It: Welcome to Derry: Release Date and Real Crimes That Inspired the Stephen King Series!

It: Welcome to Derry takes us back to It’s universe, but its story happens several years before Georgie was killed by Pennywise, and his older brother and friends discovered that the murderous clown was responsible for the disappearance of dozens of village children over the years. The series is based on one of the most famous novels by Stephen King (It), and it is a sequel that is directly connected to It and It: Chapter 2 of Andy Muschietti, which again shows us King’s mastery of combining fiction with reality, supernatural terror with a very real type of terror. For this story (and many others in his collection), Stephen King drew inspiration from real elements, including the clown phobia and a series of brutal crimes committed by an assassin who marked the history of the United States. Pennywise is not real, luckily, but the character has a connection to the murder case of more than 30 youth and children between the 1970s and the panic of “Stranger Danger” from the 1980s.

What is It? Welcome to Derry About?

The series is in charge of Andy Muschietti, creator of It: Chapter 2, and takes us to the small town of Derry, in Maine, in 1962. As in the original story, the series follows a group of friends who discover that a group of children from their town has disappeared without a trace, and no one is doing much to find them. First, they believe that this must be connected to a serial killer, until they discover that the truth is much more terrifying and that no adult will believe them if they tell it. The series also follows an African American family that has just moved to town and is facing discrimination and racism from its neighbors, and which is also beginning to worry about cases of missing children that are on the rise in the town. Soon, the children discover that there is a long history of terrifying things happening in Derry and that they are going to have to figure out what is happening without help. As we see in the trailer, it is a series that not only has supernatural terror but also makes many social comments related to topics such as racism and failures in the justice system.

It: Welcome To True Story: The Crimes of John Wayne Gacy

According to many reports, to create Pennywise, Stephen King took as reference the phobia of clowns and the character of Ronald McDonald (McDonald’s famous clown), but it was also based on the case of the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who was accused of the rape, torture and murder of at least 33 children, adolescents and youth in the 1970s. In his daily life, Gacy dressed as a clown to give shows at different children’s hospitals and used the names “Pogo the Clown” or “Patches the Clown”, and no one imagined that that friendly clown could be a serial killer. Gacy did not attract her victims wearing her clown outfit (she did it with the promise that it would help them get jobs), but that was part of what made no one suspect that someone like him, who was dedicated to providing a little joy to children, could actually be as dangerous, or responsible for all those deaths. The killer was identified after the disappearance of a 15-year-old named Robert Piest, and his mother told the police that he had stayed to meet Gacy. With this, he was finally arrested, tried, and sentenced to death in 1980, being executed using the lethal injection on May 10 from 1994.

Panic for Strangers

According Screen Rant, the story is also inspired by “Stranger Danger” from the 1980s, where, after several cases of kidnapped, disappeared and murdered children were disclosed, thousands of families began to fear that some stranger might take their children, that’s why they began to teach children not to talk to strangers, even if those strangers seemed harmless (because it was also thought that strangers could take on an innocent appearance to approach children and convince them to go with them).

In fact, Ronald Reagan even launched a campaign about it, promising harsher sentences for anyone who hurt a child. What happens in the series, and in the movies, takes all of this as a reference to make Pennywise even more terrifying, and to leave the kids trapped and not knowing whom they could trust or who they could ask for help.

How Many Episodes Will It: Welcome to Derry have?

The first season of Welcome to Derry is short and will have only 6 episodes. For now, it is not known if it will have more seasons, but if so, little by little, they could advance to the events of It part 1. At the end of the trailer, we have a glimpse of Bill Skarsgard, who is back as the Pennywise he played in the movies, and this suggests that the series is connected to them, and that it will eventually lead us to that moment when the first movie begins, with the death of Georgie and the first appearances of the killer clown before his brother and friends.

It: Welcome to Derry Release Date?

The series is confirmed for the fall of this year, and although HBO has not announced an official date yet, we know it will be a series with weekly releases, so we are going to have several weeks to digest what happens in the series of Stephen King. In what you expect, you can see The Outsider, with Cynthia Erivo and Ben Mendelsohn, on Max (who will be HBO Max again).