Overnight, and without so much as a cough of warning, HBO Max slipped a Halloween treat into the sack: a surprise half-hour special for IT: Welcome to Derry, titled A Story of Derry, and streaming now. In the grand tradition of trick-or-treating, it is a small thing that may well contain something sharp.
The setting is the interesting bit. We are not in 1962, and we are not in the 1935 of the already announced second season, with its Bradley Gang and their catastrophically poor choice of shop for buying ammunition. We are hundreds of years before Pennywise, where three youngsters venture into the Western Wood and run into what the logline calls a terrifying ancient spirit. Anyone who has ever watched a horror film will note that the youngsters could simply have stayed out of the wood, but then there would be no special, and the wood would be bored.
The special sits before episode four, the one that explained why the clown can’t leave town, and opens with a title card telling us this is not the story as outsiders know it: the people involved hid the truth about the Kollu inside a gentler tale, one their children could carry. Online speculation links it to the Shokopiwath people mentioned in that episode, though HBO hasn’t said so outright. Tazbah Chavez directs, from a script by Cherie DiMaline and Jasmyne Flournoy, which suggests Indigenous voices are telling the land’s oldest history rather than a studio lore department armed with a map and a highlighter.
There’s a pleasing cheek to the timing. Streamers usually mark Halloween with a banner and a bundle of old slashers; HBO has instead handed over fresh lore, which for a franchise built on a town that forgets its own atrocities is almost thematically rude. Here at SFcrowsnest magazine we’ll reserve judgement until we’ve seen it, but half an hour of ancient dread is the right size for Halloween night: long enough to unsettle, short enough that nobody has to explain to the trick-or-treaters why the lights are still off.
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