Welcome to Derry Suffers From the Same Problem as the It Movies

It: Welcome to Derry is a show that It fans really want to love, and there are plenty of reasons to do so. The series, coming from It alums Andy Muschietti, Barbara Muschietti, and Jason Fuchs, has a gorgeous color palette and does a terrific job of creating its 1960s setting. The various intertwining stories also draw on parts of Stephen King’s iconic book, while giving viewers who have never read it brand new characters and events to explore.

Where the show suffers is definitely not in its surprisingly great cast, including the child actors, nor in its writing, which has to reckon with the distinct lack of peril usually associated with prequels: we know none of these people are really going to solve the Pennywise problem because that bloody clown doesn’t ultimately eat dirt until the end of It Chapter Two. The problem with Welcome to Derry is that it can’t help but undermine its scares with ludicrous CG effects, just as the movies did, especially Chapter Two.

Let’s look at the very first scene of the pilot episode, which sets up a truly unsettling encounter. A young boy stands by a road on the outskirts of Derry and pleads with a random family to take him the hell out of there. His relief is palpable as their car picks him up and they start to move away from the cursed town. As their behavior slowly becomes strange and erratic, we know what’s happening because we’ve seen the It movies. We’re terrified for him, and when the woman in the front of the car starts to moan as she goes into labor, the thought of whatever thing she’s about to spawn is super distressing in this claustrophobic environment.

The scene is really well set up, but the punchline is that the thing that emerges from between her legs ends up being a quite frankly hilarious CG bat baby that screeches and flails as it attacks. It’s not scary, it’s silly. It is laugh-inducing, which makes for a really weird tonal shift in a show that has a nasty, mean streak when it comes to tormenting and killing its characters.

Episode two continues using the CG bat baby, while three flashes back to 1908 and has a young boy stalked by a horrible man who pursues him through a forest in broad daylight. This setting only highlights the CG enhancements, making the twisted man’s maw-mashing about as scary as your standard Scooby-Doo encounter. To date, the show is littered with spooky moments that rely on obvious, computer-generated additions.

Muschietti’s movies had the same issue. Though the first installment was relatively reserved and thoughtful when it came to using CG (the painting attack was perhaps the most underwhelming use of it), Chapter Two leans closer to Welcome to Derry’s approach, giving us a CG Paul Bunyan statue attack before going hog-wild in the climax and throwing everything from a flowing shower of CG dirt to an enormous CG Pennywise-spider hybrid at us.

The film’s spinoff has picked up this mantle. No slight on the show’s VFX department, who probably worked very hard to deliver and are clearly keen to mix practical effects in there as much as possible, but CG bat babies are not scary. Everything leading up to the bat baby is scary because not knowing is scary. Teases are scary. Pennywise is scary. Even when CG was used to enhance Pennywise’s antics in the movies, it could be frightening because Bill Skarsgård’s physical involvement makes that villain work.

Unfortunately, showing us some random monsters, especially CG-enhanced monsters with no fully tangible physical presence, has undermined what is otherwise a quite disturbing and violent series. And since Skarsgård has been MIA in Welcome to Derry for a while, what we are left with is not quite enough to make the show’s flashy horror work on its own.