Chapter 2 (For a good reason)

Season 1 of ‘It: Welcome to Derry’ revolved around adapting the most disturbing moment from Stephen King’s original ‘It’ novel. That moment was the Black Spot burning, in which white supremacists burned down a speakeasy for black servicemen in Derry. But this wasn’t the first time we saw this speakeasy in the “It” universe created by Andy Muschietti. The black dot was seen in a photograph in 2017’s “It,” but the version seen in “Welcome to Derry” was very different. This begs the question of why the series essentially rebooted the film it serves as a prequel to. Ultimately, though, it seems like it simply comes down to the fact that the series was developed long after the movie began.

“Welcome to Derry” was an ambitious project from the start, expanding brief interludes from Stephen King’s 1986 novel “It” into a full season of television. Somehow, co-creators Jason Fuchs, Andy and Barbara Muschietti succeeded, delivering a captivating film, surprisingly scary and horrifying series with “Welcome to Derry”. Of course, creating an entire series based on short snippets of the source material meant that the creators had a lot of creative freedom, resulting in a series containing all sorts of additions to King’s established lore. Additionally, the creative team also had to keep in mind the continuity established by Andy Muschietti’s two “It” films.

In theory, this meant that Muschietti and his cohorts had to adhere to a version of the Black Spot speakeasy depicted in this photo from 2017’s “It.” But rather than feeling indebted to this original vision of the bar, the creators simply did what they felt was best for the series.

In the novel “It”, the moment of the Black Spot fire is recalled by Loser’s Club member Mike Hanlon’s dying father, Will Hanlon (played by Blake Cameron James in “It: Welcome to Derry”), who recounts how the Black Spot was a speakeasy for Derry’s black servicemen. He then explains how it was burned down by a white supremacist group called the Maine Legion of White Decency and even remembers seeing a sinister bird hovering over the massacre – a reference to Pennywise taking on another form in order to chase terrified patrons amid the chaos.

The 2017 “It” movies reference the horrific event in which Loser’s Club member Ben Hanscom (Jeremy Ray Taylor) researches the history of Derry and reports on it to his friends. Among Ben’s photocopies of old newspaper articles is a photo of the Black Spot, which turns out to be a brick-and-mortar store on a street lined with other similar businesses. In the prequel series “It: Welcome to Derry”, however, the Black Spot – the location of a major character’s death – turns out to be a converted storage unit in the woods, meaning the series took this aspect of Muschietti’s “It” verse and, ultimately, was much truer to the book in doing so.

In “It” by Stephen King, Will Hanlon recalls how black soldiers built their own “club” in an “old requisition hangar.” Hanlon said the shed was “dark and smelly, full of old tools and boxes of moldy paper,” with only two small windows, no electricity and a dirt floor. But the soldiers quickly transformed it into a makeshift club, which became a refuge for Derry’s black servicemen.

In “It: Welcome to Derry”, the Black Spot is represented with the same improvised aesthetic. It is secluded in the woods and was clearly never intended to be used as a social gathering place. In that sense, it’s much closer to how King described the original Black Spot in his novel. All of this means that Andy Muschietti and his co-creators essentially reworked their own movie by making the speakeasy much closer to its original form with the TV show. If Andy, Barbara Muschietti and Jason Fuchs could come up with an entire origin story for It, then surely they could rework elements from the films to better serve the story they were telling – especially since “Welcome to Derry” was developed after the success of the films.

Ultimately, the HBO series was never intended to stay entirely true to the established tradition of “It,” so Muschietti and co. simply extended this philosophy to their own work and created a Black Spot that better served their story. “Welcome to Derry” continued this approach by changing one of Pennywise’s biggest murder scenes.. Instead of hovering in his bird form as in the novel, the Mad Clown appears in his harlequin form during the Black Spot fire to feast on the faces of the trapped patrons. This is another major change, but it has proven to be the best overall approach.