Why Does the HBO’s New ‘It’ TV Show Think This One Thing Is So Scary?

So far, this season of It: Welcome to Derry is 0 for 2 on Pennywise appearances but 2 for 2 on horrifying birth sequences. Besides that both sequences were gross, it was lazy storytelling to use birth two episodes in a row.

The worst element of the It prequel is that the scariness is undermined by the over dependence on awful special effects. How hard is it to get some fake blood splattered all over that car? Call Noah Wyle and have him bring some from his ranch up north. Okay, maybe huge blood sequences like those in Stephen King’s most famous (and least favorite?) adaptation, The Shining, are hard to achieve, but it would have been worth it for the scariness factor.

Even if the two birth sequences had used more tactile elements, it still would have been disappointing that the show uses birth as a horror crutch. Full disclosure, I have given birth to two children who did try and murder me like in the second episode’s birth scene, where Ronnie relives her own traumatic birth, but my kids are (probably) not demons, unlike the flying monstrosity in the cold open during the first episode. However I do think birth is really scary and disgusting, with apologies to my fellow parents who find it a beautiful and natural experience.

I don’t think using birth and babies as the thing that terrorizes the preteens in It: Welcome to Derry makes a lot of sense, though. In past It iterations, including the book, It is usually the clown, because clowns are somewhat universally feared, or, in its “true form” more like a spider, which is another common fear.

Turns out my own preteen has seen the 2017 It film at their dad’s (eyeroll) and does not think their peers’ first fear fantasy would be a demon baby (it was something to do with needles, which, as a child of the pandemic who has had lots of shots, kinda makes sense).

Kids don’t fear birth and babies the way grownups do. Adults are scared of the commitment of having a demon spawn and, yes, adults are scared of childbirth. Everyone has their own or someone else’s birth horror story at the ready, whispered between parents over kids’ heads at birthday parties, but largely kept out of the kids’ earshot.

Then there’s the continuity errors in storytelling. In the cold open, we’re supposed to be experiencing the fear vision that kills Matty while he’s hitchhiking in the backseat of a car. However, the POV of the camera bounces around, giving us a front row seat to the entire birth. After the flying demon baby is born, we switch back to Matty’s POV, in which he tries to see over the backseat and then is horrified by the baby. That’s scary. But watching the thing come out is just yucky and gratuitous, since Matty wouldn’t have been able to see it based on where he was in the car.

The second birth scene, in the second episode, makes a little more sense, since Ronnie’s mom did die in childbirth and Ronnie feels guilty about it.

Once Ronnie is expelled from the giant amniotic sac and sloshes onto her floor, her mom tries to lasso her back in by the umbilical cord. The mom’s gaping womb has shark-like teeth, chomping, which seems like an unrealistic fear for a girl to have. There are scary eyeballs lighting up the darkness within, but they’re not even Pennywise’s exophoria-style ones, like one of the kids had in the opening car ride. If you’re going to have genitalia with teeth, you need to do a parable with a feminist lens, like Teeth. If you’re going to sow fear in pregnancy and babies, you aren’t going to do it better than Rosemary’s Baby (unless you’re my sister who finds spending a couple days with my kids good birth control).

Is all the birth symbolic because this is a Pennywise origin story? Was the kid’s pacifier in the opening scene a metaphor? We know It preys on the vulnerability of children, feeding off their fear. What’s more vulnerable than a baby? However we want to analyze the logic of the two birth scenes, when it comes down to it, it’s body horror at its most basic: Ew, women’s reproductive systems!

At best, the It: Welcome to Derry birth scenes are commenting on our puritanical obsession with demonizing women’s health, but, unfortunately, it fails to clearly state that thesis. Instead, it feels like the showrunners tried to think of the most terrifying thing they could…and came up with vaginas.