'Welcome to Derry' To Adapt Sorely Missed Aspects of 'IT' Novel

**SLIGHT SPOILERS FOR IT AND ITS ADAPTATIONS AHEAD**

I don’t think there will ever be a definitive adaptation of IT. I’m honestly not sure if such a thing should even exist. The book is one of Stephen King’s most f***ed up and dense texts, with a world so detailed you can taste it. You leave IT knowing much about Derry, Maine (where the book is set), perhaps even more than you want to, before the town is destroyed. When the evil feasting on it for centuries is defeated, so is Derry. Unfortunately, the new films didn’t show Derry’s destruction, but that’s because they barely showed Derry at all.

I’m a fan of Andy Muschietti’s IT films and honestly liked the second more than the first (something Dustin has shamed me for in the Pajiba Slack). Regardless, neither film does a good job of capturing Derry. That’s unfortunate for a lot of reasons, but chief among them is that Derry is another character in the book. We get to know it intimately through its occupants and landmarks. The extent of its rot is explicitly played out to illustrate how Pennywise and the town feed on and influence each other. We learn most of this thanks to Mike Hanlon.

Hanlon is the character stuck with the unenviable job of Light House Keeper in the book and adaptations. His family stays behind and so does he, remembering everything about their horrible childhood while everyone else forgets, so he can call them back when it’s time to battle Pennywise once more. Mike then gets sidelined in the book and 1990 miniseries, which makes sense in the book as a “he’s served his purpose” device, but it’s still a Black man not getting to take direct part in the victory his white contemporaries do (they tried to fix this in IT: Chapter 2, but it still sells the character short).

Mike spends much of the book chronicling Derry’s history via “interludes.” He collects stories of Derry’s troubled past from those who experienced it. They are some of the more frightening chapters of the book and give a look into Mike and Derry as characters. These interludes are hinted at in the adaptations, but never fully explored, much to their detriment. To be fair, they might seem a little unwieldy in a non-literary medium (again, adapting this thing is hard) but director Andy Muschietti may have found a way to bring them to life.

Muschietti (who directed both modern IT films) is behind the upcoming prequel show IT: Welcome to Derry. While it was easy to guess that the adaptation would tackle Derry’s history, Muschietti has now made it clear the show will be adapting some of Mike’s interludes. “It’s a story that’s based on the interludes of the book. The interludes are basically chapters that reflect Mike Hanlon’s research,” Muschietti explained on Radio TU. “So they talk about catastrophic events from the past, like the fire in the Black Spot, the massacre of the Bradley Gang, a gang of bank robbers in the ’30s, and the explosion of the Kitchener Ironworks. Every time Pennywise comes out of hibernation, there is a catastrophic event that happens at the beginning of that cycle…We are basing the three seasons of this series on each of these catastrophic events.” He also revealed the show is planned for three seasons.

There is certainly a lot of potential there! Also, as wild as it sounds, it’s an opportunity for these new adaptations to cover something integral to the material but mostly absent from the films: real evil. Racism, misogyny, homophobia, and all the evil, awful things that human beings are capable of are just as important to the story as the shape-changing clown. Pennywise is the disease, but human hatred is the symptom that helps IT thrive. They support each other and are not as highlighted in the new films as they should be.

Chapter 2 begins with the homophobic murder of Adrian Melon, which is the event that brings Pennywise from IT’s slumber (or IT’s awakening spurs the murder). Beverly Marsh faces misogynistic attacks, but some are more cartoonish than grounded (which is something the book nails to a disturbing degree). Henry Bowers is an unrepentant and abhorrent racist in the book and is celebrated by his father for murdering the Hanlon family dog. The first film goes around that by making his father a cop in a more half-assed way to explain away his issues. Pennywise is a scary clown, but showing the everyday evil that humans are capable of makes the story work.

I don’t want a snuff film or something where I have to watch women and minorities suffer. The real evil at the base of this story just needs to be communicated better. The story of IT is about more than a scary clown, and by bringing Derry and its history into the fold, I think Welcome to Derry has a lot of potential for genuine terror. It will probably feel uncomfortable, but that is the point.

Maybe someday we’ll get the seven-hour cut of the film Muschietti has mused about. Perhaps it can include segments of the new show. But, more than likely, the best adaptation of IT will remain Stephen Weber’s reading of the audiobook (it’s tremendous).