While the killer clown of Stephen King’s A Nightmare On Elm Street’s risible 2010 remake.
However, a well-told backstory can make a villain even scarier. While Hitchcock’s classic proto-slasher Predator prequel injected new life into a tired franchise by taking its story back in time.
Welcome To Derry Will Make Pennywise Scarier
While most horror franchise prequels try to humanize their villains by taking viewers back to their past and proving that the characters were once redeemable, comparatively normal humans, Welcome to Derry can’t take this approach with It’s villain Pennywise. Despite often taking the form of a clown to attract children, It is an eons-old inhuman monster, a force of evil that has been around longer than the universe itself. As such, Welcome to Derry can instead make It’s story scarier by forcing fans to confront just how long Pennywise has been destroying lives and how successful it has been. While King himself isn’t writing the series, the author also wasn’t heavily involved in Kubrick’s The Shining adaptation, meaning Welcome to Derry’s artistic potential isn’t limited by the writer’s distance.
As such, Welcome to Derry (and any future It spinoffs that are set before the two-part movie adaptation) only help make the It movies themselves more frightening. While viewers do know that the Losers Club eventually overpower Pennywise, there is no guarantee that any of the characters seen in Welcome to Derry will escape with their lives. Even characters who do survive the events of Welcome to Derry will be haunted by Pennywise's psychic presence for the remainder of their lives, since viewers know that the monster is alive and well by the time It’s movie adaptations take place. The Lovecraftian fate of being driven mad by an encounter with an ancient eldritch evil is even scarier than being killed by Pennywise, meaning Welcome to Derry can make the ur-villain of Stephen King’s It more chilling than ever before.
