Another highly anticipated adaptation of one of Stephen King’s spookiest stories is just days away from hitting TV screens. HBO’s It: Welcome to Derry will take viewers to the origin of Pennywise, showing how the fear of the killer clown became a plague and a nightmare for the children of Derry. While the premise of the It universe is unique and compelling in its own right, there’s another show with a different setting that has already explored a similar mood and vibe. Set in the fictional German town of Winden, Netflix’s Dark also immerses viewers in dread, with missing children cases that leave authorities powerless and the mystery unresolved.
Dark is a masterpiece in sci-fi mystery that explores free will, time travel, and the way events inevitably circle back to their origins. Fans of Dark have long searched for another show that captures that same eerie blend of mystery, time, and trauma. Now, It: Welcome to Derry might be the long-awaited successor. Set decades before Pennywise’s first appearance, the series seems to be moving beyond clown horror to examine how evil can seep through generations with the kind of slow-burn, fate-driven storytelling that made Dark a masterpiece.
Both Shows Turn Generational Trauma Into the Real Monster
At the heart of Dark is a simple idea: the past, present, and future are not separate, but are all connected in a never-ending, deterministic loop. There is horror, but it’s not just about time travel; it is about generational trauma. The characters in the town of Winden are trapped in a 33-year cycle, a “never-ending circle” that uses time travel to physically connect 1953, 1986, and 2019.
Dark explores the “bootstrap paradox,” a concept where any attempt to alter the past is revealed to have been the necessary step in causing that very event in the first place. This creates an unbreakable chain of suffering. The trauma is not just inherited; it’s created by the very people trying to stop it, and as the show progresses, viewers learn how everything is connected and how confusing and complicated the family trees of some characters are. Hence, the true monster of the show is not a person, but this cyclical “knot” itself.
It: Welcome to Derry appears to be built on this exact same terrifying principle, just with a different set of rules. The series is set to dive deep into Derry’s “interludes,” the dark chapters of the town’s history that Mike Hanlon researches in the original novel. This includes real-world horrors like the burning of the Black Spot, a nightclub for Black soldiers that was destroyed in a racially motivated hate crime, and the Kitchener Ironworks explosion.
By setting the story in the 1960s, against the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement and Cold War paranoia, the show’s creators are making a powerful statement. They are suggesting that Pennywise, the cosmic monster that awakens every 27 years, is not the only evil in Derry. The real horror is the human-made evil, the racism, the bigotry, the societal complicity that has poisoned the town for centuries. In Derry, the supernatural horror feeds on human trauma, a symbiotic relationship where the town’s sins are what allow the monster to thrive.
