Welcome to Derry: 3 Reasons You Need to Watch Kubrick’s 84% Rotten Tomatoes Classic Before Bill Skarsgård’s Prequel

HBO is rolling out IT: Welcome to Derry soon, and yes, Bill Skarsgard is back in the clown paint. The prequel drops us into Pennywise's 1962 terror cycle and digs into where this nightmare actually came from. Before you wade into the sewers, do yourself a favor and spin The Shining. Not just because it's a classic, but because it sets the mood and the mythos in some very specific ways.

Why The Shining is the perfect warm-up

1) Same author, different flavors of fear

Both projects spring from Stephen King's books, and both take their own paths getting to the scares. Kubrick famously bent The Shining into a cold, psychological slow-burn, while the new series is leaning hard into supernatural dread and origin-story creepiness. Either way, you're in King's playground.

And in case you were wondering how the King of Horror himself feels about the show, he posted this on Threads a few weeks before premiere:

"WELCOME TO DERRY is amazing. First episode is terrifying."

That is a pretty loud cosign.

2) Kids at the center of the nightmare

It is built around the Losers' Club, and Welcome to Derry lines up a fresh batch of misfit kids in 1962. The Shining flips the setup: one child, Danny, stuck in an empty hotel with an ability called the shining that tunes him into a lot of stuff no kid should see. Different scale, same effect. Watching horror unfold through a child's point of view strips away the safety net. Danny's visions in the Overlook are a nasty preview of the kind of apparitions and trauma the Derry kids will be up against.

3) The connective tissue is real

King's stories share characters, places, and cosmic rules across what fans call his macroverse. A big one here: Dick Hallorann. He is the Overlook's chef in The Shining and shows up in It lore too, in a flashback about the 1930s Black Spot nightclub fire in Derry - an atrocity tied to Pennywise. Welcome to Derry makes that link explicit by featuring a young Hallorann, played by Chris Chalk.

According to showrunners Andy and Barbara Muschietti, the series directly ties It to The Shining and even nods to The Shawshank Redemption, widening the on-screen King universe in ways that longtime readers will clock instantly.

Quick cheat sheet

• The Shining (1980 film): Based on Stephen King's 1977 novel; psychological horror; directed by Stanley Kubrick; written by Kubrick and Diane Johnson; stars Jack Nicholson (Jack Torrance), Shelley Duvall (Wendy), Danny Lloyd (Danny), Scatman Crothers (Dick Hallorann); set at the Overlook Hotel in Colorado during winter isolation; premise is a struggling writer's slide into madness in a hotel haunted by its violent past; features the psychic "shining" ability; released theatrically by Warner Bros. on May 23, 1980.
• IT: Welcome to Derry (2025 HBO series): Based on Stephen King's 1986 novel It; supernatural horror prequel series; multiple episodes directed by Andy Muschietti; written by Jason Fuchs, Brad Caleb Kane, and Helen Shang; main cast includes Taylour Paige (Charlotte Hanlon), Jovan Adepo (Leroy Hanlon), Blake Cameron James (Will Hanlon), Chris Chalk (Dick Hallorann), and Bill Skarsgard (Pennywise); set in Derry, Maine, across spring to winter 1962; premise follows Pennywise's emergence and an early cycle of terror involving the Hanlon family; explicitly connects to The Shining through young Hallorann and Derry's shared mythology, with additional links teased to The Shawshank Redemption; produced for HBO by Warner Bros. Television; premieres October 26, 2025; 8 episodes.

The vibe check

If you're into King's interconnected sandbox, expect character crossovers, lore breadcrumbs, and some deep-cut references sprinkled throughout. Whether Welcome to Derry sticks the landing on actual scares is the big question, but the lineage it is drawing from is rock solid.

Where to watch

The Shining is streaming on HBO Max in the U.S. IT: Welcome to Derry premieres on HBO on October 26, 2025.