“Welcome to Derry, home of Paul Bunyan.”
I can still remember the It miniseries from a few decades ago. I thought Gary Oldman was just wonderful as Pennywise the clown at the center of Stephen King’s novel of the same name. What I really never took into account was that being wonderful really wasn’t the point of the character at all. With much love to Oldman and the many characters he’s brought to life over the years, I never realized until 2017 was who Pennywise the clown was truly meant to be. Andy Muschietti and his sister Barbara went to work on a two-film attempt to bring It back to life, this time on the big screen. Like most people I was pretty skeptical of the whole thing, and a lifetime of failed Stephen King films that never lived up to his written word was the evidence I cited. Can’t be done, I said. They’ll only run it into the ground to be resurrected badly as if it had been buried in King’s Pet Semetary. But I was wrong. While Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption might still be some of the best adaptations of King’s work, I think the 2017 It and It: Chapter Two are the best one-two punch in the frightening world of Stephen King. What I didn’t know was this wasn’t a two-film deal at all. It was intended to be three films, with the third being a prequel. Something happened along the way, and the project finally got greenlit, and the Muschietti family brought along all of their scary friends including Bill Skarsgard, who taught me who Pennywise really was, and the lesson has been unforgettable. Now Warner Brothers is releasing the first eight episodes that make up the first season of It: Welcome To Derry, and it’s available on UHD Blu-ray in 4K. Snatch it up before Pennywise snatches you.
“You know what they say about Derry, don’t you? Once you leave, you forget.”
That won’t be the case after seeing the first season of this little horrorfest. The films and the novel tell the story of a group of kids known as The Losers Club in two parts, first as children and then as adults, because It has a kind of cycle where it sleeps for around 27 years between bloodbaths. The series uses that as a way to get us back into the story, because obviously there were many of these cycles before the films. This time we go back to the early 1960’s when another Pennywise cycle is played out. I dare you to forget Derry after this.
“If you tell me that you’ve seen something impossible, then I believe you”.
You might recall a character named Hanlon in the films. Here we learn just how his family ended up in Derry. Leroy Hanlon (Adepo) is an Air Force officer who has been transferred to the base in Derry, Maine. He brings his wife Charlotte (Paige) and young son Will (James). What he doesn’t know is that there is a secret in Derry. It’s one the audience already knows, but we’re not the only ones. Hanlon was brought here because he has a rather odd genetic attribute. He doesn’t feel fear. He’s being teamed up with another airman with a special attribute. You knew him in The Shining through Scatman Crothers; that’s Dick Halloran (Chalk). What you might know is that before he became a watchman for a certain haunted hotel he used his abilities to sense things, what that story called The Shine for another horrible event. General Francis Shaw (Remar) is who brought all of them together. Because of a drug trial he was a part of, he remembered his time as a child in Derry. Now he’s a powerful general, and he wants to find It and use it as a weapon to stop the flood of Communism. Nobody said it was a bright plan. But he comes to Derry to use Halloran’s ability to track the thing and Hanlon’s inability to feel fear to let it loose in the world. The idea is folks will be so scared that they’ll be drawn back to old fashioned values and morality. Again, not the greatest of plans, but here we go.
Of course Will ends up finding friends who have had a connection to It and have decided to take it on themselves. Marge Truman (Lawler) was once part of the popular girls called Patty Cakes after their shallow leader Patty. When she sees some of the injustice around her, she gets pursued by It. Then there is Lily Bainbridge (Stack), who was witness to a massacre in a movie theater. She’s spent time in Juniper Hill, a place King fans know to be an insane asylum. She caves to pressure and helps blame a theater worker and Blackman for the murders to avoid getting sent back. So she reaches out to help his daughter Rhonda (Storey) to clear his name and try to destroy It. They form the core of a group that makes it their mission to stop it.
The series doesn’t just tell another Pennywise story, and that’s where it finds its strength. We get flashbacks, and we learn more about this creature and how it came to be. In the 30’s we see how it took the form of Pennywise because It noticed how children were drawn to the image. We also learn that It arrived 400 years ago on a meteor, and it was the native population who first had to deal with It. They discovered It had a weakness. Pieces of the meteor that brought it here had power over It. It’s very much a Superman kryptonite story. They used pieces of it to create a boundary it could not cross. Unfortunately, that cage became Derry, and a lot of folks got killed over the next 400 years. Now Hanlon wants to use that substance to put him back in his cage before Shaw’s men set him free on an unprepared world. The completeness of the story in just eight episodes is uncanny.
The series throws a lot of Stephen King Easter Eggs at us, and if you are paying attention, you’ll see plenty of characters, items, and places from the King universe. That seems particularly true of The Shining. There’s a very complete world built here, and they don’t pull punches for a series. Each episode has the production values and intensity of the two films. While Skarsgard is back, you don’t see him full-on Pennywise until the fifth episode. They make you wait, and the wait is worth it. The film’s atmosphere with the resolution and textures of UHD/4K make this pretty much an 8-hour movie. A lot of shows will tell you how they’re making a movie with each episode, but here that’s absolutely true. I dare you to match this to both films and not feel a complete connection to it all. Stephen King wasn’t a part of this production in any way, so I’m not sure what his feelings on the project are, but I have to believe he’s delighted. They ran with his idea and completely hit it out of the park.
There are a few bonus features. Each episode has a behind-the-scenes feature, and there are a couple of short features in addition. The best is a profile on Pennywise where we get to see all of the stages of creating Pennywise from Bill Skarsgard. The next season jumps to the next cycle and will take place in the 1980’s. Meanwhile maybe we’ll catch up with Halloran taking his new gig at a resort hotel. “I mean, how much trouble can a hotel be?”
