The unsettling first season of IT: Welcome to Derry, the horror-spin-off prequel to the films IT and IT: Chapter Two, is in Italy available on Sky and streaming on NOW and HBO Max, and has revealed to us that the real monster is not only Pennywise, but also the cruelty of human beings and a society that fuels hatred, racism, and indifference. The ruthless clown born from Stephen King’s pen has found fertile ground in a community already poisoned by hostility, fear, and coldness. Through “a different stylistic approach,” the next cycle of episodes will continue along this path, telling a new story set in a different era, as showrunner Brad Caleb Kane hinted to Entertainment Weekly, just in time for Halloween.
IT: Welcome to Derry 2, a gangster film seen through Pennywise’s lens
“For the second season we are cooking up something really exciting that I can’t say too much about, but that features a different stylistic approach,” Kane said. “We’re set in the period of the Great Depression, 1935. I can’t add more, but imagine a Warner Bros. gangster film seen through the lens of Pennywise and Stephen King. That’s basically what we’re making.”
In the upcoming season, therefore, IT: Welcome to Derry will go even further back in time than IT, from the America of the 1960s in the previous cycle—a period marked by the Cold War, the fear of nuclear conflict, and social tensions—to the mid-1930s, at the end of another 27-year cycle, in a far gloomier Derry, where poverty, unemployment, and the despair of the Great Depression have left the city even more desolate. And while this was already known since last summer when the series was officially renewed, the novelty lies in how the producers want to tell the second season: taking a clearly recognizable cinematic genre, the gangster movie, and turning it into something unsettling, supernatural, and deeply tied to the IT universe.
Kane added that work is proceeding “at full speed” and that the team is “in the thick of the writers’ room: we already have several scripts, we have outlined more than half of the second season, and we are approaching the pre-production phase. Beyond this, I fear someone would take me out if I revealed more. But yes, we have fully immersed ourselves and everything is in the works. It is something very exciting. It is extremely bloody and very, very different from the first season.”
From earlier reports we know that the story will center on the bloody massacre of the Bradley Gang, a group of storefront and bank robbers who stop in Derry to buy ammunition. What initially seems to be a simple passage through the town turns into an encounter with an horror impossible to comprehend. At the head of the organization were brothers George and Al Bradley, often joined by Kitty Donahue, the wife of the elder, who took part in their criminal raids. 1935 was notable for a brutal ambush and shootout when some Derry residents laid an ambush for them, killing its members with gunfire. According to King’s book, Pennywise was present on the scene.
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