Original Coverage & Source Attribution: www.avclub.com
Perhaps to avoid cleaning up toilet paper and eggs from its platform on November 1, HBO Max is giving users a surprise treat this Halloween. (How are people supposed to egg and TP an online streaming service, you might be asking? Well, aren’t we full of questions today!) In observance of the holiday—and to stir up interest in a new TV season, which we’ll get to—the streamer released a new episode of It: Welcome To Derry set well before the events of season one (per The Wrap), which is also handily sitting right there on HBO Max if you want to keep the foreboding vibes going as you put together a costume for the night’s festivities.
Titled “A Story Of Derry,” the surprise drop ventures into an era preceding the monstrous monkeyshines of Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård), though that shouldn’t suggest a dark, vicious presence isn’t still lurking around. Set centuries before the events of Welcome To Derry, the thirty-minute episode, directed by Tazbah Chavez (Reservation Dogs) and written by novelist Cherie Dimaline and Jasmyne Flournoy (The Acolyte), follows three indigenous young people who enter the Western Wood (the forest outside of Derry where “It” crash-landed from space at some point in the distant past) and “encounter a terrifying ancient spirit,” per the episode’s synopsis.
The surprise drop is a fun placeholder as Derry fans wait for season two of the HBO Max original series developed by Andy Muschietti, Barbara Muschietti, and Jason Fuchs, with Fuchs and Brad Caleb Kane serving as showrunners. The next season, announced in August, will be run solely by Kane, who’s just coming off another prequel horror TV series for Peacock, Crystal Lake, starring Linda Cardellini as Jason Voorhees’ murderous mom, Pamela.
You can watch the new episode of It: Welcome To Derry here.
