SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for the first episode of IT: Welcome To Derry. If you have not yet watched the show, you can take advantage of your HBO Max subscription to do so, or you can otherwise proceed at your own risk!
Hey, Constant Readers: how are we all feeling after the premiere of IT: Welcome To Derry? If you’re a little bit shocked, that’s totally understandable, as the pilot does execute a nice bit of rug-pulling. For the majority of the episode, we’re led to think that we’re being introduced to what is essentially the 1962 iteration of The Losers Club… but then Teddy, Phil, and Suzie meet with horrible tragedy when they encounter a form of IT in the Capitol Theater. It’s exactly the kind of nightmare fuel that fans have been hoping to get from the show – but what if I were to tell you that the bloody peril has really only just begun?
The lead story of this week’s King Beat teases the horrors to come on the IT prequel series specifically through the eyes of star Chris Chalk), but it’s not the only cool headline I have for you: a virtual book club held this week had Stephen King as a guest, and one of the most interesting perspectives that he shared was in regard to his approach in writing female protagonists. There’s a lot to discuss, so let’s dig in!
IT: Welcome To Derry Star Chris Chalk Was Stunned By What Some Of The Young Actors Do On The Show
A significant portion of what makes Stephen King’s IT so terrifying can be summed up in three words: children in peril. The titular entity certainly has no problem preying on adults, but it has a clear preference for innocent, wide-eyed kids that it can terrorize and feast on. It’s a core aspect of the story that has to be included in any adaptation – but IT: Welcome To Derry star Chris Chalk nonetheless found himself blown away when he saw the kinds of sequences that his younger co-stars shot.
In the wake of Teddy, Phil and Suzie making their surprise exit from the fictional mortal coil in the pilot, there is still a kid-centric storyline in IT: Welcome To Derry, and it mostly plays out in parallel to the plots involving the adults. When I spoke with Chris Chalk and Stephen Rider earlier this month during the virtual press day for the show (as captured in the video above), I asked if they were able to have a general audience-esque experience watching the younger audiences work when viewing final cuts of episodes, and Chalk expressed sincere shock at what he’s witnessed:
Yeah, yeah. There are things that, well, you know, in the most spoiler-free way, there are scenes that people who are under the age of 17 did that. I was like, 'I would not let my baby do that,' because that child's going to be thinking about that for the rest of their life. I remember they showed an... I can't even talk about it; it's the worst.
Like Chalk, I’m going to do my best to steer clear of spoilers, having personally seen the first five episodes of the show. That being said, I will mentally prepare everyone by saying that the second episode does not take its foot off the gas pedal in any way after the pilot, and IT gets up to some evil, evil, evil shenanigans.
In the context of Stephen King adaptations, one can’t help but be reminded of the experience that Danny Lloyd had on the set of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, as the child actor was famously shielded from the more horrific aspects of the movie when he was on set. That being said, Lloyd was only seven years old when he made the 1980 horror classic (significantly younger than the young cast of IT: Welcome To Derry was at the time of production), and when you see what happens in upcoming episodes, you’ll understand that there was no way of shielding anything from anybody.
Still tip-toeing around spoilers, Chris continued and recalled watching a particularly gruesome moment in the show. He was so taken aback by one performance that he thought it must have been manipulated in the editing room, and he was impressed to learn that no such cinematic manipulation occurred. Said the actor,
They showed us an edit of something that happened, and the young actor was so committed that I thought they had sped the footage up. I was like, 'Wait, well that was a neat little fast-forward. You change the frame rate?' They were like, 'No, they did that all day.' And there was an urgency and a choice that the person made that I was like, 'Oh man, I want to be young and act again like that. I'm gonna steal that choice.'
To be fair, Chris Chalk is no slouch himself and a terrific highlight of what I’ve seen thus far from IT: Welcome To Derry. He doesn’t have a prominent part to play in the pilot (he is only briefly featured in scenes where Jovan Adepo’s Leroy Hanlon is being toured around the Derry Air Force base), but that will change with the debut of the second episode, which delivers a proper introduction to Dick Hallorann: the man who will eventually get a job as the head chef at The Overlook Hotel. He'll soon become a much bigger part of the show – but don't expect him to be the character we already know from The Shining and Doctor Sleep, as he has room to grow.
And speaking of the second episode, fans won’t actually have to wait until next Sunday for the next chapter in IT: Welcome To Derry, as it will be arriving early on HBO Max this Friday in celebration of Halloween (right when the clock strikes midnight on the west coast). I published a feature after the premiere highlighting all of the Stephen King easter eggs and references, I will be doing the same tomorrow – so be sure to head back here to CinemaBlend to check it out.
‘You Do The Best That You Can’: Stephen King Discusses His Approach To Writing Female Protagonists
I have acknowledged many times in his column that the magic of Stephen King’s characters comes from their authenticity – and that’s an aspect of his writing that is in no way gender specific. His protagonists are typically male, but some of the greatest tomes in his bibliography feature female-led stories, including Gerald’s Game, Dolores Claiborne, Lisey’s Story, and the recent run of Holly Gibney books. He has earned great acclaim in that realm over the course of his career, so what is it that allows him to tap into that foreign perspective?
King was asked that exact question this week while participating in a virtual UMass Lowell Alumni Book Club event, with the main subject being the author’s 2023 novel Holly, and he was honest in his answer: there is no trick to it, and you just “do the best that you can.” At the same time, he expressed that he feels he has a certain advantage from his upbringing. Said King,
You do the best that you can with it. And I think that's true for women writers who write about men too. You have to try and extend your imagination a little bit. And of course for me, writing about women is a little bit easier because I was raised by a single mother, and I had four aunts that were close to me. My wife has a number of, like, five sisters. So I'm surrounded by women.
For those who don’t have a great number of models to be inspired from in their own lives, he added a message that essentially boils down to “don’t let perfection be the enemy of good.” He suggests that writers accept the fact that they won’t ever be able to entirely understand the perspective of another gender, but the effort and the practice are both valuable. He added:
You watch, you learn, you try as best that you can to understand that female point of view, but you never kid yourself that you really can get inside any female character. You do the best that you can. And that's what I do.
While Stephen King is open to criticism, he has done a particularly fantastic job in recent years telling detective stories led by the lovable Holly Gibney, and that most definitely includes his latest: Never Flinch. The novel arrived in stores during the summer, and even if you’ve never read one of King’s mysteries before, it’s worth picking up as an introduction to the canon.
That wraps up this week’s edition of The King Beat, but I’ll be back here next Thursday on CinemaBlend with a brand new column – and stick around the site for a whole lot more from my interviews with the cast and filmmakers behind IT: Welcome To Derry, as there is plenty more on the way in the coming weeks.
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