The first trailer for IT: Welcome to Derry is here – and it looks just as hair-raisingly creepy as we've come to expect from Stephen King adaptations.
After keeping Bill Skarsgård's Pennywise hidden in previous teasers, as well as its young leads, the HBO series has finally unveiled both in the latest look. Watch it above... and make sure you stick around until the final few seconds.
The clip opens with a youngster hitchhiking on a dark road, before being picked up by a couple who suggest they tell him where home is so they can drop him off. "Anywhere but Derry," the kid ominously replies.
It then jumps to Maine in 1962, as It looks to terrorize a fresh batch of pre-teens. "No adult is ever gonna believe what we saw," says one at one point. "I heard voices in the pipes," another whispers later. Bone-chilling stuff.
Acting as a prequel to Andy Muschietti's It and It: Chapter Two, it was largely inspired by a story Mike Hanlon's ailing father Will tells him in the source material. As Mike learns in the book, Will and his Air Force comrades once opened the Black Spot, a bar and nightclub frequented by non-white patrons – in the book, this happens in the '30s, while the new show is set in the '60s. Tragedy struck when a radicalized supremacist group burned it down one terrible night, with Mike concluding in the present day that It must have been present that fateful evening.
"We are telling the stories of the interludes, writings by Mike Hanlon based on his investigation that includes interviews he conducts with the older people in the town," Muschietti previously told Entertainment Weekly. "In Welcome to Derry, we touch on the usual themes that were talked about in the movie – friendship, loss, the power of unified belief – but this story focuses also on the use of fear as a weapon, which is one of the things that is also relevant to our times."
It: Welcome to Derry premieres is set to premiere sometime in the fall. While we wait for an exact release date, check out our picks of the most exciting new TV shows heading our way.
