THE BLACK SPOT IS BURNING RIGHT NOW – Episode 7 Trailer Just Dropped and Derry Is Literally on FIRE 🤡🔥
You can FEEL the heat through the screen. HBO’s new Welcome to Derry Episode 7 trailer is 90 seconds of pure chaos: the entire Black Spot jazz club engulfed in flames, Dick Hallorann screaming as the roof collapses, hooded racists cheering outside, and — holy hell — Pennywise’s gloved hand dragging someone deeper into the inferno. Bob Gray’s 1908 carnival act flashes between the blaze like a cursed memory, Ingrid Kersh whispering “Daddy needs more” while kids burn, and that final shot of the clown standing in the middle of the fire, untouched, smiling like he’s home. This isn’t a horror episode anymore. This is a massacre. One week until the finale and Derry is about to lose half its soul in a single night. Who lives? Who gets turned into balloons? And why the hell is Pennywise just… watching it all burn? Drop your panic theories before Sunday melts your brain 👇🔥
Derry is burning — and Pennywise couldn’t be happier.
HBO dropped the official trailer for IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 7 late Tuesday night, and the internet is still reeling from the sheer brutality on display. Titled “The Fire Rises!”, the 92-second spot is less a teaser and more a declaration of war: the long-dreaded torching of the Black Spot, Derry’s underground Black jazz club and sanctuary, finally explodes onto the screen in a roaring wall of flame that swallows everything in its path. With only two episodes left in the season, the series is pulling no punches — and the body count looks set to skyrocket.
The trailer opens innocently enough: a smoky 1962 night, saxophone wailing inside the Black Spot as laughing couples dance and soldiers in uniform toast the end of another week. Then the torches appear outside. Cut to Clint Bowers (James Remar), face twisted with hate, leading a hooded mob straight out of Derry’s ugliest nightmares. Within seconds, Molotov cocktails crash through windows, gasoline splashes across the floor, and the screen erupts into an orange inferno that feels almost too real. Practical fire, real stunt performers, and zero mercy — this is HBO spending every dollar of its reported $12 million-per-episode budget to make you smell the smoke.
At the center of the carnage is Chris Chalk’s Dick Hallorann, the Shining-gifted WWII vet who has served as the moral anchor all season. The trailer lingers on his horrified face as beams collapse around him, a child clutched against his chest. He screams something lost in the roar — fans are already freeze-framing and enhancing audio, convinced he’s yelling “It’s here!” just before a familiar white-gloved hand bursts through the flames and yanks an unseen victim backward into the blaze. Whether that hand is dragging Hallorann to safety or to a far worse fate is the question now torching social media.
Cross-cut with the present-day hell are rapid-fire flashbacks to 1908: Bill Skarsgård’s Bob Gray, still human, still heartbreaking, performing his beaver-and-graveyard routine under carnival lights while a little girl — clearly a young Ingrid Kersh — watches from the wings with worshipful eyes. The editing is merciless: every time the flames leap higher in 1962, we slam back to Gray juggling over tiny tombstones as the crowd cheers, the parallel screaming that Derry has been feeding its children to fire and clown for generations.
And then the money shot: thirty seconds from the end, the camera pushes through billowing black smoke to reveal Pennywise himself — full makeup, orange pom-poms glowing like embers — standing dead center in the burning club. Untouched. Unhurried. Smiling like a kid on Christmas morning as the world collapses around him. The final frame freeze on his dead silver eyes before the screen cuts to black and the single word: SUNDAY.
Reaction has been immediate and volcanic. Within twelve hours the trailer racked up 3.1 million views on YouTube and sent “Black Spot fire” trending worldwide on X. One viral post with 217K likes simply reads: “They really just burned the Black Spot on screen and made it look like actual hell.” Another, from horror account @finalgirlfiles, posted side-by-side stills of the practical fire shoot and wrote, “This is the most expensive single sequence in HBO horror history and it shows.”
The Black Spot fire has loomed over the entire season like a guillotine. First mentioned in Episode 2 as “the night Derry forgot how to be human,” it’s lifted directly from Stephen King’s novel — a 1930 atrocity where Legionnaires and proto-Klan members torched the club, killing dozens while the town looked away. Showrunner Brad Kane confirmed earlier this fall that the series would move the event to 1962 “to tighten the cycle and make the Hanlons witness the moment Derry’s soul finally dies.” The result is a sequence that doubles as historical horror and supernatural accelerant: Pennywise doesn’t start the fire, but he sure as hell dances in it.
Early reviews of the episode — HBO screened it for press under strict embargo — call it “the most unflinching 58 minutes of television this year.” One critic who saw it described walking out of the screening “feeling like I needed a shower and a drink, in that order.” Sources say the fire sequence runs nearly twelve uninterrupted minutes, with Hallorann’s desperate crawl through the collapsing club shot in a single take that left cast and crew in tears on set.
Behind the scenes, the production pulled out all stops. Filming took place over eight nights on a full-scale Black Spot set built inside a decommissioned Toronto warehouse. Fire safety officers were on set 24/7, and the production reportedly burned through 40,000 gallons of flame-retardant gel. Director Ishana Night Shyamalan (yes, daughter of M. Night) reportedly fought to keep the sequence practical, rejecting CGI fire even when insurance begged for it. “If the audience doesn’t believe people are actually burning,” she told crew, “Pennywise has no reason to smile.”
The broader implications are staggering. With the finale only a week away, the destruction of the Black Spot severs Derry’s last refuge of joy and forces every surviving character — the Hanlons, the kids, the few cops who aren’t corrupt — into the open, straight into the clown’s waiting arms. Social media theorists are already predicting a bloodbath: some believe Hallorann survives but scarred (setting up his eventual Overlook Hotel fate), others think the fire is the “feast” Kersh has been promising her “Daddy” all season.
One thing is certain: after Sunday night, Derry will never be the same — and neither will anyone who watches.
