IT: WELCOME TO DERRY (2025)

Here’s a summary of the story of It: Welcome to Derry (2025), including its premise, major plot beats and themes (spoilers ahead).

🎬 Basic Premise and Setting

The series is a prequel to the earlier films of Pennywise the Dancing Clown and is set in the small Maine town of Derry, Maine in 1962.
It begins with the disappearance of a young boy, Matty Clements, under very odd circumstances — his vanishing will trigger a series of horrifying, supernatural events.
Into this unsettling backdrop arrive two storylines: one follows a group of local kids determined to uncover what happened to Matty; the other focuses on a Black Air Force family newly assigned to Derry, whose arrival seems to coincide with the awakening of greater horrors.

After Matty disappears, his friends — including Lilly Bainbridge, Phil Malkin, and Teddy Uris — start experiencing weird, frightening phenomena. For example, Lilly hears Matty singing from the drain in her bathtub; she also sees bloody fingers coming through the pipes.
The friends investigate the local movie theater where Matty was last seen. When they play a copy of the musical The Music Man, Matty mysteriously appears on screen — holding a swaddled baby — but the baby turns out to be a grotesque winged demon. The creature proceeds to brutally kill some of the kids.
This shocking, violent event underlines that the horror in Derry isn’t simply psychological or creepy — it’s visceral, brutal, and deeply disturbing. The series doesn’t shy away from gore or body horror.

Parallel to the kids’ story, the show follows Leroy Hanlon (an Air Force major) and his wife Charlotte Hanlon, who move to Derry with their son Will. Their arrival marks a turning point: strange events begin to intensify, and prejudice they face highlights the town’s more human — but equally terrifying — horrors.
There’s a recurring subplot involving government interest: the military seems to be aware of the supernatural evil in Derry and is investigating or possibly attempting to weaponize it. This layers the horror with paranoia, distrust, and systemic corruption.
As the series progresses, the separate threads — the missing boy, the terrified kids, the haunted town, the suspicious military — begin to converge, amplifying the dread and the stakes on both a personal and cosmic level.

The series deepens the mythology behind Pennywise / the evil force in Derry: it isn’t just a local curse, but something ancient and cosmic. The horror is expanded beyond a simple “scary clown” — its influence is systemic, spanning generations, trauma, and even institutional evil.
There are scenes and story beats that tie to real-world horrors too, like racism and societal violence — which the show uses to ground its terror in something emotionally and historically resonant, not just supernatural.
So while it has the grotesque shocks and monstrous horror fans expect from a Pennywise story, it also tries to interrogate fear itself — fear of evil, fear of otherness/racism, fear of institutional betrayal, and fear from the loss of innocence.

The horror is not just personal but societal. By weaving in the military presence, racism, and community trauma, the show makes the fear — and what feeds the evil — more layered than just “monster lurking in the sewers.”
It doesn’t hold back on body horror and gore, so it can shock and disturb in ways the earlier films largely avoided or limited.
It rebuilds the mythos of Derry and Pennywise from the ground up: this is not just a retread of the famous clown story, but a re-examination of what makes Derry a place of horror over decades.