Longtime Constant Readers know that many of Stephen King’s most iconic stories are connected, with various characters, locations, and storylines intersecting across King’s oeuvre. Derry, Maine is the most prominent recurring location in King’s work, so it should come as no big surprise that HBO series “IT: Welcome to Derry” will be touching upon other King tales.
While “IT: Welcome to Derry” is of course primarily a prequel to IT, particularly the Andy Muschietti movie from 2017 and its 2019 sequel, the new trailer makes it clear that King stories including The Shawshank Redemption and The Shining will be referenced in the series. In some ways, that makes “Welcome to Derry” feel like something of a spiritual successor to “Castle Rock,” the short-lived television series that remixed various iconic King elements.
The “IT: Welcome to Derry” trailer promises the series will be taking us back to Shawshank Prison, and it also reveals that Dick Hallorann is a prominent character in the upcoming series.
Actor Chris Chalk (Godzilla vs. Kong) plays Dick Hallorann in “IT: Welcome to Derry,” making him the fourth actor to portray the character on screen. Gifted with the titular power, Hallorann is of course a central character in Stephen King’s The Shining, played by Scatman Crothers in the Stanley Kubrick classic, Melvin van Peebles in the Mick Garris mini-series from the 1990s that was written by King himself, and later Carl Lumbly in Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep.
Dick Hallorann was indeed mention in Stephen King’s novel IT, which was published nine years after The Shining came along. The novel revealed that army cook Dick Hallorann worked at a Black nightclub called The Black Spot before finding his way to the Overlook Hotel, and it’s The Black Spot that will serve as a central location in “IT: Welcome to Derry.”
As the Stephen King Wikipedia explains, “Dick is mentioned as an Army cook and member of the African-American army nightclub in Derry, Maine called The Black Spot, which was burned down by the Legion of White Decency (the Maine equivalent of the KKK) in 1930. Dick’s Shining allowed him to save the lives of several other clubgoers, including Mike Hanlon’s father. He is also notable for being one of the only sane adults able to see IT in one of its varying forms.”
“Welcome to Derry” kicks off with the debut season set in 1962 in the time leading up to the events of IT: Chapter One, and as we learned in the 2017 film, The Black Spot was burned down that very year in this particular timeline. That means those tragic events will play a role in the HBO series, so we can expect to see a whole lot of Dick Hallorann this October.
As Andy Muschietti explained to Entertainment Weekly last year, “Our baseline [for the series] is 1962, but we do a few jumps to the past…. Every 27 years when IT appears, IT’s cycle is marked by two catastrophic events, one at the beginning and one in the end. We are using the Black Spot as an event in which many stories are built around.”
The eight-episode series “IT: Welcome to Derry” premieres Sunday, October 26 on HBO & HBO Max. New episodes will debut weekly leading up to the season finale on December 14.