Inside ‘It: Welcome to Derry’ premiere’s shocking cliffhanger: ‘It’s our Red Wedding’

This article contains spoilers from It: Welcome to Derry episode 1.

Jason Fuchs, a co-creator of HBO’s It: Welcome to Derry, has already seen the fans theorizing online around who will or won’t survive the first season of the eight-episode prequel series. “But I don’t think anyone’s expecting so few characters to survive the pilot,” he says.

The premiere episode was indeed a bloodbath. The opening scene followed a troubled young boy named Matty (Miles Ekhardt) as he attempted to hitchhike out of Derry, only to find himself trapped in a car with the “It” entity, which took the form of good samaritans, a white Christian family unit. Though the camera didn’t show Matty’s ultimate fate, the flying demon baby lurching at him, followed by his lone pacifier shooting out of the window, suggest he didn’t make it.

By the end of the hour, the death toll climbs significantly. Four years after that opener, Matty’s classmates Lilly (Clara Stack), Ronnie (Amanda Christine), Phil (Jack Molloy Legault), Teddy (Mikkal Karim-Fidler), and Susie (Matilda Legault) team up to find out what happened to him.

The five child actors featured prominently in much of the show’s marketing campaign, giving the impression that they would form the new Loser’s Club. Yet their mission leads them back to the Capitol Theater, where It’s flying devil baby form leaps out of a screening of The Music Man and devours the children except for for Lilly and Ronnie.

“We love it,” Barbara Muschietti, a co-creator on the series with Fuchs and her filmmaker brother, Andy Muschietti, remarks to Entertainment Weekly. “It’s our Red Wedding.”

Andy, who directed the It: Welcome to Derry premiere, acknowledges, “This is strategically a devastating event to set the audience into that sense of ‘nothing is safe in this world.’ We kind of trick the audience into thinking that these are the new Losers. Well, guess what? I guess they’re all dead.”

Like the entity itself, It: Welcome to Derry is a show that only grows more powerful by invoking fear within its viewers. The team took their cues from the source material. Stephen King’s It novel opens in a similar manner with the introduction and then swift death of poor Georgie Denbrough, as seen in the beginning of the Muschiettis’ 2017 It movie.

The bloodbath cliffhanger came out of a mini writer’s room that assembled in secret, consisting of the Muschietti siblings, Fuchs, and Brad Caleb Kane (co-showrunner on the series with Fuchs). In the original pilot script, penned by Fuchs, all the kids lived, and that’s the starting point the HBO executives were expecting to hear when the team later convened to pitch the entire season.

“It was a product of that mini room experience where we decided, ‘What if this happened?'” Fuchs recalls. “So the network didn’t know that was going to happen in the context of the pitch. We had a wall with headshots of child actors who would’ve played the kids in [episode] 101. Andy theatrically stood up as I was pitching. I got to the part where all of them, other than Lilly and Ronnie, being eaten. Andy pulled the paper down, and there was a whole other group of kids [headshots] under there. I’ll never forget seeing their faces and feeling like, ‘If we can replicate their reaction in the room with audiences at home, we’ll have a really interesting, exciting, satisfying way to end episode 1.'”

HBO getting on board with the premiere twist was “a huge relief,” Barbara admits, “because we went in [thinking] that will be the fight for us, we’re gonna have to fight to keep on pushing the horror and push the jump scares. It was the opposite.”

The idea for the demon baby, specifically, came from Andy. Season 2 is set in 1962, within a decade marked by the Cuban Missile Crisis, post-World War II sentiments, the Civil Rights Movement, and the rumblings of the Cold War.

“It was very important to pay attention to the fears of the era,” the filmmaker explains. “There was a pretty widespread panic of nuclear attacks and the effects of radiation and mutations in childbirth. There’s all these things that I can only imagine what being a child in those years would be like, how your imagination would be spun into horror very fast, not in a good way. Also in pop culture, a lot of horror movies from the late ’50s are very tied to the horror of radiation.”

So, technically, It’s first form on the series isn’t a demon baby. “It’s a mutant baby that [is] malformed by radiation,” he points out.

“That was a big shocker, especially when we got the scripts,” Christine remembers of her initial reaction to the material. “We were just like, ‘Whoa! This is how we’re ending things? Okay, let’s get into it!’ So it was definitely really fun to really endeavor also into my character, being the first time I’ve witnessed Pennywise and really felt him be present. That ending scene was just iconic. It’s a shocker.”

The crew brought a giant monster baby head to set for the younger actors to react to, while Andy would make distorted baby noises to help set the scene.

For Stack, the other sole survivor, “Honestly, it was so much fun to film,” she says. “Personally, I love filming action-packed horror sequences like that. There were so many cool things about it. I loved learning the blocking of me ducking into the chairs and climbing out and running out with Ronnie and getting drenched in blood and getting to scream and cry. It was all so much fun.”

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Looking ahead, Fuchs teases, “The entire story of the season is set in motion by what happens at the end of episode 1, this massacre of the Capitol Theater. You’ll see in episode 2 the way the aftershocks of that play out.” But more importantly, he hopes the shock factor will be strong enough to cut through the media noise and catch the attention of the viewers at home, including those who prefer to scroll on their phones with the TV on in the background.

“We know that we’re telling, in some ways, a story that is familiar,” he says. “We’re going back to a town people have seen, we’re going back to a character, Pennywise, that people are now familiar with over the course of two films, and we’re gonna have kids in danger. But the question was, How do you then still surprise the audience? How do you communicate that from the very beginning of the season? How do you really pull the rug out from under the audience and go, ‘All bets are off, the rules don’t apply, anything is possible’?”

The fact that It: Welcome to Derry is set in 1962, a time in the Maine suburb that even King readers don’t know much about from the original novel, afforded them a lot of freedom. “Not all these characters are canon from the book,” Fuchs notes. “We can do some pretty unexpected, exciting things.”

It: Welcome to Derry episodes will arrive weekly on HBO and HBO Max Sunday nights at 9 p.m. ET/PT.