IT: Welcome to Derry Timeline: A Complete Guide to the Cycles of Fear

IT: Welcome to Derry, he has arrived on HBO Max, leaping back in time to delve into the city’s dark past. And the demonic entity has been living in its depths not for years… but for centuries, since its origins date back long before the 60s in which this prequel series is set. The fiction is created by Jason Fuchs together with the Muschietti brothers, who were already behind the most recent adaptation of the novel by Stephen King, which was released in theaters divided into two parts. It was precisely in that second half that the Muschietti showed a first glimpse of the origins of It. The premiere of IT: Welcome to Derry promises to be one of the most notable premieres of the remainder of the year, at least as far as horror is concerned, after a first episode whose scenes, from the first to the last, will not have left anyone indifferent.

Over 8 episodes, the creative team of the series (which includes Andy Muschietti, director of the two films, already with Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise) will tell the story of the mythical town with the “clown curse” that Stephen King devised in his novel. In fact, the filmmaker himself has explained that the series has been planned to tell a story over three seasons with which to explore “Pennywise’s three critical cycles: 1962, 1935, and 1908′′, as he pointed out to the magazine Variety. In the proposed structure, the first season is mainly located in 1962, serving as a direct prequel to the 2017 film and setting the events 27 years before the first film, IT. Here, the plot revolves around an older generation of Derryians, who confront the origin and influence of Pennywise, played again by Bill Skarsgard.

IT: Welcome to Derry Timeline: A Complete Guide to the Cycles of Fear

In the town of Derry, Maine, history is not a straight line. It’s a vicious circle. As Stephen King taught us, and as Andy and Barbara Muschietti are masterfully expanding upon, in Derry, nothing happens just once. Everything comes back: the fears, the missing bodies, the laughter that echoes from the storm drains.

The upcoming HBO series, IT: Welcome to Derry, is not merely a prequel. It is an excavation. The Muschiettis’ ambitious plan—a three-season story told “backwards”—aims to dissect the three great cycles of evil that poisoned the town long before The Losers Club ever rode their bikes. This isn’t just the story of a clown; it’s the autopsy of a community built on a foundation of fear.

Let’s pull back the curtain on the terrifying timeline of It, connecting the dots from the upcoming series to the classic films and the seminal novel.

The Muschietti’s Master Plan: A Story Told Backwards

Andy Muschietti has described Welcome to Derry as a “contiguous story” that functions in reverse chronological order. This brilliant narrative structure allows the series to connect the genealogy of terror with the social history of Derry itself. Each season will focus on one of Pennywise’s key feeding cycles, revealing a chilling constant: every time fear returns to Derry, it wears the face of a trauma we’ve already seen.

1908 — The Founding Fire: The Genesis of Modern Terror (Welcome to Derry Season 3)

The first major awakening of Pennywise in the modern era occurs in 1908. In Stephen King’s novel, this tragedy is presented not as a direct narrative, but as a ghost in the town’s archives—a newspaper clipping Mike Hanlon unearths about a fair that erupted in flames, killing dozens of children. The official story blames fireworks and chance, but the whispers tell of a laughing clown seen in the inferno.

The 2017 film It: Chapter One adapts this event, changing it to The Fire at the Derry Blacksmith Shop during an Easter egg hunt. While the specifics differ, the symbolic function remains brutally intact. This fire is the origin point of Derry’s modern curse. It represents a community born from, and in denial of, an unspeakable tragedy.

This event is set to be the focus of Season 3 of Welcome to Derry, serving as the genesis of the cyclical evil. It will explore how a town’s foundational trauma creates the perfect feeding ground for a creature like Pennywise, using the fire as a potent metaphor for progress built on horror.

1935 — The Black Spot Massacre: Hate as a Catalyst (Welcome to Derry Season 2)

Twenty-seven years later, evil returns, and this time it wears the mask of institutional racism. The Black Spot was a nightclub for African-American soldiers at the Derry Air Base. One night, it was burned to the ground by a white-supremacist mob.

In King’s interludes, survivors reported seeing a clown dancing in the flames. This is a cornerstone of the It mythology: Pennywise does not create human evil; it amplifies and feasts upon it. The monster is a parasite on the town’s existing bigotry, violence, and fear.

This harrowing episode, mentioned in It: Chapter One and explored through the character of Major Leroy Hanlon (Jovan Adepo), will form the core of Season 2 of Welcome to Derry. The season promises to blur the line between supernatural curse and American history, arguing that the true terror often doesn’t come from another world, but from our own.

1962 — The Unseen Battle: A New Generation of Fear (Welcome to Derry Season 1)

The first season of IT: Welcome to Derry plunges us into 1962—a period of superficial prosperity in Derry, a quarter-century before the events of the films. But beneath the post-war calm, the familiar dread is stirring.

The series introduces a new cast of characters, including Lilly, Teddy, Phil, and Ronnie, who find themselves facing the same ancient evil. The premiere, directed by Andy Muschietti, sets a brutally unpredictable tone with the gruesome death of Matty Clements. In a shocking twist, the series immediately subverts expectations by having its central group massacred in a movie theater.

“This was crucial for us,” Barbara Muschietti explained. “We wanted an unpredictable story, one that didn’t repeat the movies.” This bold move establishes that Welcome to Derry is not a safe retread. It’s a dark exploration of the cycle itself, showing that for every Losers Club that succeeds, countless others have fallen.

1989 & 2016 — The Losers’ Cycles: The Stories We Know

The timeline then connects to the two films directed by Andy Muschietti.

• It: Chapter One (1989): This film introduces us to Bill, Beverly, Ben, Richie, Eddie, Mike, and Stan. They are The Losers Club, a group of outcast kids who discover the truth about Derry and manage to temporarily defeat Pennywise, making a blood oath to return if “he” ever comes back.
• It: Chapter Two (2016): True to their promise, the now-adult Losers are summoned back to Derry by Mike Hanlon. They must confront their past traumas and the resurgent Pennywise for a final, cosmic battle. While they ultimately prevail, the victory is bittersweet, stained by loss and the indelible scars of their childhood trauma.

Beyond the Cycle: The Cosmic Origin of Pennywise

What is “It”? Behind the fires, the murders, and the laughing clown lies a cosmic truth. Pennywise is an ancient, trans-dimensional entity known as a Todash Turtle that predates humanity itself. It arrived on Earth via an asteroid and slumbered beneath the land that would become Derry. Its eternal opposite is Maturin, the Turtle, a symbol of creation and order from King’s larger multiverse (which connects to The Dark Tower).

Andy Muschietti has hinted that Welcome to Derry will delve deeper into this mythology. “Throughout these three seasons, we will probably get closer to the meaning of the turtle,” he stated. This cosmic dimension elevates the horror from a simple monster story to a grand, existential conflict between primal forces of order and chaos.

Conclusion: The Fear Clock Keeps Ticking

1908, 1935, 1962, 1989, 2016—the pattern is as precise as it is terrifying. A cycle of fear, feeding, and forced oblivion. The inhabitants of Derry are not just victims of a monster; they are accomplices in their own amnesia. They learn to live with the unimaginable and forget what they cannot explain.

IT: Welcome to Derry is poised to be the definitive exploration of this cycle. It’s not just a bridge between the films, but a deep, structural examination of the town itself. As the timeline reveals, in Derry, time doesn’t move forward. It just spins, waiting for the fear to return, always disguised as something we already know.

The “Hidden Story” of Pennywise Left By Stephen King

Unlike the movies, Andy Muschietti, which faithfully follows the central lines of the 1986 novel, the series delves into secondary elements barely hinted at in the book. “I read the book and watched the interludes. I realized that there was a hidden story and that Stephen King was leaving crumbs that could guide her somewhere. It is a story told backwards”, Muschietti himself said. Thus, the series is full of symbols that can be understood as “a bunch of Easter eggs” from the literary universe of the famous writer, but also as keys to unraveling the origin of the evil clown. For the moment, the Muschietti prefer to keep details about the future of the upcoming seasons– although they acknowledge that the original book leaves various clues about Derry’s ancestral past and Pennywise’s unfathomable nature.

The Other Big Theme of ‘IT: Welcome to Derry’

For the moment, IT: Welcome to Derry is shaping up to be both an expansion of the mythology created by Stephen King and a contemporary reflection of social issues still in force. In the latter, he highlighted above all how the series aims to address racism as a structural element in American culture, an aspect that the novelist also addressed in his book. “Stephen King is a writer very sensitive to social injustice”, Muschietti explained to Variety in this sense. For him, although in IT the narrative revolves around the evil figure of Pennywise the clown, its reality refers mainly to the evils we do to each other as human beings. Most of the horrible things that happen in Derry are man-made”.

In this sense, the executive producer and sister of the director, Barbara Muschietti, has explained how the creative team of the series has sought to address it this and other themes in the series, since they now become more relevant with the social changes facing the United States and the world in general. “Many of us are in a state of alarm. There is more awareness and receptivity to all these issues because the dangers that we thought were gone have returned. It affects us deeply”.