It: Welcome To Derry Episode 1's Shocking Ending Twist Explained By Creators

This episode contains spoilers for "Welcome to Derry" season 1, episode 1 "The Pilot."

The "It" movies may have seen Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) meet his end, but considering the cosmic entity has been around for centuries, there's plenty of room to explore the gaps in its reign of terror. HBO's "It: Welcome to Derry" turns back the clock 27 years before the events of "Chapter One" to 1962, where a new generation of children start to notice a bunch of horrifying things around town. /Film's Chris Evangelista called "Welcome to Derry" a surprisingly gruesome and scary prequel series that doesn't pull any punches in his review. If the first episode is anything to go off of, then series creators Andy and Barbara Muschietti aren't going to be letting its younger protagonists off the hook.

"The Pilot" wastes no time by dispatching young Matty Clemens (Miles Ekhardt) in the cold opening. It informs the rest of the episode by getting Phil Malkin (Jack Molloy Legault), Teddy Uris (Mikkal Karim-Fidler), Susie (Hunter Storm Baker), Lilly Bainbridge (Clara Stack) and Ronnie Grogan (Amanda Christie) together as a precursor to the Losers Club. The ending of episode one, however, sees most of the child cast biting the dust in a movie theater massacre orchestrated by Pennywise in the form of the same demonic baby that killed Matty.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Andy Muschietti talks about how he wanted the surprise attack to illustrate that no one is safe moving forward:

"You want to create an event that gives the audience a sense that if these kids were smoked at the end of the first episode, nothing is sacred [...] In this world, no one will be safe. So, technically, that was the intention."

The only thing that we could anticipate with "Welcome to Derry" was it expanding upon the town history interludes in Stephen King's epic horror novel. Spending most of the pilot episode with a group of kids investigating the evil of Derry together was the easiest thing the Muschiettis could have done to reacquaint the audience with the world of "It," but the ending shows they're interested in moving beyond that. All of those kids are on the main posters together too. Andy wanted to subvert viewers' expectations on where this show was going to go (via The Hollywood Reporter):

"We did two movies already. One thing that we didn't want was to — given that we're using the same tone and the style as the movies — is get people too familiar [with the story mechanics]. We really wanted to create a subversion to get people excited. It has to do also with raising the volume a little in terms of intensity and spectacle."

The twist delivers on the promise of "Welcome to Derry" by giving a lot of history to places we've only heard about or barely even see in the "It" duology. The Capitol Theater has now been marked as home of the deadliest screening of "The Music Man." It presents an interesting story thread going into episode two, where Lilly and Ronnie have to deal with the bloody aftermath of Phil, Teddy and Susie's brutal murders.

The series premiere of "It: Welcome to Derry" is now streaming on HBO Max.