🤡 PENNYWISE IS BACK – AND HE’S STARVING FOR ’60S KIDS: IT WELCOME TO DERRY EPISODE 5 TRAILER DROPS THE GRIN THAT’LL HAUNT YOUR FEED FOREVER! 😈

Bill Skarsgård’s clown crashes Neibolt Street with blood-smeared fangs, luring Lilly into the sewers where Bob Gray’s corpse whispers secrets. Ronnie’s dad gets shredded on a Shawshank bus ride from hell. The ’60s Losers turn on each other as Dick Hallorann’s shine lights up a betrayal bigger than the Well House.

That fiery finale frame? Pennywise offering eternal party invites – but one kid’s not coming home. Ancient Galloo origins twist into clown chaos, with Shining crossovers that flip King’s universe upside down. HBO’s nightmare fuel just went nuclear.

Click for the full Easter egg hunt before Episode 5 airs Sunday – if Derry lets you sleep tonight. 👇

HBO just cranked the terror dial to 11. The midseason trailer for IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 5, “Neibolt Street,” landed like a red balloon in a storm drain – uninvited, inescapable, and primed to pop with Pennywise’s long-teased return. Dropped on November 17 via HBO’s YouTube and Max platforms, the 2:18 clip has already clawed past 12 million views, spiking fan frenzy as Bill Skarsgård’s iconic clown finally sheds his season-one absence for a full-throated rampage through 1962 Derry. After four episodes of eldritch buildup – shadowy leeches, vanishing tots, and indigenous curses – the entity’s clown form crashes the party, promising a back-half bloodletting that ties King’s macroverse to the Cuban Missile Crisis like a noose around the town’s neck.

The trailer’s hook lands in under five seconds: A crimson balloon bobs over Derry’s rain-slicked Paul Bunyan statue, the lumberjack’s axe glinting like a guillotine before the string snaps. Cut to Skarsgård’s Pennywise, porcelain skin cracked with fresh gore, orange pom-poms matted in what looks like kid-sized handprints. “I’ve always wondered how you’d taste,” he hisses in that guttural Swedish purr, eyes ballooning to black pits as he looms over a petrified Lilly (Emuna Wilton), the pint-sized archivist who’s been piecing together Bob Gray’s carnival-corpse origins. It’s a direct gut-punch to the 2017 film’s sewer stare-down, but laced with ’60s grit: Fallout shelters hum in the background, newsreels crackle about Khrushchev’s threats, and the clown’s ruff wilts like irradiated daisies.

Episode 5, directed by series helmer Andy Muschietti and scripted by Brad Caleb Kane, pivots the prequel from Derry’s slow-simmer folklore to outright siege. Set mere weeks after Episode 4’s “The Great Swirling Apparatus” cliffhanger – where Dick Hallorann (Stephen Root) glimpses the Well House’s starry rift – the kids’ crew (Teddy/Jovan Adepo, Phil/Chris Chalk, Ronnie/Tati Gabrielle) tumbles into 29 Neibolt Street’s bowels, flashlights carving tunnels thick with rust and regret. Stills from Bloody Disgusting’s November 20 exclusive show Marge (Madeleine Stowe) clutching a silver slug – a Shining relic against the entity’s deadlights – as Pennywise’s shadow puppeteers a marionette swarm of lost toys. “He’s not just back; he’s home,” Muschietti teased in an Entertainment Weekly Q&A, hinting at Galloo’s “fallen star” crash-landing as the cosmic seed for Pennywise’s Gray guise, a 19th-century twist on King’s deadlights devouring innocence.

But the clown doesn’t hunt solo. The trailer cross-cuts to adult anchors fracturing: Ronnie’s father Hank (Randy Havens) boards a Greyhound for Shawshank State Prison – King’s inescapable pen from the 1982 novella, now a Derry fear-farm – only for seats to sprout fangs, the driver morphing into a leering harlequin. “We all float… to Shawshank,” Pennywise cackles from the overhead, a line that’s already meme fodder on X, where users like @HQNewsNerd quipped, “That trailer for Episode 5 really said: ‘Just when you thought you could leave Derry… nope, Pennywise’s still got your schedule booked.’” Meanwhile, Hallorann – the Overlook survivor whose “shine” detected Jack Torrance’s rot – rallies Major Leroy Hanlon (Glynn Turman) and Sheriff Shaw (Bill Camp) in a diner huddle, steam tables fogging as visions of the Well House bleed in. Their pact? Breach Neibolt. But paranoia festers: One frame catches Shaw eyeing Hallorann’s spoon-bending trick with a shotgun twitch, foreshadowing the Losers’ canon infighting.

Lilly’s arc steals the spotlight, her journal flips revealing Bob Gray sketches that morph into Pennywise mid-page – a meta nod to King’s novel, where the entity slumbers as the feral “It” before adopting the clown skin. The trailer teases her as bait: A dream-sequence bus ride (echoing Georgie’s paper sail) ends with her splashing into the Barrens’ Kenduskeag, Pennywise’s gloved hand fishing her out like yesterday’s catch. “You’re the one who sees, little lost,” he coos, tying to fan theories on X that Ingrid (Madeleine Stowe’s asylum aide) is Mrs. Kersh in disguise – Pennywise’s shape-shifted crone from Chapter Two, manipulating from Juniper Hill. BrainPilot’s YouTube breakdown, clocking 750K views, speculates Ingrid’s “Kersh” surname drop in Episode 5 confirms the ruse, her kindness a lure for Lilly’s “seer” bloodline.

Critics who’ve screened advance cuts are buzzing with qualified dread. The series holds a 91% on Rotten Tomatoes from 135 reviews, with Episode 4’s 8.2/10 user score dipping slightly for “clown drought” gripes – a void this trailer plugs hard. Variety’s midseason recap praises the “King-ian restraint,” noting how early episodes marinated in Shokopiwah lore (the tribe’s “Galloo” warnings etched in petroglyphs) before unleashing the feast. “It’s generational horror done right – not jump-scares, but the slow chew of denial,” the review reads, spotlighting Taylour Paige’s Charlotte Hanlon unraveling over son Will’s (Blake Cameron James) “science kid” facade cracking into visions. Social heat mirrors the split: X threads under #ITWelcomeToDerry explode with 1.2M impressions since the trailer’s drop, fans split between “Finally, the teeth!” cheers and “Don’t cheapen the buildup” purists.

Production lore adds layers to the lunacy. Skarsgård, hesitant post-Chapter Two‘s emotional toll (“I’d played too many shadows,” he told Collider), dove back with prosthetics upgraded for ’60s flair – greasepaint smudged like fallout ash, teeth filed sharper for that eternal underbite. Muschietti, directing four eps including this one, shot Neibolt’s innards on Vancouver soundstages post-2023 strikes, blending practical sets (cobwebbed pipes dripping real rust) with ILM’s particle sims for the Well House vortex. The cast’s child actors – Wilton, Adepo’s Teddy channeling Isaiah Mustafa’s lineage – endured “fear marathons,” per Barbara Muschietti’s EW interview, screening The Shining clips to amp authentic chills. Easter eggs abound: A flickering TV in the trailer airs The Twilight Zone‘s “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” mirroring Derry’s mob paranoia, while Shawshank’s bus ties to King’s interconnected hells – prisons as fear amplifiers, per the novel’s cycles.

As the back half unspools – Episodes 5-8 weekly through December 21 – stakes skyrocket. The trailer hints at the ’60s Losers’ proto-Ritual of Chüd, a telepathic bite-back against Pennywise’s fledgling form, amid Missile Crisis blackouts that cloak abductions. One stinger: Young Will Hanlon sketches the clown before his first vanish, implying Mike’s bloodline as eternal sentinels. Screen Rant’s analysis flags 12 teases, from Galloo’s starry maw birthing Gray to a fiery Pennywise silhouette beckoning Ronnie’s crew – “Join the float, or sink alone.” Fan pods on YouTube, like Life Gains’ breakdown, clock 300K subs dissecting Ingrid’s “dark secret” as Kersh’s daughter ploy, potentially flipping her into foe by finale.

For the uninitiated, Welcome to Derry isn’t rote remake fodder. It’s King’s Derry unvarnished: A mill-town carcass gnawed by cycles of greed and grief, where ’60s civil rights undercurrents (Ronnie’s arc nods to integration riots) feed the entity’s bigotry buffet. Episode 1’s 5.7M premiere viewers – HBO’s third-biggest debut behind House of the Dragon – held steady at 4.2M for Episode 4, per Nielsen, with Max streams up 30% in horror hubs like the Northeast. Globally, Sky/Now UK logs 1.1M for the half-season, while Asia’s HBO Go spikes on subtitle drops.

Yet, the trailer’s core chill is existential: Pennywise isn’t monster-of-the-week; he’s Derry’s mirror, reflecting the town’s rot back as balloons and bites. As Skarsgård’s grin widens in the fade-out – “Time to dance, Derry” – over swirling sewer fog, one truth floats clear: The clown’s return isn’t climax; it’s contagion. Episode 5 airs tonight at 9 p.m. ET/PT on HBO and Max (November 24 on Sky). Lights out. The Well House waits.