IT: Welcome to Derry Review: Fear Returns in Maine

HBO’s IT prequel goes straight for the jugular of Stephen King’s grossest notions about small towns and buried trauma — then keeps on squeezing until the dread runs out. IT: Welcome to Derry doesn’t just reheat old nightmares; it sharpens them in new ways that make your palms sweat, all while paying homage and, for my money, surpassing the mythology that transformed IT into a box office phenomenon.

With its opening scene, the show has you in its grip: Within minutes, it creates a mood so oppressive you can practically smell the damp rot of the sewers. Credit the sure creative hand of Andy and Barbara Muschietti, with Bill Skarsgård’s Pennywise still as elastic and unnervingly playful.

The Scares Under the Skin That Linger and Unsettle

Welcome to Derry knows fear is subjective. Every set piece here is a mechanism built around a character’s private dread — of feeling alone, or unseen, or failing the people you love — and then executed with surgical precision. The result is enduring horror because it feels bespoke, not generic.

The craft is top-shelf. The camera prowls like a curious predator, sound design weaponizes silence and breath, and practical gags are combined with VFX in ways that make you question what you’re seeing. It’s in the wee touches — an off-kilter reflection, a balloon string that shudders though the air is still — that the show locates its meanest jolts.

The franchise comes in with sky-high expectations. The 2017 film IT scored more than $700 million globally according to Box Office Mojo, rewriting the economics of studio horror. The series doesn’t attempt to top that scale; wisely, it reinforces intimacy and atmosphere, where TV can out-scare the multiplex.

A Derry With Teeth, Set Amid the Turmoil of the 1960s

Placed in the early 1960s — about now in that familiar-to-fans 27-year cycle — the series uses material originally heard in Mike Hanlon’s historical interludes in King’s novel to contour a town at peace with cruelty.

Derry’s tidy storefronts and smiling denizens are cosmetic; the rot is social, institutional, and inexorable.

The show weaves real-world tensions through the supernatural. We witness the violent silence of racism in everyday transactions, the institutional indifference of authorities, and the complicity of bystanders who avert their eyes. It’s not subtle, and that is the point: Pennywise prospers where communities prioritize comfort over conscience.

That texture matters. Nielsen has cited seasonal spikes in viewing horror as audiences seek catharsis; Welcome to Derry tweaks that release valve by having the human systems be just as frightening as the clown. The most terrifying moments typically come without a tooth or balloon in sight.

New Faces Worth Fighting For, and Worth Believing In

The series wisely grounds itself in new points of view. A fresh gang of kids — outsiders with soft hearts and sharp tongues — come along who rhyme with the Losers Club without mimicking it. It’s no easy task keeping secrets, and the home lives here feel lived-in and their secrets are messier. When Pennywise does appear, the terror lands because we’ve already been sold on who these people are.

Among the adults, Jovan Adepo and Taylour Paige invest a layered urgency as newcomers testing Derry’s limits, and Chris Chalk serves to thread the story into the wider King-verse without turning its development into an Easter-egg hunt in his few but significant scenes as Dick Hallorann. The stakes are sold by the performances: this isn’t lore for lore’s sake, it’s character first.

Mythology Widens Without Dulling the Fangs of Fear

Prequels risk over-explaining the unexplainable. Welcome to Derry flirts with a cosmic backstory but mostly leaves the mystery unsettling and elastic. We gain just enough understanding of the cyclical illness that plagues the town, of its origins, to increase dread, not dispel it.

The smartest decision the show makes is restraint. It doesn’t map out the predatory logic of Pennywise — how it’s a grotesque version of a community’s ugliest impulses — so much as underscore it. That aspect, too, keeps the horror psychological and thematic rather than merely monstrous.

Production Values That Bleed Confidence in Every Frame

HBO’s budget appears in the period detail: vintage storefronts, tailfins, and rotary telephones that look used rather than costumed. The color palette wobbles from the nostalgia of postcard-bright to malaise in sewer black, a visual tug of war that’s emblematic of the town’s collective head-in-the-sand attitude.

Skarsgård remains the franchise’s ace. His Pennywise is less a performance than it is an assholish weather system — cooing in one moment, pancaking his face into something insectile the next. Even when he’s not on screen, the edits seem to come around in time to his heartbeat.

Guilty by the Night Light, Proud of Its Chilling Thrills

IT: Welcome to Derry is that rare franchise prequel that justifies its own existence. It maintains its respect for the mythos while widening the canvas and hitting genuinely filthy scares that are rooted in character. If the occasional lore-tease wobbles, the series makes up for it with craft and conviction.

It is vulnerability that horror lives and dies on. This show knows that to the marrow, and it’s going to make you know it — one held breath, one balloon pop, one awful grin at a time.