HBO Just Broke the Internet: The Episode 7 Trailer Shows Pennywise Was Once a REAL HUMAN… and What Happened to Him Will Make You SICK 🤡😱
You thought you knew the clown. You were wrong.
The new Welcome to Derry Episode 7 trailer just dropped and it’s pure nightmare fuel: Bill Skarsgård back as Bob Gray — the broken, grieving man who became Pennywise BEFORE the ancient evil stole his face. Carnival lights in 1908… a desperate clown juggling over a tiny graveyard on stage… then fast-forward to 1935 when his own daughter starts feeding kids to “Daddy.”
The Black Spot is burning. Dick Hallorann is trapped inside. And Pennywise’s gloved hand reaches through the flames for his next meal.
This isn’t horror anymore — it’s a full-on origin story that flips everything you thought you knew about IT. Fans are losing their minds: “I’m never sleeping again,” “They actually made me feel bad for Pennywise?!”
One week until the finale. One week until the feast begins. Are you brave enough to watch… or will you be floating too? 👇🔥
In the shadowy underbelly of HBO’s gripping horror prequel IT: Welcome to Derry, the line between man and monster blurs like the fog rolling off the Penobscot River. As the series hurtles toward its season finale, Episode 7’s newly released trailer – titled “The Black Spot” – has ignited a firestorm of speculation among Stephen King devotees and casual viewers alike. Dropped just days after Episode 6’s bombshell revelations, the 90-second clip promises not just more of the titular entity’s grotesque antics, but a poignant, tragic glimpse into the origins of Pennywise the Dancing Clown. And with Bill Skarsgård’s eerie return to the role, it’s clear HBO is betting big on peeling back the layers of one of horror’s most iconic villains.
For the uninitiated, IT: Welcome to Derry isn’t your standard jump-scare fest. Premiering on October 26, 2025, the eight-episode limited series – helmed by IT film director Andy Muschietti and his sister Barbara as executive producers – transports audiences to 1962 Derry, Maine, a quaint New England town harboring an ancient, shape-shifting evil known only as “It.” Drawing from King’s sprawling 1986 novel, the show expands on the interlude chapters that flesh out Derry’s cursed 27-year cycle of disappearances, industrial woes, and unspoken racial tensions. Unlike the 2017 and 2019 films, which focused on the Losers’ Club as kids and adults battling Pennywise, this prequel rewinds the clock to the cycle immediately preceding those events. It’s a deliberate setup: a family – Leroy Hanlon (Jovan Adepo), his wife Charlotte (Taylour Paige), and their young son Will (Mikkal Karim-Fidler) – arrives in Derry just as a boy vanishes into the sewers. What follows is a slow-burn descent into paranoia, prejudice, and predation, all underscored by the town’s collective amnesia about its predatory history.
The series has been a slow builder, earning a solid 79% on Rotten Tomatoes from 131 critics who praise its “sharp social commentary” and “dreadful atmosphere,” even if some decry the “scattered plotting.” Viewership numbers back the buzz: The premiere snagged 5.7 million eyes in its first three days, trailing only House of the Dragon and The Last of Us among HBO debuts. Episode 2 timed its online drop for Halloween, a savvy nod to the genre, while weekly airings on HBO and streaming via Max have kept the conversation churning. But it’s Episode 7, airing this Sunday at 9 p.m. ET, that feels like the ignition point. With the finale looming on December 14, the stakes – and the body count – are ratcheting up.
The trailer’s hook is immediate and insidious: A sepia-toned flashback to 1908, two cycles before the show’s present-day horrors. There, amid the twinkling lights of a traveling carnival, a dapper performer takes the stage. “Ladies and gentlemen,” booms the ringmaster, “presenting… Pennywise the Dancing Clown!” The crowd – families, wide-eyed children – erupts in applause as the figure twirls, his painted smile gleaming under the gas lamps. But this isn’t the balloon-toting, child-munching abomination from the films. This is Bob Gray, the human progenitor of the Pennywise persona, portrayed with a mix of charm and quiet desperation by Skarsgård himself. Clad in a threadbare tailcoat, Gray juggles and capers, his eyes betraying a flicker of something deeper – loss, perhaps, or the first stirrings of madness.
King purists will recognize this as an expansion of the novel’s lore. In IT, Bob Gray is briefly mentioned as the silver-haired drifter whose form the entity assumes after devouring him in the late 1800s. The book hints at Gray’s itinerant life as a circus clown, a man adrift in post-Civil War America, whose tragic end provides It with the perfect camouflage for luring Derry’s young. The films touched on this in IT: Chapter Two, with a hallucinatory cameo of Gray taunting Beverly Marsh (Jessica Chastain). But Welcome to Derry goes further, teasing a full backstory that humanizes the horror. At the 0:14 mark, Gray’s act incorporates a peculiar prop: a beaver – Derry’s town mascot – carrying flowers across a makeshift graveyard stage. Fans on Reddit and X (formerly Twitter) are dissecting this as a veiled tribute to a lost loved one, possibly Gray’s wife or mother, suggesting his clownish facade was born from profound grief. “This could confirm Bob’s tragic arc – a broken man who turns his pain into performance, only for It to twist it into terror,” theorizes one viral thread on r/television.
But the trailer doesn’t linger in nostalgia. Cut to 1935, and we see a younger Ingrid Kersh (Madeleine Stowe in the present, with a yet-unnamed actress in flashback), daughter of the original Gray, offering a terrified girl to the shadows. Episode 6 revealed Kersh as a willing acolyte, donning the clown suit herself in a desperate bid to resurrect her father, whom she believes It to be. Her delusion – that sacrificing innocents will “keep him happy” – adds a layer of psychological dread, blurring the lines between fanaticism and folklore. “She’s not possessed; she’s possessed by memory,” director Jamie Travis explained in a behind-the-scenes clip released alongside the trailer. Travis, who helmed Episode 6, credits the sequence’s eerie tone to a stylistic shift: desaturated colors and handheld camerawork that evoke 1930s newsreels, making the past feel oppressively immediate.
The present-day thread amps the urgency. Episode 6 cliffhanged on a mob of hooded white supremacists – led by the volatile Clint Bowers (James Remar) – marching on the Black Spot, Derry’s underground jazz club and safe haven for Black soldiers and civilians. Based on King’s novel, the Black Spot was a real (fictional) hotspot of racial integration during World War II, torched in 1930 by a KKK-like gang in one of the town’s “forgetting” events. The trailer flashes to the inferno: flames licking wooden beams, screams echoing as patrons scramble. Chris Chalk’s Dick Hallorann – yes, The Shining‘s shine-gifted cook, reimagined here as a Black Army veteran – is caught in the blaze, his face twisted in agony. Hallorann, played with stoic intensity by Chalk (Perry Mason, Gotham), serves as the series’ moral compass, his psychic glimpses into the town’s rot providing rare moments of levity amid the gloom.
And then, the hand: A gloved claw – unmistakably Pennywise’s – emerges from the smoke, grasping at an unseen victim. Is it Hallorann? A child? Kersh herself? The ambiguity is deliberate, Muschietti told Variety in a recent interview. “Everything is an orchestration,” he said, hinting at It’s puppet-mastery over Derry’s darkest impulses. The entity doesn’t just kill; it engineers the chaos that feeds it, turning human bigotry into a banquet. Social media is ablaze with theories: One X post from @PennywiseFan111 racked up 13K views with a simple “Oh GOD… 🔥🔥🔥,” while Bloody Disgusting’s trailer share garnered 432 likes and 58 reposts, quipping, “There was a time when kids loved Pennywise.” Even skeptics admit the buildup works – Episode 5 marked Skarsgård’s proper re-entry as the clown, a restrained tease after earlier cameos, and now Episode 7 promises to “make up for lost time,” per Screen Rant.
This isn’t mere fan service. Welcome to Derry weaves King’s supernatural tapestry with unflinching looks at 1960s America: redlining, Jim Crow’s lingering shadow, the military-industrial complex exploiting Black labor. Leroy Hanlon, a pipefitter at the local mill, embodies this tension; his arrival with Charlotte – a fierce activist played by Paige (Zola) – disrupts Derry’s fragile whitewashed facade. Their son Will joins a ragtag group of kids (Clara Stack, Amanda Christine, Blake Cameron James, Matilda Lawler) who stumble onto the town’s “deadlights” – It’s otherworldly lure. Recurring players like Stephen Rider’s Hank Grogan, the Black Spot’s owner, and Rudy Mancuso’s eccentric young ally add texture, while veterans like Remar and Stowe ground the ensemble in weathered authenticity.
Production hurdles only heightened the anticipation. Filming kicked off in May 2023 in Port Hope, Ontario – standing in for Derry’s quaint decay – but halted amid the SAG-AFTRA strike, resuming and wrapping in August 2024. Muschietti directed four episodes, infusing the visuals with the same rain-slicked dread as his films. Writer Jason Fuchs (Wonder Woman) penned the pilot, with showrunner Brad Kane (Tokyo Vice) overseeing the arc. The budget, reportedly north of $10 million per episode, shows in the practical effects: No overreliance on CGI here; Pennywise’s feats feel tactile, from balloon strings that bleed to sewers that pulse like veins.
Critics have lauded the performances. Adepo’s Leroy is a powder keg of quiet rage, Paige’s Charlotte a beacon of defiance. Skarsgård, though sparingly used thus far, elevates every frame – his Bob Gray isn’t a caricature but a spectral everyman, evoking the drifters in There Will Be Blood. “Skarsgård makes you pity the clown before you fear him,” raves The Hollywood Reporter. Yet not all is glowing; some outlets, like IndieWire, nitpick the pacing: “The horror simmers too long before boiling over.” Still, with 7.7/10 on IMDb from 25K users, it’s resonating.
As Episode 7 looms, questions swirl. Will the Black Spot fire claim Hallorann, tying King’s multiverse tighter? Does Gray’s “mentoring” of a young clown in the trailer foreshadow It’s apprenticeship – learning to weaponize joy for the hunt? And with Kersh’s cultish fervor peaking, is a mass “feast” at the club the penultimate bloodbath? Muschietti teases a three-season plan, each tackling a cycle: 1962 here, perhaps 1930 or 1906 next. “Derry is It, in many ways,” Fuchs told Collider. “Pennywise predates the town.”
For now, the trailer leaves us dangling – a mob’s torches, a clown’s grin, children’s laughter turning to screams. In Derry, forgetting is the real killer, but Welcome to Derry forces us to remember. Tune in Sunday; the feast awaits. Just don’t look too long into those deadlights. You might see your own reflection staring back.
