Warning: This post contains spoilers for Episode 2 of It: Welcome to Derry
Here's a Pennywise promise you can take to the bank: You'll never look at a jar of pickles the same way again after the second episode of It: Welcome to Derry. Stephen King fans who decided to stay in for Halloween were treated to an early peek at the prequel's sophomore installment, which snuck onto HBO Max ahead on Friday ahead of its regular Sunday night airing.
The nightmarish pickle moment happens towards the end of the episode, when young Lilly Bainbridge (played by Clara Stack) is wandering the aisles at the Derry, Maine's main grocery store. Like many of the town's kid population, Lilly is still on edge after the recent disappearance of Matty (Miles Ekhardt), a school chum whose deadly encounter with the shape-shifter known to us as Pennywise opened the series premiere. Matty's vanishing followed the still-recent death of her father, who was sliced to ribbons in a factory accident in front of her eyes. And that's precisely the emotionally traumatic hook that Pennywise uses to reel in his latest target.
Walking through the aisles, a mysterious voice leads Lilly to a blind corner where she's treated — make that tricked — to a horrific vision of her father's face swimming in a brine-filled pickle jar. "Got a kiss for daddy?" the apparition says. Understandably freaked out, Lilly shatters the jar on the ground; the other jars follow, covering the tile floor in pickles... and a tentacled monster that just barely resembles a man. Meanwhile, another tentacle wraps itself around Lilly's throat and holds her in place as the demon that would be her father — call him Pickle Dad, like Stack does — goes in for a kiss.
Luckily for Lilly, Pennywise isn't ready to kill her just yet. She's awoken from the vision to find herself sitting on the store's floor, a single broken pickle jar not too far away. She's survived... but at what cost?
Lilly isn't enjoying herself at all in that moment; Stack, on the other hand, had a blast. "That scene was super-fun to film," the actress tells Gold Derby. "I loved action-packed sequences and that scene definitely had a lot of action! I also don't like pickles, so having to sit in a bunch of pickles was interesting."
For Lilly's close encounter with a tentacle, Stack remembers the VFX team attaching a "tiny wire coated in this rubbery material" to her mouth, with another one wrapped around her neck. "They actually had a prosthetic Pickle Dad for me to react off of," she says. "That was laying on the ground while I was drenched in pickle juice! It was intense, but a lot of fun. When I watched the episode, it was really cool to see how they used props while we were filming versus how it came out with CGI in the real show."
Asked about the origin of that particular set piece, Brad Caleb Kane — who serves as Welcome to Derry's showrunner alongside Jason Fuchs — says its yet another example of Pennywise's M.O. when it comes to terrorizing kids. "Lilly saw her did in pieces and this was about bringing that visual back in an absolutely horrible way," he explains.
"Lilly also feels responsible for the death of her dad, and of course she's not," Fuchs adds. "She's just a child; it's not her fault that the machinery pulled him in and tore him apart as it did. But she doesn't trust her own judgment in some ways. There's a part of her that worries that she's still to blame for all of this. That's a really interesting starting point for what I hope is an emotional journey for a character who has to come into her own. This is a coming of age story for these kids, and Lilly most of all."
The showrunners credit VFX supervisor Daryl Sawchuk and his team with making the pickle jar monster come to horrific life. "That is some of the strongest VFX work I've ever seen," Fuchs says. "The liquid feeling, and the tactile nature of the skin on his pickled face. It reminds me of Billy Nighy's character from the Pirates of the Caribbean films. I'm blown away by the work they did."
Pickle Dad isn't the only nightmare fuel in Welcome to Derry's second episode. An earlier sequence features one of Lillian's friends, Ronnie (Amanda Christine), coming face-to-face with her own deceased parent — in this case, her late mother, who died while giving birth to Ronnie. Continuing to mine the horrific birth imagery present in the series premiere, the sequence begins with Veronica seeking refuge beneath the blankets of her bed, only to have those surroundings take on the hallucinatory appearance of a womb. Fighting her way out of the fleshy, fluid-filled prison, she turns around to see her bed take the form of her mom.
"You came out of me and ripped me right open," says the Mother Thing — the name Christine says was given to the creature on set. "You killed me," it adds. "Like you're gonna kill your father." At that point a plus-sized umbilical cord emerges from the creature's gaping belly and tries to drag Ronnie back into the womb, where a set of jaws are just waiting to gobble her whole.
"That's something you don't see a lot," laughs Welcome to Derry co-creator, Andy Muschietti, who previously directed both blockbuster It movies. "The perspective of someone that's coming into this world form the inside out! It's another step in baby horror or miracle of life horror, I guess."
The filmmaker notes that scene is another case where Pennywise is manifesting a child's deepest, darkest fears. "Ronnie has this unconscious guilt of having killed her mother, and that's what Pennywise uses against her by manifesting this horrific mother in her bed. It's very graphic, and very surreal, the way the bed turns into her mom!" For an added bit of drama, Christine's own mom, Tanika Davis, plays Pennywise's monstrous Mother Thing.
"There was a journey of figuring out how to bring this to life step-by-step with a lot of technical challenges," Muschietti continues. "Every shot in that sequence required a different technique, a different set-up for the camera and different special effects. It was grueling not only for the production, but also for the actors. It took us four days to shoot the whole thing, and Amanda and Tanika had to go through a lot of tears and screaming."
But Christine says she knew that all those tears were for a good cause. "I was in goo 24/7, so it was crazy experience, but very fun to do," she remembers, adding that she had to complete water training prior to filming the sequence for the moments where Ronnie is completely submerged. "I also only have one parent, so diving deep into that emotion about the loss of a parent and flip-flopping everything was really fun to do. Having my mom play my mom on the show helped me out. She's who I was looking at when the bed was breathing, and that was really nice."
Pickle Dad and Mother Thing — that sounds like a Stephen King bedtime story that's guaranteed to keep your kids from ever sleeping again.
All the young people in this show are fantastic…..but Amanda Christine is particularly amazing. Intense, very emotive, perfect for this role. I hope they don’t kill her off, because so far it looks like anybody’s fair game.