Entertainment Weekly
It’s a relatively short passage in the context of Stephen King’s 1,000-plus-page It novel, but it takes center stage on the HBO prequel series It: Welcome to Derry.
Decades before Pennywise torments the Loser’s Club, members of the Maine Legion of White Decency, a white supremacist group, set fire to the Black Spot, a military speakeasy catering to Black patrons, with all of its revelers trapped inside. The event marks one of the earlier sightings of the shape-shifting, child-devouring It entity as dozens of victims burn alive.
For Andy and Barbara Muschietti, the sibling executive producers who developed It: Welcome to Derry out of their two It movies, this horrific tragedy was the anchor around which the entire HBO drama’s first season was built. They expand the interlude into a pivotal set piece that stares down the hatred in the 1962 setting while adding to the lore to explain exactly why it happened and who of the crucial characters did not survive.
“It is one of the few big climatic moments of the arc of the show — it all builds towards that,” Andy Muschietti, who directed the scene in the seventh episode, tells Entertainment Weekly.
“There was a lot of thought put behind it. I really wanted to create an immersive experience of the horror of being inside the Black Spot. That’s why the camera, for a long part of the sequence, doesn’t come out of it. We are there with the characters.”
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