As Stephen King wrote in his 1986 novel It, the town of Derry, Maine, has been terrorized — every 27 years, like clockwork — by an evil entity. Its best known guise is Pennywise the Clown, played by Tim Curry in the network miniseries adaptation from the ’90s, and by Bill Skarsgård in the It movies of the 2010s.

According to IMDb, Skarsgård is also playing Pennywise in HBO’s new prequel series, IT: Welcome To Derry, but so far he’s been pretty shy about appearing in his iconic white and red face paint and Pierrot-inspired costume. Instead, those of us who’ve followed the franchise have inferred his presence in various apparitions. Lilly (Clara Stack) imagines pieces of her father, killed at a pickle bottler, reassembling themselves out of pickle jars at the supermarket. Teddy (Mikkal Karim Fidler) learns about concentration camp inmates’ skin being turned into lampshades, and imagines the one in his room growing moaning faces. Will (Blake Cameron James), whose Air Force Major father Leroy (Jovan Adepo) has already survived a plane crash, is terrorized on a fishing trip by the specter of Leroy’s corpse, burned to death. If you’re plagued by intrusive thoughts about your worst fears, Pennywise is going to mine those for a horrific psychic assault customized just for you.

**WARNING: What you’re about to read contains GIFs of graphically violent injuries to a VERY sensitive organ of the face**

Since this has been well established, I should have been on my guard in the fourth episode, “The Great Swirling Apparatus Of Our Planet’s Function,” when a scene is set in a science class. The teacher is showing an educational film about worms, narrating over it: “Here we see the parasitic flatworm leucochloridium paradox, who burrows into the bodies of land snails, causing their eyes to swell and expand into multicolored stalks, which subsequently attract the attention of birds, who then swoop down and pluck them out.”

What happens next: Derry High School Queen Bitch Patty (Maya McNair) gives social climber Marge (Matilda Lawler) a signal. Marge taps Lilly, her off-and-on friend, to apologize for “what a shit” she’s been lately, and suggest that they eat lunch together and catch up. “Maybe that’s the connection,” I thought. “Marge, who’s clearly setting Lilly up for some kind of humiliation, is being as slimy as one of these land snails.”

‘IT: Welcome to Derry’ Episode 4: Matilda Lawler Breaks Down Marge’s Grotesque Eye Horror Scene: “I Was Like, Girl, Please, Please, Please, No!”

I was right about the setup: Marge has been tasked to make Lilly think Tim Flanagan (Gabriel Mattka) has a crush on her and urge him to go talk to him so that he can reject her in front of the whole cafeteria; anyone who’s watched a John Hughes movie could have seen that one coming. But I was wrong about the snails: what the film foreshadowed was that parasitic flatworm Patty has burrowed into Marge, maybe not intending to destroy her, but probably not caring if that is the result.

Marge — who already worried in the series premiere that her new glasses make her look like a “bug-eyed freak”— follows Lilly to the bathroom to freshen up. Lilly is so pitifully excited about Tim that Marge has to confess. But before she can get the words out, she’s struck by a sharp pain in her right eye. Lilly, in the stall, hears Marge scream in pain. But she can’t imagine what hideous vision Derry’s ancient evil has sent Marge: like the land snails she just learned about, Marge’s eyes swell into multicolored stalks, oozing blood.

By the time Lilly opens the stall door, Marge is already staggering down the hall, still sobbing in agony, her vision distorted into watery twin tunnels. Does Marge try to find her way to the nurse’s office? Oh my, no: she goes to the wood shop, half-blindly gropes for a chisel, and repeatedly smashes it into her right eye stalk.

This clearly does some damage, but not to the extent Marge wanted. It gives me no pleasure to report that she lunges for the band saw next. Marge’s little legs scramble to push her up high enough, and though Lilly runs in shrieking for her to stop, Marge uses the band saw to slice clean through both eye stalks.

When Lilly gets to Marge and pulls her away from the saw, she can’t see what Marge is seeing: to Lilly, there are no stalks, just Marge’s right eye ruptured from the blow she struck with the chisel.

Marge, still crazed, reaches for the chisel again and keeps trying to pulverize her right eye with it, while Lilly straddles her and wrestles the tool out of her hand, so when dozens of kids stream in, it doesn’t look great for Lilly.

I know Lilly’s been scared of being returned to Juniper Hill, the local mental institution. But after getting through this scene, I think I might be ready to go there for a nice therapeutic rest…in the strongest safety goggles ever made.