If there’s one thing HBO never misses, it’s an opening. From The Sopranos’ Jersey drive to Six Feet Under’s deathly montage, Game of Thrones’ mechanical map to House of the Dragon’s molten veins, the network has turned the title sequence into an art form. Now, It: Welcome to Derry joins that hall of fame with something equally haunting and hypnotic: a two-minute descent into nostalgia, nightmare, and New England rot.
Created by Los Angeles-based Filmograph and set to the deceptively chipper 1956 tune A Smile and a Ribbon by Patience and Prudence, the credits are a twisted slice of Americana. Think Norman Rockwell by way of Pennywise. The animation flickers like a vintage postcard reel, bright and innocent at first, until the frames begin to curdle. Every tableau, every smiling face, hides something very, very wrong.
A girl bends toward a storm drain (yes, that storm drain), a little too curious for her own good. A family poses in front of the infamous Neibolt Street house, gateway to Pennywise’s lair, as a shadow moves in the upstairs window. In another vignette, a team of doctors prepares to operate on a screaming child inside Juniper Hill Asylum, a recurring King institution that later houses Henry Bowers.
Even civic pride isn’t safe. A towering Paul Bunyan statue looms over Derry’s idyllic square, the same one that terrorizes Richie Tozier decades later, while, down the street, the Bradley Gang shootout erupts in bursts of animated gunfire, one of the novel’s blood-soaked historical interludes. And just when it seems the sequence can’t get darker, it does: a giant white rabbit presides over the Kitchener Ironworks explosion, the 1908 disaster that killed 88 children during an Easter egg hunt.
Each of these moments is stitched together with postcard lettering that spells out “WELCOME TO DERRY,” its once-rosy slogan collapsing into smoke and ash as the cheery melody warps into static. The imagery is both seductive and sickening, a perfect metaphor for the show’s core idea: a town that smiles on the surface and rots beneath. Watch below:
Director Andy Muschietti told The Hollywood Reporter, the credits are “a descent into dread,” and that’s exactly what it feels like. Working with title specialists at the Emmy-nominated company, Muschietti turned Derry’s civic mythology into a living scrapbook, fcrendered in CG, printed to film for a scratchy authenticity, and soaked in 1960s optimism until the sweetness becomes sinister.
It’s a sequence packed with clues, lore, and Easter eggs (literally), the kind you can rewatch a dozen times and still catch new details. And it cements HBO’s status once again as the undisputed champion of the opening title — the network that makes “Don’t Skip Intro” feel like a dare.
It: Welcome to Derry streams Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO.
The Geek is a working screenwriter, director and screenwriting instructor.
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