IT: Welcome to Derry plays with the day-to-day horror of living in America

There’s always been something creepy about clowns. When Stephen King published IT in 1986, he chose Pennywise the Clown as the guise for his villain because it was figure children feared.

The consistently cheery demeanour, the disproportionately sized feet and their generally chaotic energy – who isn’t a little scared?

With traditions stretching back to commedia dell’arte and Indigenous and folk cultures around the world, clowns are depicted as fools but they’re also truth tellers. Think about the jesters in medieval courts, the only ones who could be honest about a ruler’s flaws and foibles without losing their heads.

Listen to a clown, pay attention to what they’re saying, and you might discover something. The thing is, and maybe this is why clowns make us innately uncomfortable, is that it’s probably something you didn’t want to confront.

In King’s IT universe, Pennywise kills and eats children, haunting the fictional Maine town of Derry every 27 years. But the evil in men’s hearts are always lurking, Pennywise merely exploits them and brings them to the surface during his cycles of violence.

He’s a truth teller.

IT: Welcome to Derry is the new HBO series that launches today, a prequel to the 2017 and 2019 film adaptations of King’s novel by Andy Muschietti, who along with Barbara Muschietti and Jason Fuchs, has created this show.

It is often gory and bloody – a delight for those chasing thrills and a jaw-tensing challenge for those not. It opens with a bang, and the first episode ends on a killer sequence that spares few. It’s not what you expect, and it’s a declaration that this show means business.

Five out of eight episodes were made available for review, and there are plenty of heart-thumping moments, and a few jump scares, with the promise of a climatic massacre before the season’s end.

The filmmakers obviously revel in horrifying set-pieces, but their thematic ambitions are grander than just Pennywise’s origin story. The jury is still out on whether knowing where Pennywise comes from diminishes his power to scare.

The idea is that It: Welcome to Derry will adapt the “interludes” in King’s novel, stories about the dark history of the town, which one of the book’s characters, Mike Hanlon, had traced and recorded.

Because the films were set primarily in 1989 and 2016, and there are those gaps between Pennywise’s rampages, this takes us back to 1962, 1935 and 1908. There are three seasons planned, in backwards time order, starting with 1962, exactly 27 years before the first IT movie.

The year is a rich moment in American history, a lot of which is beamed into the show via TV news reports playing in the background of scenes.

Set a few months before the Cuban Missile Crisis, the spectre of nuclear war is ever present. The kids watch the infamous duck-and-cover videos in class, and the presence of the military in the story looms large.

There’s an airbase on the outskirts of town, and General Shaw (James Remar) is looking for something with the help of Dick Hallorann (Chris Chalk), a King character that is better known as a supporting player in The Shining, and who is mentioned in the interludes of King’s IT novel.

Hallorann, if you recall, has psychic powers, the “shining”, and he’s been tasked with locating something Shaw hopes to use as a weapon.

The idea that a malevolent supernatural force such as Pennywise could be harnessed as a military asset is not new, but ties in nicely to the series’ contention that the government will always try to control what they cannot (ahem, nuclear weaponry), for some advantage over their enemies.

This is a long-standing cinematic and TV tradition that we’ve seen across titles such as The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Stranger Things, and more explicitly, Godzilla. You can also refer to David Lynch’s 2016 Twin Peaks revival for how he links the development of nuclear weapons to the creation of BOB, the show’s villain.

As far as metaphors go, it’s an obvious but effective one.

On Hallorann’s team is Leroy Hanlon (Jovan Adepo), an air force major who served in the Korean War and his experiences there give him an edge. He has moved to Derry with his wife Charlotte (Taylour Paige) and son Will (Blake Cameron James), and they are one of the few black families in town.

Before the Hanlons relocated from the South, Charlotte was an activist involved with the Freedom Riders because, of course, the other thing that’s going on in US history in 1962 is the Civil Rights movement.

In King’s novel and in the 2019 movie IT: Chapter Two, the second cycle of violence kicked off with a homophobic attack, and in Welcome to Derry, racism and prejudice is ever present. A black man who works at the movie theatre where there’s an incident is scapegoated, the black soldiers and officers are clearly regarded differently, and the local First Nations community contend with the theft of their land.

We understand the cues of covert as well as overt racism, or how non-white people modulate their behaviour for fear of being targeted, not that Welcome to Derry is subtle about it.

The most churny moments come not from the supernatural but from the day-to-day of living in America.

The show may be set in 1962 but these scenarios are not ancient history.

Derry may sit at the convergence point of a sinister force, and the terrors may be extreme, but it is also recognisably mundane and common.

That’s the real horror story, and that’s the truth.

IT: Welcome to Derry is streaming on HBO Max