Full disclosure: This episode made it hard for me to get a good night’s sleep. There are horrific images, excruciating moments, and an overall tone of queasy cruelty in this hour of television that I simply couldn’t shake. To me, that’s the mark of great horror.
I recall getting that feeling from reading the 1986 novel “It,” Stephen King’s epic portrait of a small town in Maine called Derry that is haunted by a demonic, shape-shifting, child-eating clown. I first read it in middle school, when I was the same age as its young protagonists — I’m closer in age to their adult selves now — and it hit me like a possessed car. Beyond being King’s scariest book, and his grossest, it is also his cruelest: a nightmare dive into the horrible realities of child abuse and small-town closed-mindedness, transmuted into the supernatural.
I did not get that welcomely awful feeling from the two films to which this series serves as a prequel, “It” (2017) and “It Chapter Two” (2019), both from the director Andy Muschetti. Which is why I’m happy, if that’s the right word, to report that the first scene of this first episode of “It: Welcome to Derry” is scarier and more disturbing than everything in the two movies combined. With Muschetti once again behind the camera for the premiere, he and the showrunners, Jason Fuchs and Brad Caleb Kane, serve up a perfect nightmare of mounting panic and terror.
Tags: horror, It, it: welcome to derry, new york times, Stephen King, TV, TV reviews