FEARS OF A CLOWN

THE ORIGINS OF PENNYWISE THE DANCING CLOWN ARE UNEARTHED IN THE HIGHLY ANTICIPATED PREQUEL SERIES IT: WELCOME TO DERRY

- DARREN SCOTT

WHEN YOUR LONG-AWAITED FEATURE film adaptation of one of Stephen King’s biggest novels breaks box office records, becoming the highest-grossing horror film of all time, it’s a no-brainer that talk is swiftly going to turn to continuing the franchise.

But director Andy Muschietti’s two It movies (2017/2019) told the story of the Losers Club and the ultimate defeat of Pennywise the Dancing Clown with nowhere left to go - except backwards.

Andy says that it was while work was completing on the second movie that conversations with Pennywise star Bill Skarsgård gravitated to a prequel and the character of Bob Gray, the real person behind the clown in the original book.

While the treatment of Bob Gray in prose is very cryptic, It: Welcome To Derry - a nine-episode television series starting this month - aims to explore that mythos in detail.

“Who was Bob Gray and how did It take the shape of the clown? What were the circumstances, the events surrounding it and how did it happen?” Andy asks. “We were very excited about that for a while, then life happened and we went in two different directions. During The Flash I came back to It and to the subject of the book. The interludes were something that created gravity. It’s these stories in the book, from the past, that are very mysterious and they’re big, big question marks of the past, of It in Derry.

“Before too long I had this idea of telling the story backwards,” he explains. “For a very specific reason that I can’t tell yet because it’s part of the mystery of the big arc of Welcome To Derry, which is designed as three seasons. At the end of season one you realise why we would tell the story backwards.