Welcome to Derry’s Pennywise Origin story

‘It: Welcome to Derry’ isn’t just the first Stephen King adaptation where no one is safeit’s the first to provide a fully realized backstory for Pennywise the Clown, and it appears the original creator of this legendary horror villain had virtually nothing to do with it. For what? Well, because Stephen King never wrote a backstory for the character in his original novel, which, as “Welcome to Derry” co-creator and director Andy Muschietti explained in a recent interview, was a work of suspense that intentionally kept audiences in the dark about certain things.

Like all good horror stories, “It” works so well because so much of the story remains a mystery. Who is it? What does He want? And how did it happen in Derry? None of these questions are fully explained in King’s original 1986 novel, which only makes the titular entity even more unknowable and therefore imposing. It is a creature that thrives on fear, and horror itself thrives on the fear of the unknown.

So when Muschietti, director of the 2017 adaptation of “It” and its 2019 sequel, “It: Chapter Two,” decided to make a series explaining everything mysterious about the evil force and its most nefarious corporeal form, Pennywise, King must have hesitated for at least a second. At least, one would think so, but it seems that the author was rather hands-off when it came to creating the new story told in “It: Welcome to Derry”, allowing Muschietti and co. to create pretty much unhindered.

“It: Welcome to Derry” serves as a prequel to the two aforementioned Andy Muschietti films. Show creators Jason Fuchs, Andy and Barbara Muschietti plan a trilogy of seasons “Welcome to Derry” this will collectively transform the modern “It” verse on screen into something much richer and more realized. These seasons will chronicle three of the most significant moments when he emerged from his slumber beneath Derry to terrorize the city’s residents. In the end, there should be very little left to explain, especially since the first season already revealed Pennywise’s origin story.

In Stephen King’s novel “It,” the titular entity told Georgie Denbrough that his name was Bob Gray, a human nicknamed Pennywise the Dancing Clown. However, there is no explanation or elaboration on this point, which left Muschietti and his “Welcome to Derry” co-creators with a lot of creative freedom when writing their prequel series.

Much of this manifested itself in episode 7 (which beat the films with the death of a major character)where we finally see how he came to take on his nightmarish harlequin form. It turns out that in Muschietti’s verse, Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) was an actual clown played by a man named Bob Gray (also played by Skarsgård). The episode shows how, after a performance, Gray was led into the forest by It in the form of a young boy, where the entity devoured the circus performer and took on his appearance. It’s not the most elaborate story, but it’s extremely important in providing fans with a true history of the character of Pennywise. And according to Andy Muschietti, Stephen King had virtually nothing to do with this origin story.

Andy Muschietti spoke to Deadline Crew call where he was asked to create a backstory for Pennywise based on the scant details from the original novel. “One of the strengths of this book is that it has a lot of crumbs and bits of information,” he said, “which are pieces of a puzzle. We took those pieces as big pillars to create a new story.”

The director then explained that there was a lot of invention involved in “Welcome to Derry”, simply because King did not provide many concrete details about Derry’s past in his book. According to Muschietti, the author agreed with this. He explained that King “was game” for the project and essentially told the co-creators, “‘Okay, let’s see what you have.'”

When asked if King had any notes on the original Pennywise story that the co-creators ultimately crafted, Muschietti said, “He didn’t have a lot of notes because his work, on ‘It,’ is suspenseful, creative work.” The co-creator then explained that Bob Gray is “a very enigmatic character” in the books, but now that “Welcome to Derry” has explained everything, he is much less so.

This expansion of King’s original story is both the strength of the series and the biggest problem in “Welcome to Derry” and could be catastrophic for Pennywise making it much less mysterious and thus robbing it of much of its cosmic horror appeal. Still, there’s no doubt that the series remains compelling even after answering one of the biggest questions fans had about one of the the most legendary scary clowns in horror history.