Is this the best new opening credits sequence of the year?
HBO‘s horror-thriller It: Welcome to Derry just revealed a stunner of a credits sequence (watch it below) that debuted on the show’s second episode, which was released on HBO Max a few days early for Halloween.
The phantasmagorical animated sequence peels apart the seemingly idyllic Maine town during the early 1960s to gradually reveal an increasingly horrifying succession of postcard-like tableaus, from Pennywise causing death and destruction to the threat of nuclear war. The sequence is set to the aggressively sunny 1956 song “A Smile and A Ribbon,” by Patience and Prudence, and extends HBO’s track record for creating groundbreaking titles for shows (with previous standouts including The Sopranos, Game of Thrones and Westworld).
The show’s executive producer and director, Andy Muschietti (who made the series along with his creative partner Barbara Muschietti) calls the concept “a descent into dread” that was inspired by the film’s postcard-tourism Welcome to Derry title.
“The name Welcome to Derry felt touristic and brings you to the world of postcards and facade, which has a lot to do with what Derry is — a place that’s seemingly wholesome, but there’s something dreadful under the surface,” says Muschietti, who heavily praised the production studio Filmograph, which created the sequence. “There was a lot of tweaking and calibration — how much is the next step? It reflects our desire to show the big catastrophic events [described in Stephen King’s book IT], all leading to the explosion at the Ironworks.”
The Ironworks factory explosion and other events shown in the credits, however, will not necessarily be depicted in the series, particularly during the first season. Another key event in the sequence is a shootout in the street with the Bradley Gang, which took place during the 1930s.
A crucial component is the song “A Smile and A Ribbon,” which was originally going to be used for a sequence where a character gets ready for school. Then they tried the song for the credits instead, and it fit perfectly. As the images get weirder and darker, the song offers up the unsettling key lyric, “The louder I say I’m happy, the more I believe it’s so.”
“The song is about faking a state of mind, faking a feeling,” Muschietti says. “The message of the song wrapped in such a beautiful tune is dreadful in itself.”
The team at Filmograph also gave some insight into the title’s creation, including one element that went too far even for Muschietti.
“Our assignment was to take the literature [from King’s novel] and take vignettes that also exist in the world of the show and find a way to stitch them together,” said Aaron Becker, a principal and director at Filmograph. “Andy [was] dead set on the idea of taking us back in time through a specific type of medium — the tourist postcards that you would find in like the gift shop in a small town, which worked perfectly for Stephen King’s lexicon and Derry in particular.”
The animation itself was done with CG, but then HBO let them take what they had created and put the final product on film, which added a bit of grainy realism to the end result. “And the nice thing is that Andy kept saying, ‘I want the dirtiest-looking version.’”
The grain also meshed well with the song, which has record scratches and pops as part of its original recording. “We got the track and we dropped it in, it almost lined up perfectly,” said Troy James Miller, Filmograph producer. “We realized this is the perfect track for this. And now it’s been in my head for the last year.”
“It just made what we did look so much better, because the song itself is so jarring,” Becker added. “It mirrors the characters’ arc as children coming of age, trying to convince themselves that their biggest fears aren’t real.”
“We imagine viewers really looking at this from an Easter egg perspective, just like the show,” noted
Seth Kleinberg, a Filmograph principal and executive producer. “There’s so much opportunity to not skip the intro and to really look at the finite details of what we’ve created, and I think that that’s really special. This is seriously one of our most favorite projects we’ve done.”
The sequence also has literal Easter eggs during its climactic postcard showing the explosion at Ironworks, which took place during an Easter egg hunt in 1908. A girl running from the flames originally was going to have eyeballs popping out, but that proved one step too far Muschietti. “That was too much and we dialed that back,” Kleinberg said.
And just because it’s pretty rare you have three experts in making opening title sequences on a Zoom call at one time, we couldn’t resist asking each of them what was their favorite all-time credits. And the trio came back with: David Fincher’s Seven, Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and David Chase’s The Sopranos.
