No one does atmosphere quite like Stephen King, and HBO’s It: Welcome to Derry can make you feel uneasy with the color of a tile floor or how a children’s carnival stage can make you queasy and nostalgic. The world of Derry has always felt foreboding even with its Americana sheen. Production designer Paul Austerberry never lets us forget that our unease doesn’t have to be tied to a shape-shifting clown but to a place itself.
So much of King’s story is about escaping and then having to return home, and Austerberry’s work on Welcome to Derry is a bit of a homecoming since he worked on one of Andy Muschietti’s films about the terrifying Pennywise. A lot of horror follows up their story with a sequel since the fanbase is rabid enough to want more, but this new HBO series is an entirely different animal from King’s original source material. Is there a challenge in going back rather than following up such a success?
“Working on It: Chapter Two was definitely helpful, so we could reference things from the first film since it was established,” Austerberry says. “We had to be conscious of keeping the lore and some of the mood that was brought in with the first films. That was so successful that we were always thinking about that, but other than that, we found ourselves to be fairly free. We had to keep the feel of Derry as Derry as we could.
There are a number of recurring moments like The Capitol Theater and the meat shop, so we had to think of earlier versions of that. We also had to figure out older versions of the logos and signage to think of how it may have evolved into something we have seen before. This time period is a nice period to work with. Ironically, 1962 is the same period as The Shape of Water.”
I jokingly mentioned to Austerberry that the stretch of the main street of Derry was a place that I was drawn to, but I could feel something hidden in the shadows. It’s not just the killer clown or the political implications of the time period, but something in the town’s past is following just behind you as you walk down that seemingly cheerful street.
“It was always supposed to be this beautiful town with this lurking fog of Derry behind it,” he admits. “That is that interstitial, and it has this late-fifties vibe to it. For the most part, the colors were all that sort of pastel-y tone with the costumes and some of the things like the grocery story which greatly contrasts with the scarier underbelly of what’s right outside our eyeline.”
When we enter the grocery store, the first thing my eyes noticed were the butcher signs in the window. It’s just plain, white paper, but something about the way the sale items are listed feels very transportive. One of the creepiest and simplest moments happens as Lily is walking down the aisles, and the shelves swirl and move right behind her back. Everything looks like it has an employee devoted to front-facing all of the cans and making sure they are placed right on the edge of the shelves, especially the Calumet baking powder. Who knew that stopping for a dozen eggs could be so traumatizing?
“We had a team of four from the design department working on that for about two months,” Austerberry says. “It was a combination of creating and rebuilding things from reference or buying on eBay from collectors’ old labels and then scanning it and rebuilding. We also had to get permission from some of the companies to even re-do them, and we had a lot of hand-painted things like with the butcher paper signs. There is so much to research when it comes to that time period and a store like this, and we had to make sure that we had the right kind of pricing. All of the cans at the front of the store were arranged in a way from a photo reference I’d seen from the some old store that they made the stripes of an American flag. It’s a bit like current Japanese grocery stores where it’s very perfect.”
When we get to the carnival scenes in the past, the first thing your eyes is drawn to are those huge, colorful posters boasting different attractions. You have to think about how the posters may have looked when the carnival first came to town or how they looked when they were first painted. If the attractions were visiting for more than a week, maybe the local weather would take a toll on them. Once they are ready to pack up, the carnival might wrap them up and they could be rolled together until they are unfurled in the next city.
“The carnival is one of my favorites,” he admits. “I have some books where there are so many reference points, and one of them is called Freaks, Geeks & Strange Girls. One of our graphic designers, John Moran, bought one for a collection, and he now collects a bunch of interesting things–I think one from from 1930 or around that time. We studied it, and we saw it was stitched in the corners with the big D pulls on it. You could sort of see the colors that we were inspired to use.
It’s a traveling thing–they’d probably been there for a week or two before they had to take them down again. They might have dirt all over them–this red, clay dust that was particular to the location. We took scenic cues from that and whether we should use real dust in the aging or not. From the scenic artist point of view, it was just fantastic, and we got the best sign writers and artists that had here locally to work on it.”
It’s rather macabre to think about how families are brought into a carnival with the promise of seeing a clown. It’s almost perverse to go back in time and imagine how Pennywise was brought to be the entity that we all known him to be, but Austerberry was thrilled to peel back another layer to the lore.
“We’ve had two films where we’ve seen Pennywise as this clown, and we don’t really know why he takes that form a lot of the time,” Austerberry says. “This was an exciting time to be able to show you that. It’s kind of like the Pied Piper–kids are really enamored with him and by his show. I spoke with Andy [Muschietti] a little about what that show should be, and he told me all about how he had to do this show with his wife who had died. We needed to see his daughter there, so we decided that we had to start on the inside of the wagon or is little house or even in the country. When he comes out of the door and he’s going out to collect flowers to put on the grave of his wife, he interacts with these little country farm animals. There was a nice interplay with our little crude wooden folk. It felt more like old school theater than explosions.”
It: Welcome to Derry is streaming now on HBO Max.
