters to form a complete understanding of the entity’s true form before the events of the films, IT: Welcome to Derry mostly terrifies them with a series of jump scares.
The 2021 A24 film is just as unpredictable, sickening, and surprisingly hilarious as it needed to be.
There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with jump scares, as they can be used effectively to keep viewers on the edge of their toes and connect more closely with the characters. However, jump scares work better within a cinematic medium where there is a captive audience that is engaged; it’s much harder for them to be continuously effective on a weekly basis, as they often disrupt the flow of the narrative. The jump scares in IT: Welcome to Derry often don’t succeed because they don’t stand in for larger ideas, as Lilly’s traumatic encounter at the supermarket seems inserted just for shock value. Although a scene from “The Great Swirling Apparatus of Our Planet’s Function” features a jump scare where Will nearly drowns, it only emotionally registers because of the fear shown by his father, Major Leroy Hanlon (Jovan Adepo), who begins to suspect that he hasn’t been told the full truth by Shaw about his real purpose in Derry.
‘IT: Welcome to Derry’ Shouldn’t Be Derivative of Andy Muschietti’s Movies
The best scenes in the IT films don’t actually involve Pennywise (Bill Skarsgard), and the films themselves worked best when they literalized the fears that each member of the Losers Club had about growing up, such as Beverly’s (Sophia Lillis) fear of her father, or Bill’s (Jaeden Martell) guilt about the loss of his brother. The jump scares in IT: Welcome to Derry aren’t as effective because we already have information about each of the characters’ trauma, as the series has already examined Lilly’s fear of being institutionalized and Ronnie’s indignity that her father Hank (Stephen Rider) has been racially profiled and framed for the death of the children. It also doesn’t help that the show’s computer-generated imagery doesn’t look great in certain scenes, as Muschietti seemingly hasn’t taken the right lessons from the disastrous release of The Flash.
The best parts of IT: Welcome to Derry are those that interweave different components of the King universe, including other adapted material. The threat that Hank could end up in prison due to Lilly’s coerced testimony serves as an interesting callback to The Shawshank Redemption and its themes of hope and perseverance, and the way that Hallorann uses his psychic powers to interrogate Taniel (Joshua Odjick) is an exciting way to tease the role that the character will end up playing in both The Shining and Doctor Sleep. The most terrifying aspects of IT: Welcome to Derry are the ones that hint at the evil lurking beneath an idealistic American town; even if the 1950s were seen as a booming decade in which the nation had recovered from World War II, the seeds of racism, nuclear experimentation, and conspiracies were hiding in plain sight. This is where the show is at its best, as nothing involving the younger characters has been quite as gripping as the efforts by Charlotte (Taylour Paige) to investigate Ronnie’s case and take down the racist cops. Although there are a lot of brilliant performances and fascinating ideas within the series, Muschetti’s ambitious prequel show should try to lean more into “Derry,” and shy away from being solely about “It.”
