As the days get shorter and the weather turns chillier and chillier, there’s no better time to get ready for a good old-fashioned horror show – and once the clocks change, the mood will really start to get perfect for it. HBO’s fully aware of that shift in mood, and it’s getting ready for Halloween with the return of a huge franchise: It.
The two movies did so well that it clearly felt there was more gas in the tank, and the prequel series Welcome to Derry is now closer than ever. It’s coming out on 28 October, or at least premiering that day, and promises more madness inspired by the murderous clown Pennywise, this time set decades before the two movies that attracted so many fans.
The show takes us to Derry back in 1962, and it’s not even purporting to be the very first time the town has been under a cloud of weird events. As this trailer lays out, it’s a place where people go missing way more often than you’d expect, with kids seemingly particularly vulnerable.
It looks like we might get two main plots to follow, revolving around the arrival of a new Black family in town, at a time when American politics didn’t make their existence remotely easy. Their son will try to make friends at his new school, persevering past bullying to find a group who are determined to get to the bottom of the disappearances they’ve all been living in fear of.
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Meanwhile, his parents have their own things to work out, including what looks like some sort of local army base that’s also looking into the matter and finding some pretty baffling evidence about how people are going missing and dying. All of this happens with Pennywise presumably hanging around in the background, menacing people more as things unfold.
If you’re a fan of the genre, you’ll doubtless be looking forward to all this keenly – it’ll be available to watch on HBO Max in the US, while here in the UK you’ll need to go with Sky or a Now Entertainment pass, as usual.
