I am not a great horror fan. After watching It: Welcome to Derry, I remember why. It\u2019s because it\u2019s full of horrors. Someone, please hold me.<\/p>\n
If you are a hardened It fan, I\u2019m sure the new series \u2013 co-developed and directed by Andy Muschietti and functioning as a prequel to the 2017 film It<\/a>, which he also directed (as he did that film\u2019s sequel<\/a> two years later, because some people are just built differently, I guess, and don\u2019t find themselves trying to claw their way through solid walls whenever a grinning clown shows up) \u2013 will be but a bagatelle. I\u2019m sure the opening sequence, when you\u2019ve barely got comfortable on the sofa, involving a picture-perfect family giving a lift to an unhappy boy and gradually revealing themselves to be liver-eating demons filling the car with blood, gore and a mutant baby swung round by its demented mother via the umbilical cord, is nothing to you. Less viscera-happy people, however, may need a moment. And also be forewarned that this isn\u2019t even the last mutant-birth scene you\u2019re going to see, although it\u2019s interesting to note that the most terrible parts of each are also the most realistic. Truly, the human body has some major design flaws.<\/p>\n Anyway. Once this pulverising opener is over, we cut to April 1962 \u2013 by which time the unhappy boy, Matty (Miles Ekhardt), has been missing from his hometown of Derry for four months \u2013 to meet the children who will make it their mission to find him. Teddy (Mikkal Karim Fidler) is a sensitive soul, conscience-stricken by the knowledge that he and his best friend Phil (less sensitive, likes boobs and theorising about aliens\u2019 presence on Earth, played by Jack Molloy Legault) had to be bribed to attend the friendless Matty\u2019s last birthday party. Lilly (Clara Stack) is suffering at school in the wake of her father being mangled in an accident at the pickle factory \u2013 a perfectly Stephen King<\/a> death, sitting at the exact juncture of tragic and comic that enables the other kids to turn it into a bullying opportunity. Ronnie (Amanda Christine) was, with her father Hank (Stephen Rider), the last person to see Matty alive (at the cinema where they work). When the girls realise they have both heard Matty\u2019s voice through the pipes in their homes, which come up from the sewers, and tell the boys, the investigation is on. Only briefly for some of them, alas.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, what are the adults up to? Important secret cold-war work on the Derry airbase, that\u2019s what! Major Leroy Hanlon (Jovan Adepo) is a newcomer who soon realises there is more going on at his new place of employment than is usual for even the very most important secret cold-war work. Also working on the base is Dick Hallorann (Chris Chalk), and if you just said: \u201cWait a minute \u2013 isn\u2019t he the telepathic man from The Shining who appears briefly in It, the novel, as the rescuer of, among others, Will Hanlon, who himself goes on to be the father of Mike, one of the main adversaries of Pennywise, that grinning goddamn clown? And wait again! So Major Hanlon is going to be \u2026 Will\u2019s father? Mike\u2019s grandad? Is that how things are starting to join up?\u201d, I would have to say: well done you, and keep watching with your eagle eyes and clever-old cleverness!<\/p>\n Miles Ekhardt as Matty begins to regret his choice of transport in Andy Muschietti\u2019s It. Photograph: HBO\/Sky<\/p>\n There is also the matter of Derry itself. Its townsfolk are racist, which must be navigated carefully by the ever-vigilant Hanlon family and makes Ronnie\u2019s father an easy target for the police to frame as they come under pressure to find the person responsible for Matty\u2019s disappearance, and then for a variety of other missing children \u2013 presumed dead from the amount of blood spatter and guts coating the inside of his cinema.<\/p>\n In short, all of Stephen King\u2019s tropes, concerns and set pieces are here. Idyllic small-town American life beneath which malevolence lurks. Supernatural horrors as a metaphor for nuclear and other human-made evils. The innocence of childhood that is no such thing. The endless, exquisite cruelties we can inflict on each other. Unsettling uncanniness brought to such a pitch that it is almost a relief when it reaches tipping point and lets the hellion babies fly free and rip the limbs off tiny victims cowering under theatre seats; or pickle jars fill with paternal body parts begging for a daughter\u2019s kiss in a nightmarish supermarket that is probably commenting on the US\u2019s rapacious capitalist hunger, or something.<\/p>\n It: Welcome to Derry is not going to trouble the top tier of TV adaptations in the King pantheon (including the 1990 version of It wherein Tim Curry\u2019s Pennywise made coulrophobics of us all) but it is solidly entertaining stuff \u2013 on a par with Under the Dome, say, rather than the dismal recent offering that was The Institute \u2013 and should give fans the nightmares of their dreams. The rest of us should hunker down and prepare for the arrival of Amazon\u2019s take on Carrie next year. The girl\u2019s a menace.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I am not a great horror fan. After watching It: Welcome to Derry, I remember why. 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