It: Welcome to Derry – The Pilot – Review: A Monster No One Can Escape From

A child is in a movie theater. His name is Matty. Despite looking too old for it, he has a pacifier in his mouth. He’s watching a movie with adults, until a guard comes for him: Matty shouldn’t be there. The child is chased but manages to escape. He has a difficult life; his relationship with his parents isn’t good. Cut to Matty on the road, trying to hitchhike with one of the passing cars. It takes a while, but a car finally stops. There’s a family inside. A smiling father, a pregnant and friendly mother, and their son and daughter silent in the back seat. They say they’re leaving Derry, just as Matty wishes.

Time passes.

The older daughter shows Matty a jar with sticky liver inside. The younger son invents a spelling game whose chosen words become increasingly sinister, and the atmosphere in the car is suddenly more violent. The mother screams — she’s giving birth to the child inside the car. Matty is terrified. They didn’t leave Derry, and the newborn isn’t a child; it’s a monstrous creature that flies around the car, distracting the driver, banging against the windows, and being celebrated by the family of murderous kidnappers while Matty watches in horror, clinging to his pacifier as if it can help him escape.

For those familiar with the Muschietti’s IT adaptations and their opening kills, Matty’s fate was sealed from the beginning: the creature violently attacks him. At the same time, the car continues to take the family further and further into Derry. That’s how IT: Welcome to Derry begins, with Matty trying to escape his abusive parents and dying at the hands of an even worse family. There’s no such thing as escaping it: you either face your fears and conquer them, or it drags you underneath to the town’s entrails. The thing that kills Matty — the creature that haunts Derry — is something no one can escape from.

Created by Andy and Barbara Muschietti, Jason Fuchs, and Brad Caleb Kane, Welcome to Derry is based on the IT book by Stephen King, this time taking inspiration from the novel’s interlude chapters, in which Mike Hanlon, the only main character who remained in Derry, tries to understand how Pennywise, the monster who lives underneath the town, is related to the town’s darkest events and studies how they are all rooted in racism and different kinds of hate crimes. Greenlit in 2023, the show has three seasons planned, with the first set in 1962, and subsequent ones planned to be set in 1935 and 1908. Each season should adapt a remarkable, violent event from the interludes, starting with the Black Spot nightclub fire, when a nightclub attended mostly by black soldiers from the nearby Army base was burned down by the Maine Legion of White Decency.

Thus, Welcome to Derry is centered on the Hanlon family: Mike’s grandparents, Leroy and Charlotte, and their son Will, who have all just moved to Derry. Leroy works for the Army and will be likely connected to the Black Spot plot; Will is one of the children expected to be part of this generation’s Losers Club; and my guess for Charlotte is that while interacting with Derry’s white moms, she will somehow stumble into the Legion of White Decency. This way, all of the Hanlons could have a connection to the aforementioned event.

But that’s just a theory, as Charlotte and Will don’t appear in the premiere, and Leroy’s military plot takes little screentime from the episode. In fact, this first hour deals mostly with the consequences of Matty’s, now presumed dead, vanishing. Lilly, one of his friends (kinda), is the one to miss him the most, especially after she hears his voice coming from the pipes. First enlisting the help of Matty’s (kinda; it’s complicated) friends Terry and Phil, who are later joined by Phil’s sister Susie and Ronnie, the group investigates what is happening in Derry, at first seeming to be the 1962 version of the Losers’ Club. If you watched the entire episode, however, you know that isn’t exactly true: lured to the movie theater where Matty’s was last seen, the children are attacked by the creature, and aside from Lilly and Ronnie, they are all shockingly killed by it.

With an ending that gets to be even more shocking than its opening, the premiere sets the stage: no one is safe this time. Will has to live so Mike Harlon is born, so he’s certainly surviving the horrors; the others, however… Anything can happen anytime with anyone, and that’s a good thing for a horror show. That’s to say that Welcome to Derry starts strong, more shocking and gorier, but not necessarily scarier, than ever. Not counting the opening or the final sequence with the flying baby monster, the other forms of the creature are not as atmospherically terrifying as they could be, and with the clown Pennywise saved for later episodes, this episode feels sometimes cheap when it comes to its jump scares.

But this introduction has more pros than cons. If the military plot introduced in the premiere is not exciting enough, at least it counts with a mysterious, younger version of The Shining’s Dick Hallorann, who will mostly fight the creature later in the show with his telepathic powers. The kids are charismatic, with Lilly and Ronnie — the surviving ones — being established as strong, interesting characters to watch. There’s also Marge, Lilly’s friend, who appears briefly in the premiere and doesn’t get involved with this first version of the 1962 Losers, seeming very worried about what people will think of her. That could become a compelling narrative later, if Marge gets to be involved with the next version of the 1962 Losers — will she overcome the desire to be accepted, or will she become a part of Derry? This time, friendship and love may not be enough to save everyone, as the darkest chapters of the town unfold, so anything could happen. And of course, Taylour Paige’s Charlotte is a big pro — there’s something unique about the show creating narratives for both children and adults, as the audience will be able to watch how the creature affected different parts of society and got to hurt people in various ways.

Feel free to leave a comment with your impressions and thoughts, and thanks for reading!