“Every nightmare has an origin.”

Before the red balloon floated down the gutter.
Before the sewers echoed with laughter.
Before the Losers’ Club stood against the storm…

There was Derry.
And Derry was already dying.

Set in the shadowy depths of 1960s Maine, IT: Welcome to Derry is the chilling prequel to the iconic horror saga based on Stephen King’s masterpiece. It peels back the rotting layers of the town’s past to expose the true genesis of evil — the beginning of a cycle of terror that would haunt generations to come.

The series opens as the town of Derry falls into quiet panic. Children vanish without a trace. The police blame runaways. The town chooses silence. But a small group of kids — too young to be taken seriously, too brave to stay quiet — begins to connect the dots. Their search leads them not just into the sewers, but into the soul of something unspeakable.

Deep beneath the surface lies It — a shape-shifting, ancient entity that feeds on fear and awakens every few decades to feed. Though it hasn’t yet taken the form of Pennywise the Dancing Clown, the entity begins to experiment with fear itself — stalking its victims in new, grotesque ways: whispers in the dark, mirrors that reflect what’s not there, and voices that sound like your dead relatives.

Starring Bill Skarsgård, returning to deliver a more primal, more unhinged version of Pennywise than ever before, Welcome to Derry explores how the entity became the clown — and how the town itself is a character in the horror, shaped and scarred by every act of violence committed under its watch.

As the children dig deeper, they uncover secrets the town has buried for centuries — murders covered up, families vanished, strange weather, sudden floods, entire blocks that no longer exist. Every layer pulled back reveals something more cursed than the last.

But this isn’t just a horror story.
It’s the story of what fear becomes when no one speaks its name.
And how a town that refuses to remember… becomes a perfect feeding ground.

Dripping with 1960s atmosphere, from foggy drive-in theaters to silent school corridors and smoke-filled basements, IT: Welcome to Derry captures the paranoia, repression, and dread of a decade on the edge — while revealing how It adapted to manipulate fear in every era.