You’d think the most devastating moment in IT: Welcome to Derry would involve blood. Screaming. IT tearing flesh.
The kind of brutal, body-horror carnage that cosmic horror trades in.
Instead, the moment that gutted me hardest came from a freezer. A scared girl. A brave boy. And the simple act of sacrifice.
Rich Santos died on IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 7, and I wasn’t ready for it.
Not because I didn’t see it coming — the show had been building toward it, but because it didn’t feel like the other deaths on this series. It felt personal, raw, and unbearably human.
While IT’s been peeling skin off bodies and chewing through bones, Rich was just being kind. That’s what got me. That’s what hit different.
IT: Welcome To Derry Didn’t Prepare Me For a Dying Scene Like That
I watched IT eviscerate people. I saw flesh torn in ways that should’ve destroyed my appetite. Yet none of it landed the way Rich’s final moment did.
Here’s the thing: gore is easy. Gore is shock value, designed to make you jump and squirm and turn your head. It’s external, visceral, and it’s expected in a horror show.
Rich’s death was intimate. It was quiet and almost unbearably tender, breaking my heart.
As the Black Spot burned, Rich and Marge found a small refrigerator. Only one person could fit inside, so Marge panicked. She didn’t want to leave him.
And Rich — brave, unflinching Rich — looked at her and said he’d be her knight just like she’d joked about earlier. He was going to save his fair maiden.
He didn’t scream. He didn’t claw. Rich simply sat on top of that freezer, holding it closed while flames consumed the building around him, talking to Marge through the metal.
Telling her a story. Telling her he loved her. Remaining calm as everything burned.
I wasn’t prepared for that. I was braced for gore. My expectation with the show was to tear into my emotions through shock and violence.
Instead, it broke me with gentleness. With a 1980s drummer who loved someone more than he loved himself. With someone choosing death so someone else could live.
The brutality didn’t come from what happened to Rich. It came from what he chose. That’s infinitely more devastating than anything IT ever did.
Why Didn’t IT Go After Rich?
Here’s something nobody’s talking about loud enough: IT doesn’t want brave victims. IT hungers for fear. It feeds on terror the way we consume food.
It gets strong off panic and dread and the primal need to survive at any cost. Fear is the spice IT needs. Without it, what’s the point?
Rich never gave IT that craving.
Throughout the series, IT’s been hunting kids drowning in their own anxieties. Lilly’s trauma. Will’s fear. Ingrid’s longing. Every victim IT targets is already bleeding fear from invisible wounds.
IT circles them like a predator sensing weakness. It magnifies what’s already there. Turns internal horror into external nightmares.
Rich wasn’t like that. He had problems, sure. But fear? Real, primal terror? That wasn’t his default setting. He was brave in ways that went deeper than false confidence.
When he looked at Marge’s mangled eye, he didn’t flinch. He thought it was cool and didn’t judge. He loved her exactly as she was.
And when the building caught fire? He didn’t panic or beg. He accepted his fate with the kind of grace that leaves cosmic horror starving.
IT had an abundance of fear to feast on. The Black Spot was packed with terrorized people. Chaos. Screaming. Flames. Darkness. Dread so thick you could choke on it.
IT was gorging itself on the collective terror of dozens of people. It didn’t need Rich; it didn’t even want him. He was too calm. Too sure of himself. Too willing to die for someone else.
That’s not fear. That’s love, and IT can’t digest love.
So while IT hunted the terrified, Rich walked toward flames without flinching. He didn’t run from IT because IT never came for him.
He died protecting Marge from fire and smoke and the chaos of the moment, not the creature itself. His death wasn’t IT’s work.
It was something almost worse: it was human sacrifice, the kind that reminds us that sometimes the real horror isn’t monsters. It’s losing the people brave enough to save us.
Marge will carry that weight forever, and so will we.
Did Rich’s sacrifice hit you harder than IT’s gore, or do you think the show’s visceral kills are what actually stick with you? What’s the most devastating moment you’ve seen so far in Welcome to Derry?
Drop your thoughts in the comments — we want to hear what’s haunting you most.
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