{"id":499887,"date":"2026-06-14T23:05:11","date_gmt":"2026-06-14T23:05:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/499887\/"},"modified":"2026-06-14T23:05:11","modified_gmt":"2026-06-14T23:05:11","slug":"the-secret-to-it-welcome-to-derrys-nastiest-nightmares","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/499887\/","title":{"rendered":"The Secret to \u2018It: Welcome to Derry\u2019s\u2019 Nastiest Nightmares"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWatching the second episode of It: Welcome to Derry<\/a>, you\u2019d be forgiven for assuming that the Mother Thing, one of the HBO show\u2019s many terrifying surreal creations, came mostly out of postproduction. The parent of young Ronnie (Amanda Christine), who died during childbirth, emerges in a hallucinatory sequence while Ronnie is hiding under her blankets \u2014 she finds herself stuck in a strange sort of womb, with her mother taking on the form of the bed. It\u2019s slimy and creepy and wholly fantastical.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd yet much of this was actually filmed on set: The bed was constructed to fit two actresses, with one playing the upper body, and several minute details of the scene were captured closely in-camera. \u201cWe built out and slimed up a very disgusting-looking intestine that she got to reach onto,\u201d reveals VFX supervisor Daryl Sawchuk. \u201cThat stuff that we photographed was real \u2014 the drapery, the lighting, everything in the room was a solid foundation. We went in and withered the mom away and made her more of a corpse, with a dried-out mummified effect, but we had such a great foundation to work on.\u201d They added some extra goo, too.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis was the way of Welcome to Derry. Building off of his two It films, series co-developer Andy Muschietti shared a broad philosophy with the VFX team when it came to developing the look of this prequel. \u201cWe\u2019re both big believers in shooting as much practically as possible, trying to get really good photography \u2014 he loves old-school practical prosthetics and makeup effects and slime and goo, and stuff that\u2019s very visceral,\u201d says Sawchuk. \u201cThere\u2019s sometimes a convenience factor when you can shoot something against a bluescreen and deal with it down the road, but that doesn\u2019t always give the best results. Holistically, there was a great partnership in terms of the creative ideation and how we wanted to approach the show.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tRonnie (Amanda Christine) is covered in slime when her dead mother visits her in a hallucinatory sequence.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tBrooke Palmer\/HBO<\/p>\n

\n\tBringing the action back about 25 years from the 2017 It film, the \u201960s-set Welcome to Derry opens on a new family\u2019s arrival in town, the disappearance of a young boy and the birth of a flying mutant baby, whose killing spree kicks things off in bloody fashion. The prosthetics team actually puppeteered the birthing sequence, establishing the unusually on-set method of depicting even the most outlandish sequences.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cYou start to see these first assemblies and it\u2019s shocking and it\u2019s visceral, and you\u2019re like, \u2018Well, surely there are going to be notes from the studio where this is not going to go to air like on camera\u2019 \u2014 but of course it does, and it makes for such a shocking entry into the series,\u201d Sawchuk says. \u201cI thought we\u2019d have to replace the baby with a CG one for the birthing scene. But we ended up using it all practical.\u201d Again, they added some goo at the end for kicks.<\/p>\n

\n\tSawchuk credits the production\u2019s ability to employ that \u201cold-school horror film work\u201d style \u2014 which is not typical for modern genre TV \u2014 with the show\u2019s network. \u201cEven the initial episode of Game of Thrones, where their main character is killed and you\u2019re like, \u2018Oh my God\u2019 \u2014 it\u2019s such a shocking way to start the series,\u201d he says. \u201cI think on any other platform or with any other studio, there probably would\u2019ve been a lot of notes and maybe a more conservative approach.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tVFX supervisor Daryl Sawchuk was keen on showing the frightening \u201canatomical\u201d features of Pennywise in the series. <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of HBO<\/p>\n

\n\tYet there was also the matter of having the standard of two highly regarded, hugely successful films to meet or exceed. \u201cWe put a lot of pressure on ourselves to make sure that we kept up with the photography and the production design and the amazing prosthetic work,\u201d Sawchuk says. He worked closely with Muschietti, who directed half of the eight- episode first season and brought in \u201cvery demented and radical ideas\u201d on how to push the designs further. They wound up having an unusual amount of time to devise out-of-the-box strategies, with strikes and other delays ultimately leading to two and a half years\u2019 worth of VFX development on the show. Normally on episodic TV, you get less time than on a feature. Here, they had more.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAndy almost treated it like an eight-hour feature film, where truly no shot was finished until it was ripped out of our hands,\u201d Sawchuk says. \u201cIt just meant that we were able to do extra reps and extra refinements and detailed passes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOccasionally, they still bumped against the specific parameters of TV production and needed to get creative: \u201cA lot of what we do is we figure out, \u2018Well, how many shots can we afford to do for that amount of money and that amount of time?\u2019 And when things kind of blow up a little bit, you have to figure out how to make those things work.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tThe prequel series opens with a birthing scene of a flying mutant baby puppeteered by the prosthetics team.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of HBO<\/p>\n

\n\tThe primary vendor that the team worked with, Rodeo FX in Montreal, had also worked on the It films, so they joined the process with familiarity on their starting points \u2014 and an understanding of how to take things to the next level. Take the central figure of the It films, Pennywise the Clown, who returns here and is portrayed again by Bill Skarsgard. It\u2019s still the iconic villain we know and love, but subtle changes in the way he\u2019s envisioned and filmed make a notable impact.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI thought we could do something that was a little more anatomical \u2014 we could really play into how as the mouth stretches open, what the orbital bones do, and how that structurally pushes and pulls the anatomical features underneath the face,\u201d Sawchuk says. \u201cWe spent a lot of time designing things in as naturalistic a way as possible. As a result, it was a more aggressive-looking Pennywise.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tThe VFX team made the Mother Thing in Ronnie\u2019s dream \u201cmore of a corpse, with a dried-out mummified effect,\u201d in postproduction.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of HBO (3)<\/p>\n

\n\tSawchuk points to one of the season\u2019s most memorable images, when we see Pennywise almost frozen in place in a chilling tunnel sequence. His eyes are twitching. His physical vulnerabilities are exposed. It\u2019s the same Pennywise \u2014 and yet as you\u2019ve never seen him before.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAndy went, \u2018We\u2019ve never been able to be this close to him and really appreciate the slime and the drool and all the details in the mouth and teeth,\u2019 \u201d Sawchuk recalls. \u201cWe knew what the baseline look of the creature needed to be, but we wanted to make sure that we could kind of upgrade and push it to its limits.\u201d Which is to say, in the world of Welcome to Derry: You can never have enough goo.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis story first appeared in a June stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Watching the second episode of It: Welcome to Derry, you\u2019d be forgiven for assuming that the Mother Thing,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":499888,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[6971,12432,204898,93,61,60,21012,282],"class_list":["post-499887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-awards","tag-emmy-awards","tag-emmys-2026","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-it-welcome-to-derry","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=499887"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499887\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/499888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=499887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=499887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=499887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}