Gory, atmospheric prequel revisits Derry’s cursed past in a solid if uneven slice of horror
Stephen King’s nightmare town of Derry is back – and bloodier than ever. It: Welcome to Derry, co-developed and directed by Andy Muschietti, serves as a prequel to the 2017 and 2019 film adaptations of It. The result is a confident, gory and surprisingly emotional series that stitches together many of King’s favourite themes: childhood fears, small-town secrets and evil seeping through ordinary life.
The series opens with a sequence so grotesque it instantly establishes the tone. A seemingly wholesome family picks up a lonely hitch-hiker, only to reveal themselves as liver-eating demons before a mutant baby is swung through the air by its umbilical cord. It’s a shocking, stomach-turning image – and for hardened horror fans, a promise of what’s to come.
From there, the story shifts to 1962, where a group of local children become obsessed with the disappearance of Matty (Miles Ekhardt), missing for four months. Sensitive Teddy (Mikkal Karim Fidler), pragmatic Phil (Jack Molloy Legault), lonely Lilly (Clara Stack) and determined Ronnie (Amanda Christine) form the core of the group, linked by a shared sense of guilt and by strange noises echoing through the town’s pipes. Their curiosity soon drags them towards Derry’s sewers – and something far more ancient and terrible.
While the children’s mystery drives the plot, the adults in town are caught up in their own Cold War conspiracies. Major Leroy Hanlon (Jovan Adepo) arrives at a nearby airbase and quickly senses that Derry hides more than military secrets. Fellow worker Dick Hallorann (Chris Chalk) provides the connective tissue to King’s broader universe: readers will recognise him as the telepathic cook from The Shining, linking this story to the larger mythology that spans King’s work.
Muschietti fills the show with classic King touchstones – racism, paranoia, corrupted innocence and supernatural horror as metaphor for real-world evil. The town’s prejudice ensures that Hank Rider (Stephen Rider), a Black cinema manager, becomes a convenient scapegoat when more children vanish. As the blood spreads through the streets and the adults retreat behind lies, Derry again becomes a portrait of denial – a community so haunted it has forgotten how to see the monsters right in front of it.
Visually, Welcome to Derry is lavish. The production design recreates small-town Maine with eerie precision, while the period details – Cold War posters, flickering neon, the pastel innocence of 1960s suburbia – heighten the unease. The performances, especially from Adepo and young Clara Stack, lend depth to what could easily have been pulp.
Yet for all its ambition, the show doesn’t quite join the top tier of King adaptations. The pacing can lurch between brilliance and bloat; the mystery occasionally yields to spectacle. Its relentless shocks, from demonic births to jars of body parts, might leave some viewers numb rather than terrified. It’s more Under the Dome than The Shining, though far stronger than recent misfires like The Institute.
Still, the series works because it understands King’s central obsession: the coexistence of innocence and horror. The moments between the bloodletting – children swapping theories, parents hiding secrets – give the carnage a human pulse. When the terror finally erupts, it feels earned, not gratuitous.
Muschietti’s camera lingers lovingly on Derry’s darkness, reminding us that evil here isn’t confined to one grinning clown but embedded in the town’s very soil. Welcome to Derry may not redefine the horror genre, but it succeeds as a chilling expansion of King’s mythology – gory, ambitious and thoroughly unsettling. Fans will feast; the faint-hearted might wish they hadn’t switched the lights off.
It: Welcome to Derry airs on Sky Atlantic and Now in the UK, and on HBO Max in the US and Australia.