TV Shows

Stephen King’s Best Villain Gets an Origin Story in Welcome to Derry Trailer (And It’s Terrifying)

It has been a long wait for the prequel to Andy Muschiettiโ€™s IT: Chapter One and IT: Chapter Two, but the wait is almost over for fans of one of Stephen Kingโ€™s most terrifying stories. IT: Welcome to Derry is set to arrive on HBO and HBO Max October 26th and now, weโ€™re getting our best look yet at the eagerly anticipated series โ€” and at the origin for what may just be one of Kingโ€™s best villains. โ€” thanks to a new, full-length trailer.

Videos by ComicBook.com

On Tuesday, HBO released the first full trailer for IT: Welcome to Derry and it offers up plenty of looks at the town of Derry in the 1960s, but thatโ€™s not all. The trailer also gives viewers a look at Bill Skarsgรฅrd’s Pennywise much earlier than he was last seen in the films, but more than that, we also get a brief glimpse of how Pennywise ended up in Derry in the first place: a meteor crashing into Earth, setting up for a terrifying, bloody story. You can check out the trailer below.

Welcome to Derry Teases More Than Pennywiseโ€™s Evil

For fans of Kingโ€™s books, thereโ€™s a lot to love about the Welcome to Derry trailer and itโ€™s glimpses of an early Pennywise. Kingโ€™s original novel explained that Pennywise is actually a fear-consuming shapeshifter who fell to Earth a very long time ago but only awoke in the 18th century and began the cycle of terror on the town of Derry every 27 years. While it will be interesting to see how Welcome to Derry adapts this origin โ€” especially with the two IT movies already making some timeline shifts โ€” the trailer also hints at darker elements of Derry that have nothing to do with Pennywise.

The trailer shows the Hanlon familyโ€™s arrival in Derry and, as the Hanlonโ€™s are Black, thereโ€™s a tone set that while Derry looks like a nice, wholesome place to raise a family, beneath the shiny surface of Americana, there are darker issues, including racism. The Hanlon familyโ€™s arrival, and the townโ€™s racial tensions, couldnโ€™t come at worse time as the trailer also reveals that a young boy has disappeared and itโ€™s pretty clear that things will get more complicated and tense from there. It all seems to set Welcome to Derry up to be more than just an intriguing new chapter in the Pennywise story and one that much more richly explores the dark history of Derry โ€” including that of its own residents.


What do you think? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in theย ComicBook Forum!