The Cutprice Guignol

Have we finally reached Peak Stephen King in mainstream horror?

I mean, it’s been hard to stretch your elbows in the horror genre in the last ten years or so without bumping into something that’s heavily influenced by work from the master of horror literature, if not adapted from it wholesale. From The Long Walk, Doctor Sleep, Pet Semetary, The Outsider, The Stand, Gerald’s Game, ‘Salem’s Lot, The Life of Chuck, the upcoming Running Man, to name a few of the direct adaptations, to stories like Stranger Things which are so profoundly indebted to King’s work as to feel like an extension of his storytelling, Stephen King has perhaps never been more relevant in the world of on-screen horror than he has been right now.

And I’m a big fan of the man himself, of course (quick plug for my ongoing review of the Christine book as well as my finished series on the Carrie novel), as well as quite a few of the adaptations of the last few years, but I have to admit that I’ve been getting a bit of King Fatigue recently. The man can’t fart without someone trying to adapt it into a miniseries, and his influence on the current genre is so overwhelming that it’s started to feel a little boring to me. Not that he hasn’t earned it, and not that I’m not glad to see new generations embracing his frequently-excellent horror storytelling with as much passion as they are, but God, there’s more to the genre than this, isn’t there?

Which brings me to Welcome to Derry, a prequel to Andy Muschietti’s duology of IT movies from the late 2010s. This story, set in 1962, is not directly based on a King book but expands on the world created in IT to touch on the previous I adore the first chapter and like the second one well enough, so I was more than willing to give this one a go (even though a cynical part of me can’t help but wonder if the release date was a conscious effort to tap in to hype around the upcoming final season of Stranger Things later this year) – but I went into it with the slight wariness of the King saturation that has swallowed up horror in the last ten years, and look, to be frank, Welcome to Derry just didn’t escape that.

To start with, this version of Derry feels distinctly empty in a way that Muschietti’s previous iterations of the town just didn’t. Of course, that’s not helped by the fact that the production design looks cheap and half-arsed at almost every turn – CGI backdrops are slapped in over thinly-decorated sets, the costumes and personal styling more a 2025 take on the 1960s than anything that feels authentic to the era, and the child actors, while they’re clearly doing their best, have the sniff of a high school production about them rather than the excellent performances that populated the Loser’s Club in Muschietti’s movies.

And the scares left a lot to be desired, at least for me – the opening ten minutes follow a hapless boy who encounters an apparently-perfect family who soon reveal themselves to be conduits for whatever evil is currently residing in Derry, and it felt more like a segment of Creepshow than something comparable to the iconic Georgie kill of the movies and books. It was so over-the-top and schlocky (I mean, the push-in on the blood gushing from a woman’s shredded vagina as something bulges grotesquely against the fabric of her underwear…I don’t know, man, I just don’t) as to tilt into goofy over actually scary, not least when it climaxed with a badly-CGI’d demon baby being chucked about the back of the car like something that might terrorize William Shatner on a long-haul flight.

Though, in all fairness, a lot of that can be put down to the exceptionally dodgy script, which I think poses the biggest problem in Welcome to Derry so far. There’s almost no scene here that manages to feel both accurate to the 1960s setting and written with any degree of nuance or skill – the moments that tap into the cultural fears of the time (which, for me, are the aspects the offered the most interesting possibilities in this version of an IT story) land with a complete clunk, some sections almost downright comical in how blunt they are.

With other King characters like Dick Halloran due to appear later in the season, the show feels more stuck in the dregs of King’s sprawling world than it does an interesting horror piece in its own right. So much of this story reliant on aspects that we’ve already seen resolved in Muschietti’s IT movies – such as the knowledge that these kids can’t defeat IT this time around, and that certain characters have some degree of plot armour due to their familial relationships with those featured in later stories – that it strips away the sense of openness that the original stories had, leaving Welcome to Derry occupying an uneasy and relatively uninspired middle ground as a result.

Of course, I’m just reacting to a single episode here, and the problems I have with the show will be fixed in the half-dozen or so still to come. But this premiere, at least, feels like a photocopy of a VHS rip of a a bootleg version of a King story I’ve already seen a better version of, and that’s just not something I think it’s going to escape.

I’d love to hear what you made of this episode and whether you’ll be tuning in for the rest of the season below – and if there are other Stephen King stories you’d like to see adapted that haven’t had a decent showing on the big or small screen yet.

If you enjoyed this article and want to see more stuff like it, check out my other blog, No But Listen, as well as my fiction work! You can also support me on Patreon to help keep my very demanding little cat in treaties, and me out of her clutches for another month yet.

(header image via The Hollywood Reporter)