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Stephen King’s IT has of course been on TV before. In fact, some of us are still bearing the mental scars of watching the 1990 mini-series which featured Tim Curry as the ultimate childhood monster, Pennywise the clown. The recent film reboots of the story – It (2017) and It: Chapter Two (2019) – saw Bill Skarsgård taking over as Pennywise and the films managed to keep the spirit of King’s books while slicking up the horror for a new generation. Now this new HBO series (on Sky over here) takes things to another level with the full premium TV treatment. Welcome to Derry (Not Derry, Ireland but Derry, Maine – firmly King country) enriches the world of IT, while coming up with a thousand new ways to scare the hell out of you. In fact, it happens right from the opening of the first episode, which may be scariest sequence you’ll see this year, a virtuoso thrill-ride which begins in creeping terror before hitting full-on disgusting gore... The year is 1962. We meet a kid called Matty, who seems abused, sucking on a dummy as a watches a film at the local cinema in Derry. He is swiftly thrown out for not paying for a ticket and ends up hitchhiking home. A kind family picks him up, an All-American nuclear family, all apple pie smiles and folksy chat. But Matty soon discovers they might not be all they seem... we’ll say no more... except that eventually a deformed baby with wings appears and... sorry. No spoilers of course. But this is the kind of horror that really makes you want to share it. Set pieces handled with utter aplomb as the children of the town begin to be picked off by evil forces… There’s a nice full circle here. Netflix’s big hit Stranger Things gleefully paid tribute to King’s world, and now we have an IT series to match anything the Duffer Brothers can come up with. What IT has that Stranger Things doesn’t, is Pennywise, a villain who is primally scary in a way which the other show hasn’t quite managed, even with Vecna. The killer clown taps into the vulnerability of children, and the effect is to transport you back into a world of childhood nightmares. Bill Skarsgard returns here to incredible effect, the show’s trump card and one who in this iteration is both nowhere and everywhere, lurking in the eyes and smiles of strangers in a town utterly compromised by devilment. King’s genius was to keep his horror in the home – where it belongs, to misquote Alfred Hitchcock – and here we have that taken to its zenith. As the children come under threat, fingers poke out of sink plugholes, bedroom lampshades become talking skin masks, a duvet cover turns into a smothering fleshy womb… night terrors rendered on screen with breathtaking effect. But what’s most impressive about the series is how well it manages to weave contemporary concerns into its early 1960s milieu, with its nods to Nuclear Age fear, civils rights and a sense of innocence being lost. As with HBO’s equally smart Watchmen, these serious concerns providing real depth to the pulpy action. Often small town American settings can be cloying, a rose-tinted Spielbergian vision of the past, but here we are closer to King’s grim realities and vicious underbellies. Derry is a racist little town, and as the children go missing at the claws of demons, who gets the blame? Yes, it’s black cinema projectionist Hank Grogan (Stephen Rider), along with his daughter Ronnie (Amanda Christine). In fact the series hinges upon the arrival of Will Hanlon (Blake Cameron Jones) and his parents, Charlotte (Taylour Paige) and Leroy (Jovan Adepo), who encounter different levels of prejudice in this snapshot of American society. Leroy works on a nearby army base, which provides a counterpoint story of institutional corruption, cover-ups and, well, perhaps an answer to the mystery of Pennywise... But as you’d expect, it’s the kids who you are rooting for, and Will ‘s smart but vulnerable child is matched by Clara Stack as Lilly, a girl with existing mental health traumas; one scene where she is in a supermarket and is followed around by threatening, staring adults down narrowing aisles is a masterpiece of paranoia, containing a child’s burgeoning fear of a grown-up world that’s out to get them, and from which their own parents cannot save them. It’s a beautifully done series, if you can call something this gross beautiful - yes, this is next level body horror with at least two deranged ‘birth’ scenes early on that will have you reaching for the sick bowl - which is about trauma, family and the fear that drives society. As for Pennywise, well, he’s back to haunt your nightmares again... IT: Welcome to Derry is on Sky from Oct 27
