With its debut episode, It: Welcome to Derry welcomes audiences back to the world of the blockbuster two-part adaptation of Stephen King’s hit with a surprising degree of assuredness.
From the involvement of the director of the movies, Andy Muschietti, to the incredibly well-realized production design, all of the show feels polished and luxuriously cinematic from the very outset. Set in 1962, nearly three decades before the events of the first It film, the series is set to chronicle the titular creature’s previous feeding cycle, which it awakens to conduct every twenty-seven years. The first film saw Pennywise awaken and attack the Losers Club in 1989, It: Part Two was released in 2019, but set in 2017, twenty-seven years after the first film’s story. Now, Welcome to Derry dives into the backstory of the films, with a healthy dosing of King’s far more cosmically-minded and lore-heavy novel influences to boot. The result is that this first episode, titled “The Pilot” (very cheeky) is an expansive and solid re-introduction to this world, but one that can’t help but exhibit a few signs of troubles to come.
Andy Muschietti’s first It film was a bona fide sensation when it released in 2017, earning praise from fans and critics alike and truly becoming a part of the cultural zeitgeist in astonishing fashion. While King’s 1986 novel had long been a fixture of pop-culture and Tommy Lee Wallace’s Tim Curry-starring 1990 TV miniseries introduced the character of Pennywise to an even wider swath of audiences, the 2017 film capitalized on all the pre-existing versions in ways both creative and financially lucrative. In one of the film’s boldest choices, Muschietti and co. extrapolated one-half of the novel’s time-hopping narrative, and adapted solely that portion of it. Gone were the adult-centric Losers Club stories, and instead, the first part focused exclusively on them as children in 1989.
It wasn’t until two years later, in It: Chapter Two, that the second portion of the story would get adapted. Notably, the two installments were not filmed back to back, but rather, the sequel was rushed into production shortly after the first film became such a monumental success.
While the first film benefited from the exorcizing of the cumbersome adult-age stories, it ultimately wrote a check that the second film was unable to cash. By leaving all of the less engaging portions of the book for the second film, Muschietti and co. set themselves up for disappointment, and it showed. It: Chapter Two was a far more divisive film with both critics and audiences, and while still successful, was far less of a cultural touchstone than the first film was.
There are certainly elements of that sequel that I enjoy (it’s a big, unashamedly gonzo blockbuster horror movie that stars Bill Hader and features copious references to The Thing, how can you not at least kind of admire that?), it is overall a far weaker film than its predecessor, and one that saw director Andy Muschietti going a bit off-the-rails. It: Chapter Two is essentially one elongated horror setpiece after another, each focusing on one individual character from the Losers’ Club, over a two-and-half-hour film. And when things get stacked up that densely for that long a period of time, you can’t help but become acutely aware of the shortcomings and bewildering creative tendencies on display. This would become only more true a few years later, as Muschietti went on to direct The Flash; an even more off-the-rails, garish, and heavily derided film.
Given all of that, I was a bit surprised at just how involved Muschietti was in It: Welcome to Derry. Not only is he a credited producer, but he’s also a chief creative voice within it, directing the pilot episode and numerous others. To this end, the first episode of Welcome to Derry winds up exhibiting a lot of the same promise and pitfalls of Muschietti’s films.
He brings an unequivocal degree of intent to the visual language of the episode, which pairs obscenely well with Paul Austerberry’s production design to give this whole thing an incredibly cinematic, absorbing look. The 1962 period setting gives them a lot of room to play with new tones and aesthetics within this overarching world, and they have a lot of fun with that, right down to some inspired needle drops and interesting uses of footage from The Music Man.
And credit where credit is due, Muschietti knows how to stage a scare with incredible precision and aplomb. He and editor Esther Sokolow build to a couple of different really solid startles throughout this episode, with a particular lamp-centric one being especially effective and unnerving. However, even in these solid moments, some of the excess and unchecked gratuity that was so abundantly on-display in It: Chapter Two and The Flash is readily apparent.
Something that Muschietti has developed a real penchant for is to hit audiences with a scare, and then wait a few seconds of screen time, only to reset the status quo and hit them with that exact same scare again. It’s the horror equivalent of telling a joke, waiting a few beats, and then just telling the same joke again, verbatim, and he does this at least three different times throughout this first episode.
It is frankly beyond my comprehension why he does this, because not only does it feel incredibly stilted in its staging and serve to lessen the tension every single time, but it is also actively deflating the effectiveness of the first scare. Punctuation, both in sentence-writing and in filmmaking, matters, so to just leave these beats to ramble on repeatedly ultimately serves to weaken them profusely. These are moments where it feels like the tension should be escalating, from one scare to the next, but instead it just feels as if the filmmaking stalls out and gets stuck in one gear over and over again.
Having said all of that, it’s worth noting that finale of “The Pilot” does offer something of a rebuttal to this very idea, at least in theory. It’s difficult to get into it too much without delving into spoiler territory, but suffice it to say that Welcome to Derry ends its first episode with a bang that both ratchets up the stakes and serves as a gleeful subversion of both Muschietti’s own tendencies and the larger tendencies of these kinds of kid-starring horror television shows. It is a hell-of-a-swing from writer Jason Fuchs, and one that I am deeply interested to see the ramifications of moving forward.
But even here, in this moment that feels like it should be Muschietti and the show’s planting of a flag in the sand, kicking audiences off into uncharted territory, things get a bit off. The way that the final sequence is shot, covered, and edited, is a bit whiplash-inducing, and not in a complimentary way. While some chaos is good for the general vibe and kineticism of a multi-tiered horror sequence like this, this one tips a bit too far over into confusion for its latter parts, resulting in the impact of the episode’s big twist feeling more like its told to us after the fact rather than us witnessing it all for ourselves firsthand.
All told, I liked “The Pilot” and I’m hopeful that as it settles into a groove, It: Welcome to Derry will grow stronger. My favorite parts of the episode centered on Jovan Adepo’s character and his role on the military base, which gave Muschietti something well outside his traditional wheelhouse to embrace (a very ‘40s war film aesthetic) that worked incredibly well. There are seeds that could blossom into real treats here down the road, but there is also an abundance of the kinds of early warning signs fans of this franchise may sadly recognize all too well.
Grade: C+