The following contains spoilers for It: Welcome to Derry Episode 3.Episode 3 of It: Welcome to Derry premiered on Sunday, offering Stephen King fans a new look at the deeping, dark mystery surrounding the town of Derry in 1962, and with it came what appeared to be the first real appearance of a familiar killer clown…kind of. As the latest collection of children to be terrorized by the entity known as It attempted to capture their tormentor on camera, viewers were left with an eerie image that could only be one thing. Showrunners Jason Fuchs and Brad Caleb Kane have now offered their opinion on what the image actually shows.
In the final moments of the episode, while looking at the photos taken during a franchise graveyard chase, Will Hanlon mentions the word “clown,” and while the image showed a humanoid figure with bright eyes, it didn’t directly resemble the iconic villain known as Pennywise. So is it the actual clown making its first appearance in the show?
Fuchs and Kane talked to Deadline about Episode 3, and jokingly teased the clown’s debut in the TV prequel. “Is that Pennywise at the end of 103?” Kane says. “I don’t know. We think it is…as you can tell by the end of the first episode, we tried to pull the rug out from underneath the audience. So right away, you feel like, no matter who I’m rooting for, nobody is safe in this show, and nothing is as it seems, and anything can happen.” He adds:
“I do think it’s Pennywise. It’s absolutely Pennywise. That’s what I’m going to say to your viewers, and they should go in thinking that. We’ll have to see what happens in the latter half of the season.”
Fuchs also talked about It’s preference for showing up as Pennywise. Although they’re aware that the clown has become one of pop culture’s preferred villains, they did not want to make a show about the clown. They’re sticking to the book’s guidelines, and instead of overexposing him, they want to explain the lore behind It, and why it prefers to manifest as the evil clown:
“Why is it that It, who can take virtually any form under the sun as a shape-shifter, chooses to keep coming back to this form of Pennywise the Dancing Clown? Obviously, the book has hints and suggestions…but what does it all mean? What is it that draws It to this form?
“We wanted to explore why an inter-dimensional entity, who is a creature of light in its most natural state, why that being would choose to remain in Derry. There are denser, seemingly more interesting hunting grounds beyond its environs? Why does it stay there?”
‘It: Welcome to Derry’ Faces the Challenge of Making Pennywise Scary Again
Fuchs and Kane recognize that making It: Welcome to Derry without constantly showing the dancing clown is risky. After all, Pennywise is an inherent part of King’s universe, and he’s one of the reasons why the 2017 and 2019 movie chapters were as successful as they were. Switching from big to small screen, the unique storytelling required for a long-form TV show meant they couldn’t just deliver It all over again. Kane says:
“There’s a tendency in horror series, as the series goes along, for people to lean on the comedy of it and for it to feel less horrific. People love Pennywise as a character now. He’s funny, he’s spooky, but is he truly scary anymore once you’ve taken him into your life and made him a part of the pop culture in the way he’s become?
“I think so, yes, he is definitely still scary, but we wanted to go back…and really make him scary again, as scary as possible, [to] really make the fears that much higher [and] really make the set pieces that much scarier.
- Release Date
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October 26, 2025
- Network
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HBO
- Directors
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Andy Muschietti
- Franchise(s)
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IT