Welcome to Derry is a strange subtitle for a TV series about an eternal horror that devours people, mostly children, who live in the titular Maine town. But It: Welcome to Derry is all about the contrast between wholesome folks and the evil they try to ignore, a contrast highlighted by the show’s opening credits.Set to a young girl singing the cheery number “A Smile and A Ribbon,” the opening credits walk through various events in the New England town. We see kids smiling as they dive into a swimming hole, families grinning at dinner, and other heart-warming sights. But even then, one notices small, disturbing touches, such as the tentacles reaching out toward the swimmers. By the end of the sequence, we’re seeing burning bodies running from a factory explosion and, of course, the gloved hand of Pennywise the Dancing Clown.At the end of the sequence, the images fill the letters of the word “Derry,” in a font common to postcards. According to Welcome to Derry creator Andy Muschietti, that juxtaposition between happiness and horror is a key element of the series. “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,” Muschietti told Hollywood Reporter.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});As he worked with production studio Filmography to create the sequence, Muschietti kept his attention toward Stephen King‘s original novel. “There was a lot of tweaking and calibration,” he said of the creation process. “It reflects our desire to show the big catastrophic events, all leading to the explosion at the Ironworks.” Even those who only know King’s story from the two It movies Muschietti directed understand the significance of the Ironworks explosion, as research into the event led to one of the first film’s most memorable sequences.In the world of the book and the movie, Kitchener Ironworks was a major employer in the town, which held community events such as an Easter egg hunt. During the 1908 egg hunt, the factory exploded, killing 102 people, including 88 children.The prominent placement of the Ironworks explosion makes sense, given that Welcome to Derry is a prequel. The series exists to flesh out events not fully explored in the two It films, drawing from vignettes about Derry’s history that King sprinkles throughout his novel. “Our assignment was to take the literature and take vignettes that also exist in the world of the show and find a way to stitch them together,” said Filmograph director Aaron Becker. “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.”Even more than the specific events depicted in the images, the opening credits get at a key idea in King’s work. Something evil lurks beneath small towns, something that preys on children. Instead of dealing with it, most adults prefer to put on a happy face, allowing the evil to do its work. In that way, It: Welcome to Derry‘s opening credits aren’t just a picture of a tiny Maine town. It’s a picture of the country itself.It: Welcome to Derry streams every Sunday at 9 p.m. on HBO.The post It: Welcome to Derry Producers Explain Cruelly Ironic Opening Credits appeared first on Den of Geek.