IT Prequel Welcome to Derry Features a Big Connection to The Shining and Very Graphic Imagery | SDCC 2025

IT: Welcome to Derry had an unusually late start time for a San Diego Comic-Con panel Saturday night, not starting until 9:15pm, but the preview those of us in attendance got of the show’s first 10 minutes quickly made it clear why this was footage you’d want to make sure little kids didn’t see. In the subsequent Q&A, producers revealed a lot of new info about the HBO Max prequel series to 2017’s IT and 2019’s IT: Chapter Two, including a big character crossover with another Stephen King classic, The Shining.

In the footage shown, we follow a young boy in 1962 Derry who gets in trouble for misbehaving at a movie theater – something that seems to be a common occurrence – and then, after running from an angry usher, wanders down the road on a dark, snowy night. It’s clear this kid has some issues, with his face appearing bruised, and with him frequently sucking on a pacifier, despite the fact that he looks to be about 10 years old.

A car pulls over with a family inside, including a mom and dad, their teenage daughter, and her younger brother. They offer the boy a ride to Portland, Maine when he says he wants to leave Derry, except things quickly get very odd in the car, as the daughter opens up a container marked “Liver” and dips her fingers in blood and then holds her fingers up to the boy as though she wants him to smell them.

Things get much worse as the boy notices they are somehow driving back into Derry, even as the family begins to ignore his cries to stop the car and let him out, acting more and more deranged. When he screams he wants out, they mock him by chanting “O-U-T!” over and over, causing him to panic and grab the steering wheel from the dad, causing a commotion that results in them hitting the mom in her very pregnant stomach… at which point she goes into labor, which is when she pulls up her dress and things suddenly get very graphic.

Beneath her underwear, we see something is coming out of her, but it doesn’t look typically baby-shaped… and then the underwear is pulled away completely and we get an unobstructed view of this misshapen thing actually being birthed from her and falling onto the passenger side floor.

We then get the full reveal of a demonic-looking, fanged baby with bat-like wings… Who then suddenly leaps into the back of the car, causing everyone to scream except Mom, who gleefully cackles, as she manipulates her umbilical cord to make the demon baby move from one passenger to another… before it finally lunges at the terrified boy, violently smashing his head into the window and presumably killing him, while causing the window to shatter and sending his pacifier flying out of his mouth and into the water to the side of the road.

We then see the pacifier begin to float into a familiar-looking sewer, with a light shining at the end of it as the show’s logo comes up.

Watch the new trailer for IT: Welcome to Derry below:

You’ll love Derry so much, you’ll never leave.#ITWelcomeToDerry premieres October 2025 on HBO Max. pic.twitter.com/ptRIpC2Emg

— HBO Max (@hbomax) July 27, 2025

After this very effective (and surprising-for-Comic-Con, given what we saw) sequence was shown, sister-brother duo Andy Muschietti and Barbara Muschietti, who made the IT films and now are producing the series – with Andy also directing some episodes – took to the stage for a brief but rather informative and tantalizing Q&A, where the following was revealed.

-The show will explore the origins of how the entity known as IT came to take on the form of Pennywise the Clown. This includes revealing the significance of the name Bob Gray in relation to Pennywise, after Stephen King mentioned that name in the original novel.

-It was Stephen King himself who suggested that each season of Welcome to Derry could go further back in time to an earlier one of IT’s return appearances (which occur every 27 years). For now, the show will have to prove to be a success for any future (or is that past?) to be guaranteed, but the plan is that Season 2 would be set in 1935 and Season 3 in 1908.

-Andy said they were using several big, catastrophic events in Derry’s history described in the books as central focal points for the series. Specifically, he mentioned the burning of the Black Spot juke joint, the massacre of the local Bradley gang and the explosion of the Kitchener Ironworks, presumably with these events spread out across those hypothetical three seasons.

-Barbara said she was shocked at how gory and graphic they were allowed to be on the series, promising “A lot more of that.” Andy was probably joking (but maybe not!) when he added there would be “one full frontal after another,” referring to the opening sequence’s most shocking visual.

-Welcome to Derry Character Leroy Hanlon (played by Jovan Adepo) is the grandfather to Mike Hanlon from IT, one of the book and film’s main characters. Andy said there would be other connections to the IT characters in the prequel series, with some more obvious or revealed more quickly than others will be.

-The show will also include at least one character from the larger Stephen King universe in the form of Dick Halloran, who was first introduced in The Shining. Dick is mentioned in the IT novel as a soldier who helped found the ill-fated Black Spot, which caters to local black soldiers. He will have a larger role in Welcome to Derry, where he is played by Chris Chalk.

-The panel concluded with an early look at the next Welcome to Derry trailer. It’s a cool, appropriately ominous trailer, showing more glimpses of a family moving to Derry and beginning to discover just how dangerous things are, intermixed with glimpses of local missing children – and, as with the first teaser, a final shot of Pennywise himself, once more played by Bill Skarsgard. Familiar IT sights like the Neibolt House and Pennywise’s wagon are also seen, along with one more overt connection to other Stephen King stories by way of a Shawshank Prison bus.

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