Why Pennywise Is Horror’s Apex Predator in IT: Welcome to Derry

Bill Skarsgard is back in clown paint for IT: Welcome to Derry, and yeah, he still has that unnerving, too-many-teeth thing down to a science. The show leans hard into what It actually is under the greasepaint: a cosmic predator that eats fear for breakfast and uses your brain against you. If you were hoping for a simple creepy clown, sorry — this thing is way stranger, and way meaner.

What Pennywise can do (and why it works)

• Shapeshift: The clown is just its favorite lure for kids. It will morph into whatever screws you up the most — a leper, a reanimated corpse, your dead parent — you name it.
• Warp reality and stage illusions: It can twist environments and conjure setpieces so convincing only its chosen victims can see them. That confusion is the point; you start doubting yourself while it moves in.
• Read minds and push buttons: Telepathy and mind control let It sift through your memories, chat in your head, and custom-build your worst nightmare. Bonus horror: It dulls Derry’s grown-ups into looking the other way while kids vanish.
• The Deadlights: This is It’s real form — an endless churn of orange, hungry light from the Macroverse (basically the void between dimensions). Look straight into it and you’re done: immediate madness or death, which is very convenient for a soul-hungry monster.
• Physical monster stuff: When It decides to get tactile, it’s super strong and fast, can contort its body like a nightmare Rubik’s Cube, and heals quickly. Cosmic being, nasty toolkit.

The show also clarifies the big picture: It crashed here ages ago, sleeps, wakes up on a cycle, and gorges on fear — especially kids’ fear because it’s raw and unfiltered. Welcome to Derry ties that appetite to the town’s history and trauma rather than just lining up jump scares.

Why Welcome to Derry hits harder than you expect

This prequel is set 27 years before the 2017 movie, which is a cheeky way to line up with It’s wake-sleep pattern. It tracks a new set of characters, starting with a missing boy and a family new to town, while the camera peels back Derry’s rot. The series plants the horror in the 1960s, tapping into real-world ugliness: the Black Spot nightclub burning and the Kitchener Ironworks explosion are used as pressure points for mass terror.

Crucially, the show keeps Pennywise framed as an ancient, unknowable entity that sometimes wears a clown suit, not a clown who happens to be ancient. That distinction gives it a heavier, more lingering dread. The R-rating gets used, too — there’s blunt-force violence and body horror that go past the movies, which makes the scares feel less like theme-park bumps and more like something you don’t shake off by morning.

Early reception is solid. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 82% with audiences at 79%, and IMDb sits at 7.9/10 from about 8.3K users. Two episodes in, people seem locked in.

Fans are already rattled (and a little giddy)

The timeline’s short, but the reactions are loud. One viewer summed up the escalation nicely:

"I’m starting to think Pennywise was going easy on the Losers Club because what the hell is this?"

Elsewhere on X, folks called out a scene where Pennywise mocks a little girl by wearing her dead mom’s face — brutal even by this franchise’s standards. Another sequence fills in what happened to Ronnie’s mother, and a later dream-with-teeth moment with Lilly gave people classic Nightmare on Elm Street vibes. There was also a quick refresher for non-book readers about Maturin — yes, the giant cosmic turtle that opposes It is real lore. It’s weird. It’s Stephen King. It tracks.

The cosmic stuff, demystified

If the Deadlights/Macroverse talk sounds like late-night Reddit, the show actually does a decent job making it feel legible: the clown is a mask; the lights are the organism. The Macroverse is the nowhere-between-worlds It crawled out of. When characters stare into that orange infinity, they break. Simple, awful, effective.

Bottom line

Skarsgard is locked in, the mythology’s nastier than ever, and the series keeps grounding the supernatural in Derry’s very human rot. That combo makes the scares stick. If you’re horror-inclined or just want to see a franchise actually swing in a prequel, this is worth your time.

IT: Welcome to Derry is streaming on HBO Max. Watching now, saving it for nightfall, or avoiding sewer grates altogether? Tell me where you’re at with this one.