Natives and Horror fans got an extra treat this Halloween. At midnight on Saturday, HBO Max dropped “A Story of Derry,” a surprise special from IT: Welcome to Derry. Don’t bother looking for Pennywise. The episode follows the Native community that first faced the evil lurking under Derry.
Welcome to Derry is a prequel to Andy Muschietti’s IT. Its first season, set in 1962, dug into Shokopiwath history but left plenty of questions unanswered. Now an Indigenous-led team gets to answer them.
Tazbah Chavez, who wrote and directed episodes of Reservation Dogs and Rutherford Falls, takes the director’s chair, working from a script by Métis novelist Cherie Dimaline and Jasmyne Flournoy. Dimaline, best known for The Marrow Thieves, also served as a producer. Onscreen, Kiawentiio (Avatar: The Last Airbender) and Morningstar Angeline (Outer Range and Echo) return to their Season 1 roles as Necani and Sesqui. Zahn McClarnon, Kimberly Guerrero, Brandon Oakes, Jennifer Podemski, Michael Podemski-Bedard, Isabel Deroy-Olson, Brenda Odjick, Thosh Collins, and Eric Trask round out a cast packed with familiar Native faces.
The new entry in the saga of IT runs 29 minutes and takes the franchise back hundreds of years, expanding on the legend from Episode 4 that explains why IT can’t leave Derry. Before the episode begins, a title card reveals that the series’ version isn’t the whole truth about IT’s discovery on the land where Derry was built. The card reads, “Generations ago, when the Kollu first preyed on our people, we left warnings for those who would come after. But we hid the truth inside a gentler tale, one our children could carry. This is the story we do not teach. This is the part we left out.”
“A Story of Derry” opens in a Native village hundreds of years before Pennywise. Apto uses a turtle shell split into 13 sections to teach young Kino that nature’s patterns hold power. Necani drops off two rabbits from her hunt and pulls Kino away to clean fish, where the girls tease Maneese about his brand-new facial hair.
The fun ends when the clan mothers call a meeting. Necani’s mother, Sesqui, shares the scouts’ bad news. An English settlement to the south is falling apart from floods, disease, and its own overhunting, and the settlers want to rebuild in the Western Wood. The elders know the Kollu lives there. If the newcomers move in, it’ll feed on them until it’s strong enough to leave.
Sesqui wants to stop the settlers before they get there, but the tribe is already short on food. Necani suggests hunting the Western Wood instead. Her mother forbids it, since the people have kept the village safe and the Kollu small for generations by staying out of it. Necani goes anyway, with Kino and Maneese tagging along after he threatens to tattle. The woods don’t take long to prove the elders right.
Spoilers ahead. Zombie settlers corner the kids, and just as Necani raises her bow for a last stand, a lone warrior played by Zahn McClarnon drives them off. At his camp, he says he’s the last of his hunting party, which the Kollu picked off one by one while wearing the skin of a black bull moose. He also tells the kids where it came from. Maturin, the great turtle, fought the monster before Earth existed and sent it here, locked inside a falling star. In the cavern where it crashed, the warrior found pieces of that broken prison, the only thing that can stop it. He’s the one who formed the dagger IT fears in Season 1. The episode doesn’t stop there, but I don’t want to give too much away before folks have had time to watch it.
What I can share is how the reveal reshapes Episode 4. In that episode, Dick Hallorann, the psychic cook from The Shining, reads the mind of a Shokopiwath man named Taniel, played by Joshua Odjick. He sees Taniel’s Aunt Rose telling her own version of the Kollu story. Her people made 13 pillars from the meteor and buried them around the old forest, trapping IT in the land that became Derry. In Rose’s telling, her people forged the dagger together. Now we know it came from a single warrior, and its origin is more complicated than the show first let on.
The standalone episode didn’t just answer the questions Welcome to Derry left unanswered; it also helps fill a long wait. Welcome to Derry: Season 2 jumps to 1935 and the Bradley Gang, bank robbers who stop in Derry for ammo and never leave. Showrunner Brad Caleb Kane says the scripts are half written, and filming starts next summer, so new episodes likely won’t land before late 2027.
Until then, “A Story of Derry” shows how the curse began, long before the town learned to bury its crimes and forget them. It goes back to the people who refused to forget and held watch. They warned the newcomers about the woods, but nobody listened. Centuries later, Native artists are telling that story, and Derry’s oldest warning finally gets heard.
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