It: Welcome to Derry turns the politics of 1962 America into its most terrifying monster

Set amid Cold War paranoia and racial tension, HBO’s prequel to It reveals the real horror isn’t the clown lurking under Derry but the country above it

Luke Beattie, Redden Callaghan, Tom Hulshof and Taylour Paige in It: Welcome to Derry. Photo: HBO

It begins like a story we’ve seen before – a group of children, a lurking evil, a town that looks the other way. But within the first hour, It: Welcome to Derry makes it clear this isn’t that story.

Set in 1962, decades before the Losers’ Club was ever lured by red balloon, the new HBO prequel rewinds to an America steeped in Cold War fear and racial division. Beneath the pastel shopfronts and small-town smiles, something darker is already at work – not just the supernatural kind bubbling up from Derry’s sewers, but the fear that a country turns on itself.

That’s what drew actor Chris Chalk to the series. “The further you go back in American history, the Black American male is more and more afraid,” Chalk tells The National. “Move him to Derry, Maine – it’s another layer of fear.”

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For Chalk, who plays Dick Hallorann – the psychic caretaker first immortalised in The Shining – the show’s real monster isn’t the clown. It’s the time period itself. Welcome to Derry, the first episode of which is being shown on OSN+ in the Middle East on Monday, reframes Stephen King’s world as a study of how fear regenerates across generations – political, social and personal – feeding on silence and complicity until it becomes something monstrous.

“The 1960s in America were an era of big unease — discrimination, the Cold War. It was a canvas very appropriate for drama and horror," says director Andy Muschietti, who also helmed the record-breaking It movies.

Bill Skarsgard returns as Pennywise the Clown in It: Welcome to Derry. Photo: HBO

That unease runs through every frame. Muschietti and his sister and producing partner Barbara Muschietti expand on the small-town America audiences remembered from King’s pages and the earlier films, peeling back its veneer of normality to show how fear is cultivated – and at times weaponised – by those in power.

Co-creator Brad Caleb Kane calls it the story’s real subject. “We realised we were telling an It story in 1962 America,” he says. “Derry is a microcosm for America – and we’re dealing with the weaponisation of fear to divide and control.”

That phrase – the weaponisation of fear – becomes the series’ organising principle. The show teases viewers with the promise of another band of plucky children, only to reveal that the evil feeding on Derry isn’t isolated in the sewers. Instead, it’s institutional.

Co-creator Jason Fuchs adds that the team wanted to unsettle expectations from the outset. “From the start we wanted to make it clear that the rules are not what you think they are – the stakes are more dire than anything you’ve seen in this universe before.”

Here, the horror is the prejudice that determines who gets to feel safe, the paranoia that keeps neighbours from trusting one another, the acceptance that lets both endure. Andy and Barbara approach it like an autopsy of the American dream.

“The 60s setting makes it feel different only because the characters and idiosyncrasies of the era are different,” Barbara says. “It was an era still trying to bring back the naivety of the small town after two wars."

The result is a period piece that treats nostalgia itself as a kind of horror – the longing for a past that never truly existed. “When you look at mid-century America, it looks idyllic – like the American dream,” Kane says. “Twisting that, contorting it and terrifying it – that’s a fun thing to do.”

If the films used Pennywise to explore childhood fear, the series uses him to expose what adults choose not to see. Every streetlight in Derry glows with the illusion of safety, but every conversation hums with the quiet dread of people waiting for the next eruption – be it from the sewers below or from the culture outside.

Mikkal Karim-Fidler, Clara Stack and Jack Molloy Legault are the predecessors to the Loser's Club of the first two films. Photo: HBO

For Chalk and his co-star Stephen Rider, who plays Hank, the story’s emotional weight comes from the people caught in that tension. “Hank is driven by family love and the need to make sure his family’s safe. Everything I do is for them,” Rider says.

Chalk draws on his own childhood in the American South. “When I was seven, the Ku Klux Klan marched across my yard,” he recalls. “Any time a show puts that in, I’m like, 'yes – let’s tell that story'.” That lived experience grounds Welcome to Derry in something recognisably human.

Andy and Kane treat King’s mythology less as gospel than as an evolving folk tale. “The rule was answering questions but opening others,” Andy says. “There’s a puzzle that’s incomplete.”

In practice, that means the show doesn’t simply explain where Pennywise came from. Instead, it explores why Derry keeps summoning him – how fear regenerates every generation, taking whatever form a community will allow.

“Whoever you root for, they’re not safe,” Kane says. “Nobody’s safe.”

That fatalism becomes its own statement about American history. Each cycle of violence repeats; each act of denial feeds the next monster. Setting the first season in 1962 literalises King’s idea that evil is cyclical, eternal and home-grown – and the Muschiettis plan to go even further back in future seasons.

If revisiting their most successful project carried risk, King’s reaction quickly erased it. “You can’t have a better partner than Stephen King,” Barbara says. “His enthusiasm and support are magical.” Andy describes their collaboration as a process of mutual curiosity. “From the beginning we said we’d shed light on things not in the book,” he says. “He was excited to see what we brought to the table.”

Part of King's trust, according to Fuchs, was rooted in his trust for the Muschiettis. “Andy and Barbara had such a clear emotional compass for what It really is,” Fuchs says. “It’s about fear, yes, but also about empathy and connection.”

The result feels both faithful and newly unsettling. Andy directed four of the eight episodes himself, but insists the goal was to preserve the tone of the films while deepening the story’s emotional core. “We wanted it to feel cinematic, like it belongs beside the films,” he says. “The challenge was to expand that world without repeating it.”

The 1962 setting isn’t just window dressing. It’s the show’s beating heart – a time when television flickered with civil rights marches and nuclear drills, when progress and paranoia shared the same living room.

Stephen Rider, right, says the show draws from the racial tension of 1960s America. Photo: HBO

In Derry, those fears are literalised. The undercurrent of racism that escalates into violence, the fear of outsiders, the faith in institutions that refuse to protect anyone – it all curdles into something supernatural. What Welcome to Derry captures so precisely is the sense that horror and history run on the same frequency.

For Kimberley Guerrero, who plays Rose, that history goes even deeper. “Storytelling, to me, comes from a different way – an embodied ancestral knowledge,” she says. “In our tribes, it’s a role, like a war chief or peace chief. Stephen King has been one of our great storytellers. To be part of his universe is an honour, and even more so to help him break part of the story that even he didn’t know.”

Her words underline what the series is really doing – widening King’s mythology to include the traumas America has tried to bury. “It mirrors Pennywise’s 27-year cycle,” she says. “We’re going back two cycles – our grandparents’ generation. Cultures were starting to interact and clash, and that lays on top of what’s happening globally right now – this dance between isolationism and choosing each other.”

Nearly half a century after King first imagined Pennywise, the story’s power endures because the world keeps providing new reasons to fear.

“Fear was used politically then, and it still is now,” Kane says. That recognition is what lifts Welcome to Derry above nostalgia. It isn’t merely filling gaps between King’s pages or the Muschiettis’ films – it’s examining how a culture built on denial breeds its own nightmares.

For the Muschiettis, that’s the whole point. Horror, at its best, doesn’t invent monsters. It remembers them.

It: Welcome to Derry releases weekly on OSN+ across the Middle East