It: Welcome To Derry Episode 2 Gives Us The Most Gruesome Pennywise Sequence (So Far)

This post contains spoilers for "It: Welcome to Derry."

It is an established fact that Pennywise leverages children's fears to terrorize them in Stephen King's "It," which is also the case in every adaptation. These hauntings are a part of a twisted ritual, where Pennywise "salts the meat" before consumption — according to him, frightened flesh tastes better. It's reign of terror in Derry can be traced all the way back to 1715, and the town has witnessed countless deaths and disappearances since then. While Andy and Barbara Muschietti's "It: Welcome to Derry" cooks up an alternate timeline of events, Pennywise's methods to hunt children prove to be more gruesome and violent than anything we've seen before.

The most shocking culmination of this is episode 1, where three innocent kids die horrifying deaths and two children barely make it out alive. The survivors in question are Lilly (Clara Stack) and Ronnie (Amanda Christine), who are traumatized even further in episode 2, which carves out the most visceral Pennywise hauntings in the show so far. After witnessing the deaths in the theater, Ronnie is already on edge because the local authorities want to pin the crimes on her father, Hank Grogan (Stephen Rider). The police's desperation to frame Hank stems from undisguised racism, which fuels the darkness that haunts Derry in broad daylight.

While Lilly's testimony can potentially prevent Hank's unfair arrest, the adults threaten to send her to Juniper Hill if she doesn't go along with their schemes. Both Ronnie and Lilly experience hell soon after, but the former is forced to witness something so scarring that it redefines our perception of what Pennywise is capable of.

The moment Ronnie is alone, she glances at her mother's framed picture to seek comfort. As soon as she covers herself with a bedsheet to feel safe, the fabric morphs into a womb, which she pierces through as she claws her way out. Attempting to crawl away while being covered in pus, blood, and amniotic fluid, Ronnie turns around to see the monster mimic her dead mother.

It blames Ronnie for killing her mother during childbirth, which is followed by the "womb" taking the form of a mini-monster with sharp, jagged teeth. Still connected to this mother-creature by the umbilical cord, Ronnie is tugged forward viciously, and she glimpses Pennywise's glowing eyes inside the mini-monster's mouth. Just when death seems inevitable, Ronnie cuts off the umbilical cord and snaps the connection to this manifested trauma. 

We know that Pennywise uses subconscious guilt/repressed trauma to frighten kids, as seen in "It," where he uses the fear associated with Beverly Marsh's abusive father to scare her. Here, he uses Ronnie's guilt to break her during a moment of vulnerability, going as far as concocting an unspeakably horrid interpretation of her birth. This sequence is extremely gnarly and is the second instance where the miracle associated with birth is warped into something abominable (the first being the birth of the mutant flying baby in Episode 1).

Lilly experiences a similarly disorienting fright in the supermarket, where the trauma connected to the pickle factory (i.e., her father's death) is filtered through paranoid body horror. Creepy shoppers stalk Lilly as she moves between the shelves, and slimy pickle jars come alive and spill severed body parts. These dual instances prove one thing: Pennywise isn't here to play nice, and he is just getting started.