[COLUMN] IT: Welcome to Derry Reduces Its Monster to Trivia | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the six episodes of IT: Welcome to Derry that are now streaming on HBO Max. It’s a frustrating show in large part because it starts out quite strong and then quickly gets lost in lore-driven fan service nostalgia. It has some really great scare sequences - particularly early on - but then just meanders into exposition and reheats. It’s a shame that the show seems to have it and then lose it.

IT: Welcome to Derry suggests that perhaps not everything demands a shared universe.

Welcome to Derry is another illustration of the slow repurposing of prestige television producer HBO as an intellectual property conveyor belt, that produces recognizable spin-offs to its own past hits like Game of Thrones or True Detective and sleek companion pieces to movies produced by its parent company Warner Bros., like The Batman or Dune. In this case, Welcome to Derry is a spin-off from Andy Muschietti’s IT duology, two of the most successful horror films ever released.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Lauren LeFranc’s The Penguin might have been a star-studded cash-in on the success of Matt Reeves’ The Batman, but it was also one of the best shows of last year. Indeed, Welcome to Derry works best as a big budget showcase for Muschietti as a horror director, allowing him to indulge in some truly gnarly sequences like the conclusion of the premiere or a trip to a convenience store in the second episode that even unsettled Stephen King himself.

To give credit where it’s due, Welcome to Derry spends blockbuster money making a television show that is properly grotesque. The series features all manner of deeply unsettling imagery, with a recurring emphasis on child birth, in a way that is refreshingly nasty for what is effectively a brand extension of a known property. Muschietti, who directed the first two episodes, is a really great horror movie director. This is the guy who directed IT.

However, as the first season of Welcome to Derry has progressed, it has run into two big problems, both of which are tied to its nature as a spin-off from a hugely successful and widely enjoyed work. The first is purely structural, and it’s a common issue with modern franchise horror. The series often feels too familiar to be scary, too committed to offering the audience what they already know and recognize to actually upset them.

The first episode of Welcome to Derry is quite ingenious. Serving as a prequel to IT, the premiere focuses on a bunch of young children who band together to investigate a strange monster haunting the town. This is the basic set up of IT, and that first episode even establishes young characters like Teddy (Mikkal Karim-Fidler) and Phil (Jack Molloy Legault) as proto-“Losers”, recalling the young teens from the first IT movie. The audience assumes that this is what the show will be: more IT.

So when the first episode ends with an incredibly brutal and graphic horror sequence in which Teddy and Phil are violently murdered and consumed by the monster at a screening of The Music Man, it seems to send a very clear message: Welcome to Derry is not IT. More than that, it is a show willing to weaponize the audience’s assumptions and catch them off-guard in interesting ways. It is a really bold and confident opening gambit. So it is a massive shame that the series has no follow-through.

Having set up and subverted the idea of just doing “the kids from IT” again, the rest of the season of Welcome to Derry has a clean slate. It can, theoretically, do anything. However, as early as the season’s second episode, it becomes clear that the show has nothing outside of that one big trick. So it introduces another bunch of kids who are now investigating the death of the last bunch of kids. After setting up and subverting just doing “the kids from IT”, it just does “the kids from IT.”

It's a choice that effectively kills the show, undercutting the effectiveness of that savvy opening choice, illustrating that familiarity will always win out over actual horror. In some ways, this points to the second and more fundamental issue with Welcome to Derry. After all, while just repeating the formula of IT isn’t the most compelling television, it is at least functional. There is a reason why people enjoy IT, particularly the first film. Repeating that formula is lazy, but it is at least practical.

The underlying issue with Welcome to Derry is that it feels less like a compelling or engaging story being told on its own terms within an existing intellectual property framework than it feels like an act of brand maintenance. As the season drags on, Welcome to Derry feels less and less like a television show than a live action listicle, building out a dense and elaborate mythology for something that was so effective in large part because it was so fundamentally unknowable.

Welcome to Derry is set in the world of Stephen King. It makes sure to remind audiences of this at every opportunity. There are frequent references to the eponymous prison from The Shawshank Redemption. The cast includes Dick Hallorann (Chris Chalk), a character who famously appeared in The Shining (Scatman Crothers) and Doctor Sleep (Carl Lumbly). The show often stops dead to draw attention to these sorts of connections, insisting that it’s a horror shared universe.

Of course, the work of Stephen King has long existed in a strange interconnected universe in which characters and events co-exist across various books, weaving a surprisingly dense cosmology across decades of pulp populist paperbacks culminating in the expansive Dark Tower series that occasionally feels a little bit like The Avengers for the work of one of the defining American novelists. King’s work is often populated with winks and nods, strings the reader can pull if they want to.

Truth be told, there is a certain amount of fun in this. One of the smaller pleasures of Edgar Wright’s recent adaptation of The Running Man is spotting all of the winking background references to the work of the author, from the names on the jumpsuits in the changing room to the fact that Ben Richards (Glen Powell) even briefly hides out in Derry. However, these allusions work because none of these references serve as a distraction from or substitute for the story being told.

There is a clear lore behind the work of Stephen King. Over the course of decades of writing, King has built up an elaborate mythology of turtles and spiders, with several of his subsequent works building out the background of IT. There are two big qualifiers to this. The first is that literary prose is a fundamentally different medium than film or television, so that lore does not necessarily translate cleanly. The second is that it’s hard to believe that it was the lore that made IT such a hit.

Welcome to Derry strips its central monster of any real mystery or horror. At the end of the second episode, it is revealed that not only does the American military-industrial complex know about the monster in Derry, but it is actively seeking to harness it as a weapon of mass destruction. “Something that was buried in Derry a long time ago,” explains General Francis Shaw (James Remar). “This weapon, it generates debilitating fear in anyone who comes near it.”

This is perhaps the single least interesting thing that a spin-off from IT could hope to do with the eponymous monster. It’s very telling that this idea of militarizing the monster was a major plot beat in both Jurassic World and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. It often feels like shorthand for: “the production team has no idea what to do with this intellectual property, can it be co-opted by the government or military?”

This is not to suggest that the trope is inherently bad or that it can’t be done well. The Mist is a great example of a wonderful Stephen King adaptation that involves the military messing around with something that they shouldn’t be. However, it is a very strange fit for IT, and the execution is incredibly formulaic and paint-by-numbers. It is “franchise expansion 101”, and it just reeks of an attempt to expand this material to eight episodes.

As the season progresses, it reveals more and more about the monster. In the fourth episode, an indigenous character named Taniel (Joshua Odjick) just dumps mountains of lore. “An evil spirit was cast down from the darkest part of the night sky,” he narrates. “It roamed the woods for many snows and countless moons – until the creation of our first ancestors.” He explains, “We lived in balance with the monster by staying outside of its reach and never hunting in its territory.”

Naturally, this level of lore comes with rules. Once Welcome to Derry has explained what the monster is, it can also reduce it to a set of known quantities. Inevitably, there is a magic item that can kill the creature, which can handily serve to motivate a generic plot about retrieving and using it. “The star that carried the monster had been its cage,” Taniel states. “And the stone it was made from still held power.” He elaborates, “We kept the dagger close and stayed away from the Western Wood.”

In the sixth episode, the lore gets even more personal. Young Lily (Clara Stack) snoops around the home of Ingrid (Madeleine Stowe), discovering a strange photo album that contains pictures of a man (Bill Skarsgård) who resembles the clown form that the creature takes to lure children to their doom. “My father was a carnival performer,” Ingrid confesses. “He called himself Pennywise the Dancing Clown.” It is a plot development that is almost parodic: the daughter of Pennywise.

It is revealed that Ingrid has been using children to get close to the monster, in the hopes of seeing her long-lost father again. There is a kernel of a potentially interesting idea in this, in the idea of a middle-aged character’s nostalgia serving a monster to which the next generation can be fed, just as there’s something potentially compelling in the idea of the monster itself as something anchored in the soil and the ground and the fabric of American life. However, none of this comes across.

Welcome to Derry is just offering IT trivia, lumping together factoids about this shared universe and fashioning them into the rough shape of television. It’s all just stuff, endless stuff. It is a collection of familiar clichés that have become standard in so many modern franchise brand extensions. There is little to no sense of what Welcome to Derry is “about”, beyond the fact that it is “about” IT. Even then, it’s not engaged with IT as anything more than a collection of plot points and data.

Perhaps the most horrifying thing about Welcome to Derry is that it feels less like the work of the director who made IT than it does a product of the man responsible for The Flash.