TL;DR: It: Welcome to Derry is a masterfully crafted prequel that trades jump scares for psychological scars. It’s chilling, nostalgic, and heartbreakingly relevant — a reminder that the scariest monsters aren’t hiding in the sewer. They’re sitting in the living room, pretending everything’s fine.

Some horrors never die — they just move downstream, waiting for the next generation to forget how bad things really were. HBO’s It: Welcome to Derry, streaming exclusively on OSN+ from October 27, is the kind of show that reminds you monsters aren’t born — they’re made, one whispered secret at a time.

Serving as a prequel to the It films, this eight-episode psychological horror (from Andy and Barbara Muschietti and Jason Fuchs) takes us back to Derry, Maine — Stephen King’s cursed postcard of small-town Americana — to show us how a clown-shaped evil slithered into being. But don’t expect a simple “Pennywise Begins.” Welcome to Derry isn’t just about what’s in the sewers. It’s about what’s in the hearts of the people who built the town above them.

And trust me — it’s not pretty.

Welcome Back to the Worst Place in Fiction

If Gotham has Batman and Hawkins has the Upside Down, then Derry has its drains — endless, echoing, and hungry. This is the most cursed ZIP code in the Stephen King universe, and the Muschiettis treat it like a living organism. Streets hum. Pipes breathe. Shadows seem to remember things they shouldn’t.

Set in the early 1960s, It: Welcome to Derry paints a deceptively idyllic America: picket fences, soda fountains, Cold War propaganda, and the kind of casual cruelty people mistake for normalcy. We meet new faces — families, airmen, school kids, and outcasts — all orbiting the same malignant heart of the town. (No spoilers here — HBO’s requested we keep key roles under wraps until later episodes air, and for good reason.)

From the first scene, it’s clear: Derry isn’t haunted by one monster. It’s haunted by the collective refusal to look in the mirror.

Nostalgia as Nightmare Fuel

The beauty of Welcome to Derry is that it weaponizes nostalgia. Every retro detail — the pastel kitchens, the jukebox hits, the black-and-white TVs — becomes a kind of camouflage for something much darker. You can almost smell the popcorn at the local theater, even as your brain screams that something awful is about to happen there.

For anyone who grew up sneaking It paperbacks into their middle-school backpack or renting The Shining from a VHS shelf your parents warned you about — this show is a gut punch of familiarity. It’s like flipping through a family album and realizing half the photos were taken at funerals you don’t remember attending.

This is Stranger Things without the nostalgia goggles. It’s horror filtered through the fog of memory — everything bright, but wrong.

Fear Feeds on Silence

One of the series’ sharpest edges is how it grounds its supernatural terror in the real fears of the era. The Muschiettis don’t just use the 1960s as a backdrop; they turn it into a psychological war zone. Racism, militarization, and the exploitation of Indigenous land hum beneath every scene like radiation. The Cold War may be the official paranoia, but Derry’s private one is much older.

Welcome to Derry isn’t afraid to show that evil doesn’t need sharp teeth or red balloons to thrive — it just needs people willing to stay quiet. The town’s silence becomes its own kind of monster, and by the end of the early episodes, you’ll be questioning which kind of horror you fear more: the thing in the drain, or the people who built the drain in the first place.

The Shadow of the Clown

Let’s talk about the red-nosed elephant in the room — Pennywise. While the show’s marketing proudly teases Bill Skarsgård’s return, the series treats his presence like a looming storm cloud. You feel him before you see him. The show’s slow-burn approach turns anticipation into agony, crafting a sense of dread that’s almost unbearable.

Skarsgård’s Pennywise — when he does emerge — remains a masterclass in horror minimalism: a creature that shouldn’t exist, moving like corrupted gravity, smiling like he knows your nightmares by name. HBO has asked critics not to spoil when or how he appears, and honestly, that’s a gift — because the build-up is half the terror.

This isn’t just the clown we remember. This is the idea of Pennywise — the manifestation of generational rot and collective denial. And that’s infinitely scarier.

Aesthetic Terror: The Look, The Sound, The Sweat

Visually, Welcome to Derry is pure cinematic nightmare fuel. Andy Muschietti’s direction thrives on negative space — long, quiet shots that let your imagination eat itself alive. The production design is immaculate, painting Derry as a town forever caught between postcard perfection and existential decay. The light always seems too golden, the smiles too wide.

The sound design? Terrifying. You’ll hear laughter from pipes, whispers in static, and distant carnival music that shouldn’t be there. It’s the kind of series you don’t just watch — you feel it vibrating in your bones. Do not, under any circumstances, watch it alone in a dark room. Or do, if you enjoy regretting your life choices.

And the score — a haunting blend of lullaby motifs and industrial groans — might just become the new standard for prestige horror television. It’s horror with patience, atmosphere, and a wicked sense of timing.

Derry Devours Its Own

By the midpoint (episode five, which critics were shown), Welcome to Derry has already solidified itself as one of the most ambitious horror prequels in years. It doesn’t rely on jump scares or cheap nostalgia. Instead, it marinates in dread — the slow, suffocating realization that maybe Derry’s real curse isn’t supernatural at all. Maybe it’s human nature, weaponized.

It’s Stephen King at his most existential, filtered through the lens of 2020s social horror — a story about fear as currency, trauma as inheritance, and evil as civic duty. This isn’t horror for Halloween. It’s horror for history class.

Verdict

It: Welcome to Derry is more than just an origin story for Pennywise — it’s a grim, gorgeous meditation on how societies manufacture monsters. The Muschiettis and their cast have turned Stephen King’s fictional hellmouth into a mirror that reflects us back, smiling with too many teeth.

Atmospheric, ambitious, and emotionally devastating, this prequel doesn’t just expand the It universe — it redefines it. By the time the credits roll, you’ll realize the real horror of Derry is that it’s never really gone. It’s just waiting for us to look away.

It: Welcome to Derry premieres exclusively on OSN+ in the Middle East from October 27. Don’t miss it — but maybe keep a nightlight handy.