Featuring Bill Skarsgård stepping back into the role of Pennywise, the upcoming HBO series It: Welcome to Derry (debuting Oct. 26 at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Crave in Canada) expands the It universe created by Stephen King. Developed by Andy Muschietti and Barbara Muschietti (It, It Chapter Two), and Jason Fuchs (It Chapter Two), the show has already received the stamp of approval from King himself, who posted on social media about how the series is “amazing” and the first episode is “terrifying.”

“You couldn’t get any higher praise than … Stephen King saying he approves of a Stephen King-inspired, adapted show,” executive producer and co-showrunner Fuchs, who wrote the teleplay for the first episode as well, said. “He’s not one of these authors who just … says everything’s great because his name is associated.”

“Until we saw that, I think it was kind of like, ‘What’s he going to say?’ And it was exciting to finally see him come out and weigh in, and say he liked it. It was huge, as you can imagine. It was incredibly validating. … [We] wanted to make something that he would feel was an organic, authentic extension of his work.”

He added that because the book only really “hints” at previous incidents in Derry, through interludes from Mike Hanlon, King’s novel was the “perfect gift” for the show.

“It had just enough to go on, just enough to sort of suggest things that felt canonically authentic, but that also didn’t sort of explain it all,” Fuchs said. “And so all those mysteries were kind of the fertile soil that we were planting our story beats and characters in.”

What is ‘It: Welcome to Derry’ about?

King’s description of the first episode of It: Welcome to Derry is spot on, with the series quickly setting the tone of its horror with a creepy, gory car ride from hell.

“The creepy opening was something that I had written in from the very beginning of the first outline of the pilot,” Fuchs said. “And the idea was, I knew that we were going to have to introduce the idea of initiating It kill.”

“We wanted something that felt like it could grab the audience. … It was a conversation between myself and Andy and Barbara, and then [co-showrunner and executive producer Brad Caleb Kane], and we all sort of built this opening that we felt, hoped would be sort of a worthy successor to that very iconic opening that Andy brought to life in the film, and that Stephen King obviously had created in the book.”

Then we delve into the core elements of the story, set in 1962 in Derry, Maine, 27 years before the events of the first It movie. Major Leroy Hanlon (Jovan Adepo) arrives in this predominantly white town with his wife Charlotte (Taylour Paige) and their son Will (Blake James), as Leroy starts a new military position at the local base. That’s where Leroy meets Dick Hallorann (Chris Chalk), who becomes the chef at the Overlook Hotel in The Shining.

Running parallel to the story of the adults are the moments focused on the kids in Derry.

A young boy in the town went missing three months ago, and when Will arrives at his new school, he befriends a group of outcast students who attempt to uncover the truth behind the missing boy. The group includes Lilly (Clara Stack), who has returned from being admitted to the Juniper Hill Asylum, and Ronnie (Amanda Christine), whose father Hank (Stephen Rider) is the projectionist at the movie theatre, who is being blamed for the boy’s disappearance.

‘The dark side of the human psyche’

As the show’s creators emphasized, they utilized the series’ timeframe to incorporate “period-specific scares” for the audience.

“It’s an era of fear over nuclear war and nuclear fallout, nuclear radiation, you obviously see that expressed in a lot of the sci-fi and the horror of that time,” Fuchs said. “And so it was, how do we take advantage of that right from the start, and orient audiences to different kinds of fears, different kinds of terrors? And so that notion of doing something that felt like an expression of that was one of the first things we created when we were building the show.”

A significant part of that in It: Welcome to Derry is exploring the fictional horror elements of the story, and the real horrors of racism, specifically in 1962 America.

“Racism has always been in my life, unfortunately, yes, it’s where we live, it’s how we grew up. And so to be able to articulate that, and at this time, through Hank, I had a lot to draw on,” actor Stephen Rider shared.

“America in 1962, you were coming out of segregation and Jim Crow, … and this was the real law of the land, and the real reality for millions and millions of Americans,” Brad Caleb Kane said in a separate interview. “When we come into our story, we are a year or two removed from the sit-ins in the South. We are still in the middle of the Freedom Riders, of which Charlotte Hanlon, one of our characters, was one. We are a year or two removed from tremendous civil unrest in the country.”

“So to touch on that when that’s the time period that we’re dipping into, it feels natural and right. And to not touch on that when that’s the reality of the time would be wrong, especially in a story that deals with your worst fears coming true.”

Jovan Adepo also spoke about the “duality of fear” present in the series. How racism, discrimination, and violence are fears that these characters can’t escape, just like any “fantasy” element in a story.

“And I think the complicit nature of human beings and how often people in history have turned their cheek … in the name of being comfortable, in the name of being scared,” Taylour Paige added.

“We have the extreme. We have a clown, but … the reality, the day-to-day, is how people treat each other, and we often don’t do anything. Or how easy it is to scapegoat or put it over there, like ‘That’s not my problem.’ ‘Boys will be boys.’ Or what kind of people we raise, … the dark side of the human psyche.”

The Canadian ‘family’ of the ‘It’ cinematic universe

As audiences dive into this spooky new series, the strength of Canadian TV crews is on display, with the show shot around Toronto, particularly in Port Hope, Ont., just like the movies.

“We’ve had the same crew for basically … 13 years now, since we did Mama, and we love coming back to Toronto,” Barbara Muschietti added. “We love to come back to ‘The Hammer.’ We love to come back to Port Hope. The support we feel and the comfort is huge. And the technicians, all our crew, are amazing.”