The fact that the proposed spin-off series of It prequel show. Not every villain needs a backstory and an elaborate spinoff fleshing out their complicated origins. Stephen King’s hit novel Cujo turned a rabid St Bernard into an incredibly effective horror movie villain, but this didn’t mean that viewers needed to see the dog’s early, pre-rabies years to feel the terrifying impact of his rampage.
However, because Stephen King adaptations have been some of the most critically acclaimed and financially successful horror movies ever made, they still manage to spawn a lot of spinoffs. Not all of these spinoffs ever see the light of day, as was the case with The Shining prequel series, Overlook. However, the cancelation of that particular show could be bad news for an King project, the It prequel series Welcome to Derry.
Written by Dustin Thomason and Scott Brown, Overlook would have focused on horror stories that took place in the eponymous hotel years before The Shining’s Torrance family became its last residents. Like Children of the Corn’s prequel, Overlook spent years in Development Hell after the show was announced in 2019. However, in August 2021, the project was officially canceled when HBOMax announced that the show would not be proceeding at the streaming service. This could be seen as proof that even a popular Stephen King franchise can’t sustain a prequel, which is bad news for Welcome To Derry’s Pennywise-focused It spinoff.
Why The Shining’s Prequel Didn’t Work
The reason that Overlook failed to capture the imagination of even some dedicated King aficionados is the same reason that Welcome To Derry might fail. Over-explaining the origins of a mysterious villain via an entire series misunderstands the appeal of horror movies like It and The Shining, where the enigma around these antagonists made them scarier. While Welcome To Derry could make Pennywise an even better villain by leaning into his mythological canon origins, this is a risky strategy.
The It movies effectively told viewers all they needed to know about Pennywise the dancing clown when the blockbusters depicted the villain as a shape-shifting, child-eating monster. The sequel’s attempt at fleshing out Pennywise’s human origins was contradictory, while the sequel's Ritual of Chud sequence did nothing to illuminate the entity’s origins but did make the story even more confusing. None of this explanation made Pennywise scarier, but it did make him harder to comprehend, something that Welcome To Derry risks repeating with its origin story. The Overlook’s status as a haunted hotel didn’t need to be expanded upon in anthology horror series much like Pennywise doesn’t necessarily need a show to explain his exploits before It, so Welcome to Derry might struggle to justify its existence much like the cancelled prequel of The Shining.
