Note: This story contains spoilers from “It: Welcome to Derry” Episode 1.
If the “It: Welcome to Derry” premiere felt bloodier or more intense than the two movies, well that was by design.
The new HBO series takes place in 1962 — which is the monster’s 27-year cycle before the Losers Club face off against him in the 2017 film — and starts with a bloody bang. The first 10 minutes follow a boy trying to hitchhike out of town and getting picked up by a family who turn out to be the shapeshifting monster. A pair of creepy kids and a mother giving birth to a horrific, imp-like monster makes short work of the kid and clues viewers in to expect more intensity and violence than even the movie pulled off.
Twenty-seven years may be a drop in the ocean of time Pennywise has been alive, but showrunners Jason Fuchs and Brad Caleb Kane told TheWrap that this younger monster is “bloodier and gorier” than what we’ve seen. A lot of that comes with the show’s mission to unpack the monster’s history.
“I think he’s even more ravenous,” Fuchs said of Pennywise. “We wanted to explore the more human side of that character — particularly the Pennywise/Bob Gray duality. We wanted to understand more about this creature and why it behaves in the way it does, why it’s chosen Derry as its forever hunting grounds, why it’s so attracted to Pennywise the Dancing Clown as its favorite manifestation that it keeps coming back to.”
He added: “That translates, I think, into a different tone for the Pennywise scares. It’s more visceral. I think it’s more horrifying. It’s certainly bloodier and gorier than what we’ve seen in the films.”
Expect new monster forms for Pennywise as the series continues, too. Part of the balancing act for the show was not over-exposing the famous clown so as to make its appearances less terrifying. And to convince Bill Skarsgärd to come back, they knew they had to do something different to keep things fresh.
“We knew that we had to create something special just to have Bill come back and play Pennywise, we had to give Pennywise new dimensions,” Kane said. “We had to integrate him in a story that felt fitting to this new younger Pennywise. We wanted to show how Pennywise became, or took on the avatar of Pennywise.”
He went on: “The other benefits of television storytelling is there’s no ratings board. We can go as Full Tilt as we want to go, without worrying if it’s PG 13 R or NC 17 or whatever. We felt like these scares enabled us to do that even in the early episodes.”
“It: Welcome to Derry” airs Sundays on HBO and HBO Max.
