When “It: Welcome to Derry” debuted last month, it did so with an episode that raised the bar on terrorizing child characters.
Stop reading if you haven’t watched yet, but that premiere saw a creature in the horrific shape of a winged, eyeless newborn baby attack a young boy trapped inside a car and, later, that same demonic infant tear apart three children in a movie theatre — even dispatching an adorable moppet named Susie (Quebec’s Matilda Legault).
We don’t know what the body count might be when new episodes of “Stranger Things” are released on Wednesday, but it looks like the teens of Hawkins, Ind., are in for a perilous battle with evil.
The massive Netflix hit, created by brothers Matt and Ross Duffer, is returning for its fifth and final season, set in the fall of 1987. “Welcome to Derry,” based on the Stephen King novel “It,” is set in Derry, Maine, in 1962. Both shows feature supernatural entities that prey on the towns’ younger residents.
Making youths the victims in horror entertainment is nothing new, of course — think of Regan, the 12-year-old possessed by the devil in the 1973 film classic “The Exorcist” — but “Stranger Things” and “Derry” both mine a bountiful vein of nostalgia mixed with dread.
When “Stranger Things” debuted in 2016, its callbacks to the 1980s and to the kid-centred films of that era — such as “E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial” or “The Goonies” — were a huge part of its appeal. Think group bike rides, Dungeons & Dragons and dancing with your crush at the middle school ball.
The series has only gotten darker in subsequent instalments.
Season 4 — and this is your spoiler alert if you’re still catching up — featured gruesome deaths of minor characters (limbs contorted and snapped, eyes gouged out), a fan favourite bitten to death by supernatural bats, a series regular left in a coma after having her bones broken and plenty more violence.
Episodes of Season 5 weren’t made available to critics to preview, but we know it will feature an all-out battle between the kids of Hawkins, now high school aged (although in real life the actors are in their 20s and 30s), and the creepy humanoid monster Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower).
Netflix did release the first five minutes of the season premiere, which show Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) — the boy whose disappearance in Season 1 kicked off the characters’ entanglement with the supernatural realm known as the Upside Down — having a noxious substance forced into his mouth by one of the snakelike vines that make up Vecna’s appendages. Poor Will, already traumatized by his first go-round with the Upside Down, can’t catch a break.
Pennywise in “It” is a much more human-looking monster, taking the form of a clown. Instead of the Upside Down, he resides in Derry’s sewers. Both he and Vecna get access to their victims by manipulating their emotions: in the case of the former, fear; in the latter, shame. (Note that Pennywise has not yet made an appearance in the four episodes of “Welcome to Derry” that have streamed so far.)
In a Q&A ahead of the “Derry” premiere, co-creator Andy Muschietti said children make ideal victims of an entity like Pennywise because they are “more capable of having faith and imagination, and believing in things that don’t exist. That’s their power and that’s their misfortune as well … They are the prominent victims of this thing, because adults don’t believe in things that don’t exist.”
Adults, he added, “become sort of like the enemy to everything that is beautiful about childhood.”
In both TV series, adults mostly hinder rather than help the kids battle the danger they are facing — although there are exceptions, like Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder), Will’s mother.
Nonetheless, there’s an appeal for adult viewers in seeing the young characters do things like hang out at the mall or meet up in secret hideouts that might remind them of their own childhoods.
Maybe don’t get too attached to the kids, though.
Speaking about those child deaths in “Derry”’s first episode, Muschietti said he and his writers wanted to shock the audience, to give “people a sense that nothing here is sacred, nothing here is safe from this evil … so that will keep you at the edge of your seat for the rest of the show.”
“The characters that we’re putting all our hopes on just suddenly are massacred and disappear, and then it’s like, ‘OK, now what?’” he said.
“It: Welcome to Derry” continues to stream on Crave, with new episodes on Sundays. The first four episodes of “Stranger Things” Season 5 will debut on Netflix Nov. 26 at 8 p.m., with three more episodes on Christmas Day and the series finale on Dec. 31.
