How Are Scary Clowns Made? IT: WELCOME TO DERRY Tells a Terrifying Origin Story

By BILL HARRIS Special to The Lede   In the first few minutes of IT: WELCOME TO DERRY, a young boy is hitchhiking in horrible weather. When a car pulls over and he gets picked up, the family inside the vehicle asks him where he’s headed. His reply is both vague and hauntingly specific: “Anywhere but Derry.” What happens next won’t be easily forgotten. For anyone familiar with the world of acclaimed horror author Stephen King, the mere mention of the fictional town of Derry, Maine will send shivers down the spine. Premiering Sunday, Oct. 26 on Crave, HBO’s IT: WELCOME TO DERRY takes a deeper dive into the evil that exists there, serving as a prequel to the movies It (2017) and It Chapter Two (2019), both of which are available on Crave and were based on King’s unforgettable novel It (1986). IT: WELCOME TO DERRY executive producer Andy Muschietti, who directed both the recent It films, was asked during a media conference if it had always been his intention to continue this creepy story somehow. “Not always – it started as we were finishing Chapter Two, and we were starting to feel like that was it,” said Muschietti, pun possibly intended. “I started having conversations with Bill Skarsgård (who is reprising his role as Pennywise the Clown). Together, we were sort of high on the experience, and just speculating about making the origin story of Pennywise. How did It become the Clown?” King has acknowledged many times over the years that he has largely avoided answering the questions of “why” and “how” in his horror novels, because he finds it more scary if things are left unexplained. But according to Muschietti and his producing partner and older sister Barbara Muschietti, King is very open to having those questions explored in other media such as TV and film, by other creative minds. “First we talked to Steve, that’s the first thing,” Barbara Muschietti recalled. Wait a minute … you call Stephen King “Steve?” “Uncle Steve to Andy, Steve to me,” Barbara Muschietti said. “We are so lucky to have this very loving relationship with him. He has trusted us with this incredible masterpiece. He gets excited by it, and he writes to us about it all the time. Without expecting anything, you wake up and you find an email from Stephen King, loving, you know, a blood explosion, or whatever we’re doing.” So what could Stephen King’s personal email address possibly be? “I don’t know what it means,” Barbara Muschietti admitted. “I’m not going to say it.” Stephen King’s email address aside, the author gave his blessing to the Muschiettis, who decided to set the main plot line in IT: WELCOME TO DERRY in 1962. There’s something about that era that always works well in a King-written or King-adjacent tale, with the surface-level innocence of small-town life contrasted with what’s happening down below – figuratively in some cases, literally in others. “There is a reason why we’re telling the story backwards, that you won’t know yet, and we can’t tell you, but it just felt exciting,” Andy Muschietti teased. Setting the story in 1962 also allows for an intriguing “character crossover,” so to speak. King fans may recall the name Dick Halloran from King’s 1977 novel The Shining, and the 1980 movie of the same name (available on Crave). In The Shining, Dick is an older man with telepathic abilities who befriends young Danny Torrance, who is also telepathic. In IT: WELCOME TO DERRY, we see a younger version of Dick, played by Chris Chalk. “We’re discovering who (Dick Halloran) is, and playing with the audience’s expectation,” Chalk said. “Because he’s such a gentle soul in the versions that you know, and it’s just not that guy here. He’s a human, and he’s having a human experience, learning to live with devastating psychic powers. It seems cool until you realize everyone around you is depressed. Then it’s not super fun.” What is super fun is trying to figure out what It actually is. “Well, the only thing I can say to that is, I’m going back to the theme of faith,” Andy Muschietti said. “Everything we have faith in is something for this thing to take, right? So does it exist because we believe in it? Is that why kids see it so much, and they’re the prominent victims of this thing, because adults don’t believe in things that don’t exist? So it’s a lingering question. It lingers in the book, it lingers in our movies, it lingers in our show. Is It real? Or is it something that we create?”   billharristv@gmail.com @billharris_tv