It: Welcome to Derry review – the demonic, liver-eating baby in this Stephen King prequel is horrifying

Mon, 27 Oct 2025

This series, set prior to the 2017 Pennywise-starring movie is a gory, mystery-packed horror, which is full of all of King’s favourite topics. It’s solidly entertaining stuff, if not the best ever adaptation of his work

I am not a great horror fan. After watching It: Welcome to Derry, I remember why. It’s because it’s full of horrors. Someone, please hold me.

If you are a hardened It fan, I’m sure the new series – co-developed and directed by Andy Muschietti and functioning as a prequel to the 2017 film It, which he also directed (as he did that film’s sequel two years later, because some people are just built differently, I guess, and don’t find themselves trying to claw their way through solid walls whenever a grinning clown shows up) – will be but a bagatelle. I’m sure the opening sequence, when you’ve barely got comfortable on the sofa, involving a picture-perfect family giving a lift to an unhappy boy and gradually revealing themselves to be liver-eating demons filling the car with blood, gore and a mutant baby swung round by its demented mother via the umbilical cord, is nothing to you. Less viscera-happy people, however, may need a moment. And also be forewarned that this isn’t even the last mutant-birth scene you’re going to see, although it’s interesting to note that the most terrible parts of each are also the most realistic. Truly, the human body has some major design flaws.

IT: Welcome to Derry aired on Sky Atlantic and is on Now in the UK, and HBO Max in the US and Australia.