A hero is trapped in some location or situation (aka the “house”) and must survive a monster (human or otherwise). There must be a sin committed—often greed—prompting the creation of a supernatural being that comes like an avenging angel to kill the sinners. Monster in the House stories are commonly found in horror movies, urban thrillers, or comedies about people or things that just won’t go away.

The 3 elements of a MONSTER IN THE HOUSE story are:

1) A monster that is supernatural in its powers—even if its strength derives from insanity—and “evil” at its core.
2) A house, meaning an enclosed space that can include a family unit, an entire town, or even “the world.”
3) A sin. Someone is guilty of bringing the monster in the house… a transgression that can include ignorance.

Platform: HBO

TV Genre: Hourlong horror drama

Story DNA

Heroes: Army Major Leroy Hanlon, a Black officer on a very white military base; Lilly Bainbridge, a middle schooler who has supernatural visions and is called “Loony Lilly” by her bullies.

Goal: For Hanlon, to take care of his family and escape traumatic memories of the Korean War; for Lilly, to have real friends and find out what happened to Matty Clements.

Obstacle: It’s 1962 and racism is rampant, plus Hanlon left Korea only to move to a town that has its own significant trauma; Lilly is haunted by her father’s death and her visions cause others to assume she’s mentally ill.

Stakes: For everyone in Derry, a violent death is a real threat, and not just because there’s an evil spirit swimming in the sewers.

Save the Cat! Beat Sheet Analysis for the IT: Welcome to Derry TV Pilot

Opening Image

It’s not every horror series that can make the 1962 musical comedy The Music Man seem utterly sinister, but somehow Robert Preston singing “Ya Got Trouble” sets a genuinely frightening tone for the Opening of IT: Welcome to Derry.

In the Capitol Theater, a young boy, Matty Clements (Miles Ekhardt), whose blackened eyes and manic pacifier-sucking point to significant abuse, watches the movie until he is thrown out for not paying by an overly zealous usher. The projectionist Hank Grogan (Stephen Rider) and his 12-year old daughter Ronnie (Amanda Christine) feel sorry for Matty and cover for him so he can escape without calling in the police.

Matty hitches a ride out of town with a perky, Leave It to Beaver-esque family, but when a news report on their car radio warns of nuclear radiation fallout that will cause birth defects worldwide and the teenaged daughter starts eating bloody liver out of a Tupperware, we get a sinking feeling that this opening pitch is going to be brutal.

Sure enough, the pregnant mother suddenly goes into labor and gives gorily graphic birth to a mutant baby with two heads and bat wings that shrieks and flies around the car and we’re like, “Yep, we’re in Stephen King world now, folks.”

Theme Stated

There’s a sly nod to the eternal evil nature of IT (as well as the long and colorful history of King’s franchise) as Robert Preston sings, “Our children’s children gonna have trouble, trouble, trouble…”, but it is Matty who nails down the theme when he is asked by the family where he would like to go. “Anywhere but Derry” is his response, identifying our House for MITH, with both the Monster and the Sin implied in his desperate, bruised face.

Set-Up

IT: Welcome to Derry is a prequel to Stephen King’s 1986 book and its various adaptations, so there will be many indications of the generational trauma of Derry’s residents.

Our first is the arrival of a young Major Leroy Hanlon (Jovan Adepo) to the military base in 1962; he will eventually be the grandfather of Mike Hanlon, one of the main characters in King’s book. Leroy Hanlon steps into this pre-Civil Rights Act thesis world and immediately suffers a racist attack, reminding us that the malevolent spirit in Derry isn’t confined to just a shapeshifting clown.

Meanwhile, middle school student Lilly Bainbridge (Clara Stack) has many things that need fixing: she is bullied by her peers after spending time in a mental health facility and suffers from terrible guilt over her father’s death. Lilly had asked him to go back into the bottling plant where he worked to retrieve something for her and was subsequently killed by falling into the machinery.

We also meet an 8th grade version of a conspiracy theorist, Phil Malkin (Jack Molloy Legault) and his best friend Teddy Uris (Mikkal Karim-Fidler), son of a conservative rabbi.

Catalyst

Matty Clement’s disappearance, while off-screen, is the event that sets everything in motion. Of course, Derry residents don’t know, as the audience does, that Matty was likely devoured by a flying two-headed homicidal infant, but his assumed murder has the whole town on edge.

Debate

Teddy confesses to Phil that he feels guilty about not treating Matty well before his disappearance; maybe if they’d been better friends to him, Matty wouldn’t have tried to run away. Lilly also regrets her last interaction with Matty; she was surprised when he tried to kiss her and pulled away, hurting his feelings.

Across town on the military base, Hanlon is experiencing the consequences of being transferred to Derry. His unease is only heightened when General Francis Shaw (James Remar) calls Derry the most “normal” small town ever.

Break into Two

Lilly is filling the bathtub when she hears what sounds like Matty singing and when his fingers poke up through her bathtub drain, we launch insanely into the upside-down world.

B Story

Only implied in the pilot episode, the merging of the two main storylines in the B Story relationship between Hanlon’s son Will (Blake Cameron James) and Lilly and Ronnie will help them all to learn the theme: there’s no escape from the House of Derry.

Fun and Games

Possible alliances are formed when Lilly tries to pull Teddy and Phil into the mystery of Matty, and Hanlon attempts to bond with General Shaw, who is looking for some kind of weapon to end the Cold War. When Teddy questions his rabbi father about the possibility of Matty being kidnapped and held prisoner underground, the rabbi is understandably upset and schools Teddy about what happened in the Holocaust—since the skin of Jewish people was made into lampshades, they know better than anyone about the horrors of this world.

Midpoint

Teddy has a terrifying vision of a lampshade with human faces screaming at him. This is our first Series’ hint of the IT entity’s wickedest ploy: the ability to shapeshift into anything that unearths an individual’s deepest fears.

Bad Guys Close In

Teddy is now convinced that they’re dealing with something supernatural and is ready for an alliance with Lilly, but she fears that if they tell any adults she’ll be sent back to Juniper Hill, and Phil is adamant that he won’t survive a loony bin. Matty’s disappearance is up to them to figure out, so the kids do research at the library and discover that Matty was last seen at the movie theater by Ronnie Grogan.

With Phil’s 6-year old sister Suzie (Matilda Legault) tagging along, they go to question Ronnie, but she wants nothing to do with them because the police have tried to pin Matty’s vanishing on her father.

It’s not until they drop the little tidbit that Lilly heard voices coming from her bathtub drain that Ronnie joins them, as she herself has heard some bizarre sounds in the movie theater building’s basement pipes. When Lilly says that she heard Matty singing a song, Ronnie takes them to the Capitol Theater to watch a print of The Music Man, hoping that it will somehow provide clues as to what happened to Matty.

Meanwhile, Hanlon is brutally attacked in his bedroom on base by men in gas masks demanding the specs of the new B52 bomber Hanlon was brought in to fly and has to be rescued by his buddy Pauly (Rudy Mancuso).

All Is Lost/Dark Night of the Soul

In a quirky twist, these two beats are reversed as the kids sit in the theater waiting for Ronnie to start the movie and they all begin to cry, feeling the guilt of Matty’s disappearance and its implied whiff of death. The IT entity feeds on their communal Dark Night of the Soul and delivers its own cruel All Is Lost moment, causing a vision of Matty to appear on the movie screen and shout that it was indeed their fault he was taken, because they weren’t there for him.

Break into Three

As they freak out, Matty throws a bundle at them, breaking through the movie screen—return of the mutant flying baby, y’all! Actually, it’s now the mutant flying toddler, as that little bugger has grown considerably since the opening.

Finale/Break into Series

Mayhem ensues as the kids try to fight back against the raging rugrat, but to no avail, and we quickly learn that the writers of IT: Welcome to Derry have no problem with “killing their darlings.”

Teddy and Phil are immediately massacred and as Lilly and Ronnie escape into the lobby, we’re left with a searing Final Image: Lilly realizes she’s still holding little Suzie’s hand, except there’s no little Suzie attached to the bloody stump.

Lawd have mercy, now that’s a true break into series, right?