Welcome To Derry: Exploring Stephen King's Universe

Welcome to Derry

How HBO's terrifying prequel is stitching Stephen King's universe together — one nightmare at a time.

Derry, Maine has always been more than a town. In the world of Stephen King, it is a wound — a festering, ancient thing that refuses to close. And with IT: Welcome to Derry, the prequel series that landed on HBO in October 2025, that wound has been cracked wide open for the first time on television.

Set in 1962 — twenty-seven years before the Losers Club ever picked up a rock or spoke the name Pennywise — the show follows a group of newcomers to Derry, Maine, as a young boy vanishes and very bad things begin to unspool. But this is no simple rehash. This is a show with ambition that stretches far beyond a single story. It is, in the most meaningful sense, the first stone laid in what could become a sprawling, interconnected Stephen King cinematic universe.

For King fans, for horror devotees, and for anyone who has ever suspected that Derry, Castle Rock, Shawshank, and the Overlook Hotel all exist in the same terrible cosmos — Welcome to Derry is the confirmation you have been waiting for.

The Stephen King Universe & The Clown Who Has Always Been There

First and most obviously, Welcome to Derry is a direct prequel to Andy Muschietti's 2017 film IT and its 2019 sequel IT Chapter Two, which were themselves adaptations of King's landmark 1986 novel. Bill Skarsgård returns as Pennywise the Dancing Clown — and the show uses his presence not as a cash-grab nostalgia play but as a genuine origin excavation.

One of the series' most quietly devastating reveals concerns the true nature of Bob Gray — the name the entity calls itself in King's book. For decades, readers and viewers have wondered who Bob Gray actually was. Welcome to Derry answers that question with chilling confidence: Bob Gray was a real human being, a circus performer who became Pennywise the Dancing Clown in 1908. IT — the ancient, shapeshifting entity — witnessed his popularity, recognized the power of that particular terror, and absorbed the form. The cosmic horror became the clown. The clown became the nightmare.

This is King lore delivered with the blessing of King himself. Co-creator Jason Fuchs has confirmed that Stephen King participated as a collaborator on the series — and that the Pennywise origin was vetted and approved by the man who invented it. King even declared publicly that the final two episodes were, in his words, "dynamite."

Derry isn't just where the story takes place. Derry is the monster. Pennywise is only its most visible face.

— Boardroom, December 2025

Dick Hallorann and The Shining

If there is one choice that makes Welcome to Derry something genuinely historic in King adaptation history, it is the central role of Dick Hallorann, played with quiet magnetism by Chris Chalk.

King fans know Hallorann from The Shining — the beloved Overlook Hotel head chef who recognizes young Danny Torrance's gift for the Shine and pays a terrible price for returning to help him. He reappears decades later in Doctor Sleep, as the guiding spirit who teaches an adult Danny how to lock his darkest visions away in a mental box. But in Welcome to Derry, set more than a decade before Danny Torrance is even born, we meet Hallorann as a young military man — already burdened by powers he cannot fully control, already haunted, already dangerous to those in authority who want to weaponize what he carries inside him.

The show introduces his mental lockbox — first referenced in Doctor Sleep — and shows us the moment it begins to fracture under the psychic weight of Derry and Pennywise's influence. His abusive grandfather, his isolation, and his extraordinary sensitivity all receive new context. And by the season's end, the breadcrumbs are deliberately, unmistakably laid: Hallorann is heading toward Colorado. Toward the Overlook. Toward the events that will define and ultimately end him.

The Shining (1977)

Dick Hallorann recognizes Danny Torrance's psychic gift at the Overlook Hotel — a connection Welcome to Derry retroactively deepens by showing us Hallorann's origins as a young soldier already marked by the Shine.

Doctor Sleep (2013)

An adult Danny learns to build the mental lockbox Hallorann taught him. Welcome to Derry shows us where that technique came from — and the cost of breaking it open near Pennywise.

The series has officially confirmed it also serves as a prequel to Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film adaptation of The Shining — a remarkable piece of continuity considering Kubrick's film and King's novel exist in something of a creative tension. The connective tissue is Hallorann, and Chris Chalk carries that weight with extraordinary grace.

The Hanlons, The Black Spot, and the Roots of the Losers

Among the new characters introduced in 1962 Derry is Will Hanlon — the father of Mike Hanlon, the one member of the Losers Club who chose to remain in Derry as an adult and serve as the town's unofficial historian. In the original novel, Mike's family history is woven into Derry's past through the tragedy of The Black Spot: a Black-owned jazz club burned to the ground by a local hate group called the Maine Legion of White Decency in 1930. Hallorann's family was there. It was one of Derry's many cyclical horrors.

Welcome to Derry shows us Will Hanlon navigating the world of 1962 Derry — a place where the supernatural evil of Pennywise runs parallel to the very human evils of racism and institutional violence. The horror is layered. The show earns the weight of the Hanlon family legacy by giving Will a story that matters, knowing full well we understand where his son will one day stand.

Worth noting: The show also features glimpses of Juniper Hill Asylum — the psychiatric institution that appears in IT Chapter Two (where Pennywise manipulates the incarcerated Henry Bowers), in the Castle Rock TV series, and across multiple King novels including The Tommyknockers and 11/22/63. It is one of King's most reliable shared-universe landmarks.

Shawshank, Maturin, and the Wider Web

The connective tissue doesn't stop at character crossovers. Welcome to Derry makes pointed use of Shawshank State Prison — Maine's most infamous fictional institution, first introduced in King's 1982 novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. A character in the series is sentenced to Shawshank, only escaping via a bus accident. It is a small thread, but in King's universe, small threads lead to great dark places.

More tantalizing — and more cosmically significant — are the teases of Maturin, the ancient turtle deity who serves as the benevolent counterpart to Pennywise's destructive entity in the novel's cosmology. Maturin is one of the Guardians of the Beam in The Dark Tower series, King's magnum opus that serves as the connective spine of his entire fictional multiverse. The turtle vomited up the universe, according to King's mythology, and has always existed in opposition to IT. His absence from the 2017 films was a notable omission; his presence in Welcome to Derry, even in symbolic glances, signals that this series has bigger ambitions than a straight prequel.

The Dark Tower stands at the center of all things. And Welcome to Derry is the first screen adaptation that genuinely seems to know it.

Connection Five

The Institute and The Psychic Continuum

In a parallel development that feels too meaningful to be coincidence, 2025 also saw the premiere of a TV adaptation of King's 2019 novel The Institute on MGM+. The two shows — unconnected in production, airing on different networks — share a remarkable thematic and mythological thread: children with psychic abilities, government programs attempting to weaponize those abilities, and small towns hiding terrible secrets beneath a veneer of ordinary life.

The Institute features children with telekinetic and telepathic powers that echo, throughout King's work, the Shine — the psychic gift that connects Danny Torrance, Dick Hallorann, and now, by extension, Hallorann's younger self in Welcome to Derry. The suggestion that these abilities exist within a shared psychic continuum — that every sensitive person in King's universe is tuned to the same terrible frequency — gives both shows an added layer of resonance when watched together.

What Comes Next

Seasons 2 and 3: Going Further Back

If renewed — and given that the Season 1 finale drew 6.5 million viewers in its first three days, with a global average approaching 20 million viewers per episode and a Certified Fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes, renewal seems a near-certainty — the creators have a clear and thrilling roadmap.

Season 2 is planned to travel back to 1935 and the cycle of terror that includes the Bradley Gang massacre and the burning of The Black Spot. Season 3 would push back even further, to 1908, to the origins of Bob Gray himself. Each cycle will deepen the mythology and almost certainly introduce new connective threads to King's wider world.

And lurking in the background, still officially in development, is a Dark Tower series with Mike Flanagan attached — the filmmaker behind Doctor Sleep, Gerald's Game, and The Life of Chuck. If Welcome to Derry is the foundation, and The Dark Tower is the sky, then what is being built right now in King's universe is something that fans have dreamed about for decades: a genuine, authoritatively connected mythology on screen.

Future Season: 1935

The planned Season 2 will explore the Bradley Gang massacre and the burning of The Black Spot — Derry's previous cycle of terror and one of the most significant events in IT's novel lore.

Future Season: 1908

Season 3 targets the earliest known cycle, set to finally explore the origins of Bob Gray and how the ancient entity first took the form of Pennywise the Dancing Clown.

The Dark Tower (In Development)

With Mike Flanagan attached, a Dark Tower series could complete the connective arc. Maturin, the Beams, and the Tower itself link virtually every story in King's catalog.

Castle Rock

Juniper Hill Asylum connects Welcome to Derry to the earlier Castle Rock anthology series, keeping King's other iconic Maine location alive in the shared geography.

Final Word

The Town That Eats Its Own

What IT: Welcome to Derry ultimately achieves — beyond the scares, beyond the mythology, beyond the lore drops that will have King fans pausing every fifteen minutes — is a portrait of Derry as something genuinely, comprehensively evil. Not just haunted. Evil. A town that generates cruelty the way other places generate weather.

Pennywise feeds off fear, yes. But Welcome to Derry insists that Pennywise also cultivates it. He is embedded in the town's cycles of racism, violence, silence, and complicity. Every act of human cruelty in 1962 Derry is food. Every look-away, every closed door, every authority figure who knows and does nothing — all of it nourishes IT. The cosmic horror and the human horror are not separate. They are the same organism.

That is a profoundly King idea — and it is one of the most faithful interpretations of his work ever put to screen. For a horror podcast audience that lives in the dark with these stories, that dwells on what they mean and why they persist, Welcome to Derry is essential viewing. Not just because it is scary, though it is. But because it is finally, fully serious about the world Stephen King built — and because it understands that world well enough to expand it.

Derry is waiting. The clown is eternal. And the universe is bigger than you think.

IT: Welcome to Derry Stephen King The Shining Doctor Sleep The Dark Tower Pennywise HBO Horror Derry Maine WELCOME TO DERRY