Spoilers follow for the first two episodes of It: Welcome to Derry.
In It: Welcome to Derry, any parent can become a torturer. The titular evil entity turns children’s fears into food for itself, and the cruel hierarchy of generations is a perpetual source. Parents’ insistence that children do what they’re told, and the resentment that creates on both sides, are manna for the beast.
So far, It: Welcome to Derry has mined this dynamic for numerous scares: Lilly’s dead father sliced up into pickle jars, the pieces congealing into an octopuslike monster ordering his daughter to give him a kiss; Teddy’s father’s stories about the Holocaust transforming his son’s lampshade into a lattice of screaming faces, all matted hair and stretched skin. These are nightmares made real, given cogency and urgency by how well they mine the sense that parents are both our first benefactors and our first tormenters. In no sequence is that more clear than Ronnie’s rebirth in the series’ second episode, a horrific corruption of how we enter this world that puts a childhood-trauma twist on the usual way labor scenes are presented on television.
Brutal childbirth has increasingly become TV shorthand for the burden of being a woman. Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, House of the Dragon, and The Pitt have all featured grueling and gory depictions of what those series frame as women’s work, punctuated with founts of blood and soundtracked by screams. The focus in them all is the mother: her pain, her fear, and the inherent danger to her body. If something goes wrong (which is often), then the primary cause for concern is her. Will she survive? How could losing a child affect her? How will she be treated by her child’s father, by her family, by the other people in her life after the labor is over? The mother has the primacy of perspective, because, well, a baby can’t remember its own birth, and because there’s a sort of gender essentialism to these scenes — a suggestion that labor is the most important thing a woman will ever go through, and therefore should be treated with the gravity it deserves.
It: Welcome to Derry initially seems like it will fall into this formula with the demonic labor in premiere “The Pilot.” As Matty Clements tries to escape Derry, he accepts a ride from a seemingly nice, suburban white family that looks just like the Norman Rockwell–style illustrations in the series’ opening credits. When the scene curdles, it’s through the deconstruction of the mid-century nuclear family — the daughter eats chunks of raw liver, the son spells words like “kidnapping,” the mother insults her children. The concept of reproduction hangs over the scene, from the boy spelling “vasectomy” to the radio news report mentioning “highly unusual birth defects” occurring thanks to widespread nuclear tests. When Matty knocks into the woman’s pregnant belly, it’s like she was waiting all along for him to trigger her labor. The winged demon baby that squishes and claws its way out of her vagina is both Matty’s responsibility and his murderer, knocking him out of the family’s car and into the sewer system occupied by Pennywise, and later swaddling itself in Matty’s arms as the now-evil boy attacks his former friends. Here, Matty’s fears take supremacy — his fear of Derry, his fear of this family, his fear of what this woman will birth into the world, his fear of what he’ll become when the demon catches hold of him. The horror of labor is no longer centered on the mother figure but on the fears of a child whose birth family trained him to never trust a person who presents themselves as a loving parent.
Within this scene, It: Welcome to Derry sets up a new dynamic around TV childbirth. The person with the most to fear is no longer the one going through labor, but rather the child impacted by it — either as an onlooker, in Matty’s case, or as the person being birthed, as presented in Ronnie’s bedtime nightmare in second episode “The Thing in the Dark.” It: Welcome to Derry is often vulgar (the scene of Lilly’s dead father trying to trap her in a slimy kiss taps into Stephen King’s long-established weirdness around tween sexuality) and gleefully gory (the demon baby tearing apart a child’s body in midair, then gnawing through another child’s wrist). With Ronnie’s nightmare about her own birth, though, the series communicates a primordial fear: that our entry into this world will result in death. Living is a kind of curse, this sequence suggests, one where danger lurks in every safe space — and the scariest thing about that danger is that we might be the ones who cause it.
The design of this scene, which transforms Ronnie’s bed into her mother, is exceptionally gnarly. Ronnie’s bedsheet turning veiny, red, and fleshy is practically Cronenbergian; the liquid rising up around her, as if she’s inside a placenta, is so viscous that you can almost feel its stickiness. The oozing and squelching sound design is awful, but nothing is worse than the inspired visual of Ronnie’s bed reimagined as her mother’s limbs-akimbo body — the tangled sheets, her umbilical cord; the headboard, her hunched shoulders. The color palette is all gray and black aside from Ronnie’s mother’s eyes glowing red and gold, like Pennywise’s, and the creamy white of the multiple rows of teeth that sprout from her baby bump turn it into a gigantic fanged mouth. As that jaw opens wide, this vision of Ronnie’s mother snarls to her an uninterrupted flow of hatred, couched as the maternal tough talk Ronnie never received: “You came out of me and ripped me right open. All I wanted was to hold my baby. And you killed me.” All the shadows and jagged angles evoke German Expressionism, distorting Ronnie’s confrontation into something both surreal and terrifyingly recognizable.
By making Ronnie the focus of this scene and emphasizing her own feelings of discombobulation and confusion, It: Welcome to Derry expands its perspective: Viewers may not all be mothers, but we’ve all been children, and we can all understand the guilt that comes with disobeying, or even hurting, a parent. Ronnie obviously never wanted her mother to die during labor; there’s no intentionality to be assigned to her actions. But by pinpointing Ronnie’s guilt over the circumstances of her birth, It: Welcome to Derry affirms Pennywise’s enduring impact as a horror villain. He plumbs the areas of trauma characters thought they’d repressed and jettisons them to the surface, infecting memories and poisoning one’s sense of self. More than anything, Pennywise transgresses, and for a tween just trying to figure out growing up, Pennywise’s trespass is in realizing who they are before they do. The demon baby in “The Pilot” was gross but not unique; if you’ve seen one hungry winged monster from the King oeuvre, you’ve seen them all. The mother–as–birthing bed in “The Thing in the Dark,” though, is primeval and unshakeable, an image so violating and so universal that it feels like It: Welcome to Derry’s first true act of mad genius.