Halloween may only be a few days away, but IT: Welcome to Derry‘s first episode has already filled my fright quota for the season.
Titled “The Pilot,” this episode is brimming with nightmarish sequences, like a car ride from hell and the world’s worst trip to the movies. But which of Pennywise’s (Bill Skarsgård) scare tactics is most effective, and which left us most unfazed? We’ve ranked all the biggest WTF scares of “The Pilot” to find out.
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5. When Matty’s fingers pop out of Lily’s shower drain.
“The Pilot” revolves around the disappearance of Matty (Miles Ekhardt), the friend of several Derry outcasts including “Loony” Lily Bainbridge (Clara Stack). In the episode’s mildest scare, Lily hears Matty singing to her from inside her shower pipes. Then, his bloodied fingers emerge from the drain before disappearing.
It’s a gruesome image, but a familiar one for IT fans. In Stephen King’s novel and future screen adaptations, Beverly Marsh experiences a similar drain-centric nightmare when buckets of blood burst from her sink. When it comes to bathroom scares, Beverly’s blows Lily’s clean out of the water. It also highlights a very important safety tip for all of Derry’s young women: Stop looking down your drains! Nothing good will come of it!
4. When men in gas masks attack Leroy Hanlon.
Jovan Adepo in “IT: Welcome to Derry.”
Credit: Brooke Palmer / HBO
Derry’s kids aren’t the only ones getting scared. Major Leroy Hanlon (Jovan Adepo) faces a harrowing attack of his own while staying on Derry’s Air Force base, as several men in gas masks break into his room and threaten to kill him if he doesn’t divulge top-secret information.
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The attack has seemingly nothing to do with Pennywise and everything to do with Cold War anxieties rising in Derry and all across the U.S. Still, even if it’s not a supernatural sequence, the sight of the masked men peering through Leroy’s window is pretty freaky all on its own.
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3. When Teddy sees a human skin lampshade.
Teddy (Mikkal Karim-Fidler) gets a truly grotesque visit from Pennywise, who manifests as a lampshade made of human skin, complete with screaming mouths. The sequence calls back to Teddy’s earlier conversation with his father, who detailed the horrors of the Holocaust, including a human skin lampshade found at Buchenwald concentration camp. (This same story is also a key point in Netflix’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story.)
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The body horror on display in this scene is nausea-inducing, but what’s more upsetting is the lampshade’s ties to the real human tragedy of the Holocaust — and Welcome to Derry‘s almost callous exploitation of said tragedy. Teddy’s dinner with his family feels like a speedrun of Jewish stereotypes, with Welcome to Derry doing little to characterize them beyond discussions of bar mitzvahs and Holocaust trauma. The lampshade scare is the cheap cherry on top, and it’s enough to make the viewers sick to their stomachs in more ways than one.
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2. When IT: Welcome to Derry kills off half its kids.
Jack Legault, Matilda Legault, Clara Stack, and Mikkal Karim-Fidler in “IT: Welcome to Derry.”
Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO
The entire ending sequence of “The Pilot” feels like a slap in the face. For the entirety of the episode, Welcome to Derry has been setting up Lily, Phil (Jack Legault), Teddy, Ronnie (Amanda Christine), and Susie (Matilda Legault) as the show’s version of the Losers Club. That idea quickly flies out the window in “The Pilot”s final scene, in which a winged mutant baby (more on that later) tears Teddy in half, rips Susie’s arm off, and carries Phil off to who knows where. It’s a bloodbath through and through, and a reminder that no one is safe — especially not Derry’s kids.
1. When Matty experiences the worst car ride ever.
Miles Ekhardt in “IT: Welcome to Derry.”
Credit: Brooke Palmer / HBO
While the closing sequence may be the most shocking moment of “The Pilot,” it’s the episode’s opening that truly raises the bar for any of Welcome to Derry‘s WTF-inducing scares moving forward.
In the scene, Matty tries to hitchhike out of Derry. He thinks he’s found a safe ride with a nice family, but it quickly turns out that couldn’t be farther from the truth. From a sinister spelling bee to a brush with raw liver juice, the opening ratchets up the unsettling tension before letting loose with an extremely graphic birth scene that leaves nothing to the imagination. Everything reaches a fever pitch when the newly birthed mutant baby — a manifestation of Cold War fears about the effects of nuclear weapons on pregnancy — starts flying around the car, umbilical cord in tow. That’s not a distraction you learn about in drivers’ ed, but I fear they must start adding it to the curriculum.
Gnarly in all the best and most disturbing ways, the whole scene is one hell of a way to kick off a show. Can Welcome to Derry measure up with its scares in the weeks to come?
New episodes of IT: Welcome to Derry premiere Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max.
