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[Warning: The following post contains MAJOR spoilers for the premiere episode of It: Welcome to Derry.]

Welcome back to Derry, Maine, for another cycle of the title extraterrestrial monster emerging from the sewers to terrorize young children.

The premiere of the It prequel series is set in 1962, against a landscape of widespread fears about the bomb and the pernicious racism that prevailed in the era. For cocreator Jason Fuchs, he needed to look no further than Stephen King‘s original text for inspiration for that defining element of the new series.

“Stephen King, I think, intentionally approached it in the way he did, because he wanted Derry to be a microcosm of America, and, in some ways, a microcosm of the larger world around us. We sort of wanted to explore that. We wanted to explore the moment of 1962. It’s a specific period with very specific fears and terrors. Obviously, It does not exist in the beginning, is taking advantage of people’s very real fear. So what are people scared of in 1962, and what are people worried about? There’s a long list, but certainly chief amongst them [is] the threat of nuclear war. It’s the Atomic Age.”

The opening shot of the series plays upon the first of those; a young (but not quite young enough for the pacifier he’s gnawing on) boy named Matty (Miles Ekhardt) is caught watching The Music Man without a ticket at the local cineplex. The usher who chases him implies this is a regular occurrence, but Matty is clocked and covered for by young Ronnie Grogan (Amanda Christine), the daughter of the friendly reel operator, Hank (Stephen Rider), who implies that Matty’s family is terrible to him.

Matty then braves the cold in an effort to get out of Derry and is picked up by a family that goes from wholesome to horrifying in a matter of minutes. As the kids in the backseat with him join their folks in a chorus of bizarre chants, the mother gives birth to a mutant monster baby with wings that attacks. The inspiration for that fearsome new creature, according to Andy Muschietti, is drawn from the perceived dangers of radioactivity in the Cold War era.

“There’s a connection to the collective fears of the era, which is… the fear of nuclear attack, radiation, general nuclear tests. People were in panic of the imminent bang… This scare with the baby is based on the radio broadcast that’s talking about birth defects, stemming from radiation. So I thought it was a great way to start to set up the era where we’re living, what the fears are, and newborn baby, boom, in your face,” Muschietti explained. “There’s also a theme of having children that cuts across the whole book. When you realize that all the Losers in the second half of the book, when they’re adults, they come back to Derry, and they all realized nobody, none of them, had children, it sort of talks about the fear or the horror of bringing kids into this world, which is full of horrors.”

We then meet Major Leroy Hanlon (Jovan Adepo) as he’s welcomed to the air base outside of Derry by General Francis Shaw (James Remar), who quickly puts an obviously racist airman in his place for refusing to salute his superior.

James Remar as Gen. Francis Shaw and Jovan Adepo as Maj. Leroy Hanlon / HBO

For James Remar, while Shaw does want something from Hanlon and his bespoke set of special skills, that’s not the only reason he stands up for him. “Am I just using him? I don’t feel that’s the case, because if I were, then I could do it by force. Francis Shaw is doing it a little bit more by coercion, and trying to get him on his side, and to see what he’s doing is right. So he does have a respect and an affection for him. I don’t feel like he’s just using him. And he protects all his troops, because just about 10 years prior to when this was taking place, maybe 1948, the United States military was desegregated. Prior to that, in World War II, Black troops and white troops did not serve in the same units… But then they integrated. And when the boss, President Truman, said we’re integrating the troops, General Shaw was right on board,” he said. “These are my troops. These are my guys. And it didn’t matter what color they were anymore.”

Leroy is later attacked in his room by a pair of masked men who point a gun at his face and demand top-secret information that he refuses to give. He’s rescued by his partner, Pauly Russo (Randy Mancuso), before things take a grimmer turn.

Jack Malloy Legault as Phil, Matilda Legault as Suzie, Clara Stack as Lilly, and Mikkal Karim Fidler as Teddy / HBO

The show also introduces us to more children who’ve been otherized by their peers at school. There’s Lilly Bainbridge (Clara Stack), who is taunted with jars of pickles after her dad’s accidental death at a jarring factory, and fears she’ll be perceived as mentally unwell. She once confided in Matty about all of that before the boy’s disappearance, and as she remembers that, she begins to hear his voice through the bath drain before a pair of fingers pop out.

Then, there’s Margie (Matilda Lawler), a girl who’s desperately trying to fit in with the popular girls called the Patty Cakes, hates her glasses, and worries that her friendship with Lilly reflects badly on her. Meanwhile, Phil (Jack Molloy Legault) is a foul-mouthed sci-fi lover, and Teddy (Mikkal Karim-Fidler) is an apparent ancestor of Stanley Urie. Teddy, after hearing about the horrors of the Holocaust at the dinner table, experiences the second individual scare with a lampshade turning into human skin and chasing him around the room.

Lilly joins forces with Phil, Teddy, and Phil’s little sister Suzie (Matilda Legault) to dive deeper into what Teddy experienced and how it might relate to Matty’s disappearance. They recruit Ronnie to join in on the mission because she, too, heard something in the pipes. Together, they hit the movie theater to recreate the moment when Matty was last seen, and things take a horrifying turn when the mutant flying baby from the intro bursts through the screen and rips most of the kids to shreds, with just Lilly and Ronnie left alive in the massacre.

Amanda Christine as Ronnie Grogan / HBO

“For me, it was super fun to get to that, being drenched in blood and getting to scream and duck under the seats and see the kids climbing over the seats and getting flung in the air,” Clara Stack remembered of making that scene.

The deaths of three of these children, who at first appear to be in line with the archetypes of the original Losers (with Phil having echoes of Richie Tozier and Teddy reminding us, of course, of Stanley), subverts expectations. That upending was by design, according to executive producer Brad Caleb Kane.

“We wanted to show people in the first episode of the show, this is not the movies. We wanted to pull the rug out from under people right away to let them know you shouldn’t get too comfortable with anybody right away. Anything can happen. Anything will,” he explained.

Find out what else the cast and creatives had to say about the first episode of It: Welcome to Derry in TV Insider’s exclusive aftershow, embedded above. And stay tuned for more cast and creative analysis to come throughout Welcome to Derry‘s run.

It: Welcome to Derry, Sundays, 9/8c, HBO