4 hours ago
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I am not a great horror fan. After watching It: Welcome to Derry, I remember why. It’s because it’s full of horrors. Someone, please hold me.
If you are a hardened It fan, I’m sure the new series – co-developed and directed by Andy Muschietti and functioning as a prequel to the 2017 film It, which he also directed (as he did that film’s sequel two years later, because some people are just built differently, I guess, and don’t find themselves trying to claw their way through solid walls whenever a grinning clown shows up) – will be but a bagatelle. I’m sure the opening sequence, when you’ve barely got comfortable on the sofa, involving a picture-perfect family giving a lift to an unhappy boy and gradually revealing themselves to be liver-eating demons filling the car with blood, gore and a mutant baby swung round by its demented mother via the umbilical cord, is nothing to you. Less viscera-happy people, however, may need a moment. And also be forewarned that this isn’t even the last mutant-birth scene you’re going to see, although it’s interesting to note that the most terrible parts of each are also the most realistic. Truly, the human body has some major design flaws.
Anyway. Once this pulverising opener is over, we cut to April 1962 – by which time the unhappy boy, Matty (Miles Ekhardt), has been missing from his hometown of Derry for four months – to meet the children who will make it their mission to find him. Teddy (Mikkal Karim Fidler) is a sensitive soul, conscience-stricken by the knowledge that he and his best friend Phil (less sensitive, likes boobs and theorising about aliens’ presence on Earth, played by Jack Molloy Legault) had to be bribed to attend the friendless Matty’s last birthday party. Lilly (Clara Stack) is suffering at school in the wake of her father being mangled in an accident at the pickle factory – a perfectly Stephen King death, sitting at the exact juncture of tragic and comic that enables the other kids to turn it into a bullying opportunity. Ronnie (Amanda Christine) was, with her father Hank (Stephen Rider), the last person to see Matty alive (at the cinema where they work). When the girls realise they have both heard Matty’s voice through the pipes in their homes, which come up from the sewers, and tell the boys, the investigation is on. Only briefly for some of them, alas.
Meanwhile, what are the adults up to? Important secret cold-war work on the Derry airbase, that’s what! Major Leroy Hanlon (Jovan Adepo) is a newcomer who soon realises there is more going on at his new place of employment than is usual for even the very most important secret cold-war work. Also working on the base is Dick Hallorann (Chris Chalk), and if you just said: “Wait a minute – isn’t he the telepathic man from The Shining who appears briefly in It, the novel, as the rescuer of, among others, Will Hanlon, who himself goes on to be the father of Mike, one of the main adversaries of Pennywise, that grinning goddamn clown? And wait again! So Major Hanlon is going to be … Will’s father? Mike’s grandad? Is that how things are starting to join up?”, I would have to say: well done you, and keep watching with your eagle eyes and clever-old cleverness!
There is also the matter of Derry itself. Its townsfolk are racist, which must be navigated carefully by the ever-vigilant Hanlon family and makes Ronnie’s father an easy target for the police to frame as they come under pressure to find the person responsible for Matty’s disappearance, and then for a variety of other missing children – presumed dead from the amount of blood spatter and guts coating the inside of his cinema.
In short, all of Stephen King’s tropes, concerns and set pieces are here. Idyllic small-town American life beneath which malevolence lurks. Supernatural horrors as a metaphor for nuclear and other human-made evils. The innocence of childhood that is no such thing. The endless, exquisite cruelties we can inflict on each other. Unsettling uncanniness brought to such a pitch that it is almost a relief when it reaches tipping point and lets the hellion babies fly free and rip the limbs off tiny victims cowering under theatre seats; or pickle jars fill with paternal body parts begging for a daughter’s kiss in a nightmarish supermarket that is probably commenting on the US’s rapacious capitalist hunger, or something.
It: Welcome to Derry is not going to trouble the top tier of TV adaptations in the King pantheon (including the 1990 version of It wherein Tim Curry’s Pennywise made coulrophobics of us all) but it is solidly entertaining stuff – on a par with Under the Dome, say, rather than the dismal recent offering that was The Institute – and should give fans the nightmares of their dreams. The rest of us should hunker down and prepare for the arrival of Amazon’s take on Carrie next year. The girl’s a menace.
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IT: Welcome to Derry aired on Sky Atlantic and is on Now in the UK, and HBO Max in the US and Australia.
