‘It: Welcome to Derry’ Explained: The Black Spot Inferno Differs from Stephen King’s Novel

WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for It: Welcome to Derry episode 7.

Fans of Stephen King‘s 1986 novel It know that in a town plagued by an interdimensional shapeshifting creature who delights in torturing and eating children, the human monsters are arguably worse.

King’s sprawling novel is punctuated by a series of four Interludes chronicling Derry’s violent history. Collected by Derry Librarian and Losers’ Club member Mike Hanlon, these four chapters tell stories of violence and hate, which conclude each of the beast’s feeding cycles. After spending the summer feasting on the children of Derry, It gorges itself in one massive event and then returns to sleep for another 27 years. Though Pennywise the Dancing Clown usually makes an appearance in one of Its many forms, these Interludes are usually caused by all-too-human hatred that explodes into violence. 

HBO’s hit series It: Welcome to Derry is based on these stories, which precede the events of King’s novel and director Andy Muschietti‘s own dual adaptations. Created along with Barbara Muschietti and Jason Fuchs, season 1 takes place in 1962, the cycle before the Losers’ Club forms. Set in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, this season centers on King’s second Interlude, a devastating hate crime known as the fire at the Black Spot. Though markedly different from King’s source material, this harrowing event follows a group of Maine racists who set fire to a speakeasy frequented by the Black servicemen of the Derry Army Air Corps Base. 

Mike first hears the story of the Black Spot fire from his father in 1958, the same year he and his Losers’ Club friends wage war against the sinister clown. While chatting after dinner one night, Will begins the story by recounting his time at the Derry Base. Stationed there in 1930 (for more information on this timeline change, see our recap of episode 1), Will was assigned to Company E, an all-Black unit housed in a rundown barracks with an unreliable wood furnace and no insulation. After installing a series of storm windows to protect themselves from the brutal Maine cold, the men of Company E were sent out of town on a special assignment and returned to find each window busted out. To further explain the town’s vicious racism, Will tells his son another horrific story about being abducted by a white soldier named Wilson and forced to spend hours digging, then refilling, then digging, then refilling a hole in the ground. 

Will explains that due to widespread segregation, Black servicemen were not allowed in the base’s NCO club and began to frequent bars in town, drawing attention from the Derry chapter of the KKK (who fancy themselves the Maine League of White Decency). The five men of the Derry Town Council complained to DAACB Major Fuller, who found a handy — if insulting — solution: the use of an old requisition shed. Will remembers, “It was dark and smelly, full of old tools and boxes of papers that had gone moldy. There were only two little windows and no electricity. The floor was dirt. George Brannock, who was also killed in the fire that fall, said: ‘Yeah, it’s a hell of a black spot, all right.’ And the name just stuck.”

The men of Company E begin to fix up the ramshackle structure, installing a makeshift kitchen and bar. It soon becomes a popular hangout for Company E and invited guests, but it’s not until the men cobble together a Dixieland combo that Derry citizens begin to take notice. When word gets out about the exciting new speakeasy, people begin travelling from miles around. The place is packed every Friday and Saturday with the doors essentially standing open from 7:00 p.m. until 1 a.m. Men of the Derry Town Council again take notice when this affects business from the town’s whites-only bars. But rather than simply complaining to Major Fuller, the Legion takes matters into its own hands. 

Set in 1962, Muschietti’s timeline is significantly different, weaving together multiple subplots. Will Hanlon (Blake Cameron James) is just a child battling Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) with his own club of Losers who find themselves caught in the adult crossfire. Local projectionist Hank Grogan (Stephen Rider) has been arrested on concocted evidence for the deaths of three children in the movie theater massacre that opens the season. A Black man, he’s hesitant to share his alibi — an affair with a white woman named Mrs. Ingrid Kersh (Madeleine Stowe) — for fear that he will be lynched rather than wrongfully convicted. After escaping from a prison bus headed to Shawshank Penitentiary, he’s been holing up in the Black Spot’s back room.

But an anonymous tip, revealed to have been called in by Ingrid herself, leads former Police Chief Clint Bowers (Peter Outerbridge) to his hiding place. Clint and four other men pull on cheap Halloween masks and barge through the doors of the Black Spot, demanding the hand of Hank. Wearing the faces of a vampire, wolfman, and Frankenstein’s monster (among others), each mask nods to a persona It uses to terrorize children in the pages of King’s novel, directly linking this egregious attack to the Entity’s evil influence and Derry’s overall corruption.

These faux “enlightened” men of the north need to dress their attack up in righteousness, but King’s version is much more straightforward. One November Saturday night, a handful of men approach the Black Spot dressed in white sheets toting homemade torches. Will muses, “Maybe they only meant to scare us. I’ve heard it the other way, but I’ve heard it that way, too. I’d rather believe that’s how they meant it, because I ain’t got feeling mean enough even yet to want to believe the worst… It could have been that the gas dripped down to the handles of some of those torches and when they lit them, why, those holding them panicked and threw them any whichway just to get rid of them.”

But regardless of their intention, the impact is the same. A fire breaks out in the kitchen of the Black Spot, currently filled with some 200 guests.

Several years later, while dying of cancer, King’s Will tells his son Mike the rest of the story. With the band raging and the dancefloor packed, the fire has time to build. When someone opens the kitchen door, flames shoot into the larger room, quickly spreading throughout the shed. Panic ensues, and a stampede forms as everyone rushes to the doors. The shed’s only exits are by the kitchen, where the fire began, and a pair of front doors that must be pulled from the inside. As terror spreads, frightened patrons rush the entryway, creating a jam that makes the doors impossible to open. 

The series’ version of the fire leans into the hatred displayed by this deliberate act. Clint and his masked men barge into the Black Spot with shotguns raised, demanding the “fugitive” Hank Grogan. When Dick and his men raise guns of their own, the cowards make a hasty retreat. Outside, they immediately barricade the doors and throw Molotov cocktails to light it on fire. They position themselves around the building and begin shooting the people trapped inside. This intentionality is important in a series set 32 years after the novel’s original Interlude. While overt racism was culturally accepted in King’s Maine of 1930, multiple characters in It: Welcome to Derry note the town’s progressive attitude towards discrimination. But this hate-fueled murder shows that racism is alive and well even when cloaked in dog-whistle calls for law and order. 

Initially caught in the stampede, Will is saved by fellow serviceman Trev Dawson, who extends a hand and pulls the young man to his feet. (Muschietti mirrors this moment when Pennywise extends a hand to a frightened young woman, promising to lead her to safety. He’s later seen devouring her face.) Here, King makes an exciting connection to his 1977 novel The Shining with the inclusion of Dick Hallorann. When the fire breaks out, the future Head Chef of the Overlook Hotel is a 19-year-old member of Company E. Though King stops short of mentioning the man’s clairvoyant powers, Dick has uncanny knowledge of the deadly door jam and guides his friends to a nearby window where they’re able to escape mostly unharmed.  

Muschietti’s iteration of Hallorann (Chris Chalk) is similarly heroic, using his psychic powers to escape the blaze. Guided by ghosts only he can see, Hallorann breaks through floorboards warped by a leaking icebox to create a tunnel under the kitchen, inverting the source of King’s literary fire as a means of escape. This allows them to bypass Bowers and his armed men, who are shooting anyone who escapes out a window. Unfortunately, attracting the attention of one ghost causes every spirit in the vicinity to notice his presence. Moments later, he’s swarmed by ghosts, he’d previously been able to lock away (see our recap of episode 5).

This eerie moment may have been inspired by a haunting passage from King’s novel. Watching from outside, Will remembers, “nothing but shimmers shaped like men and women in that fire … Some of em had their arms held out, like they expected someone to save them. The others just walked, but they didn’t seem to get nowhere.” 

Once outside, Trev jumps into action, gaining a tiny bit of catharsis in the terrible scene. Seeing the blaze, Wilson has arrived and attempts to give orders, though they’re drowned out in the chaos. Trev demands the keys to his cargo van and, along with Will, knocks the man out when he will not comply. Trev climbs behind the wheel and rams the side of the shed, eventually knocking down the wall. Survivors immediately stream out, some of them on fire. Watching in horror, Will remembers, “The last one was a woman. Her dress had burned off her and there she was in her slip. She was burnin like a candle. She seemed to look right at me at the end, and I seen her eyelids was on fire.” 

All told, King’s version of the massacre accounts for 60 deaths, many more than Muschietti’s 16, though his sequence is equally disturbing. Moments after Clint and his friends retreat, the 30 or 40 Black Spot patrons begin to panic when they realize the doors have been barricaded shut. Fire soon rampages through the building as bullets pour in through the windows. We watch in horror as a man tries to break out, only to have a bullet tear through his head. Chaos ensues, and it becomes nearly impossible for survivors to tell what’s going on around them, let alone find a way out. 

Of course, this terror draws the attention of Derry’s supernatural threat. While Hallorann struggles to find an exit, we see a familiar silhouette emerge from the flames. Taking advantage of the chaos, Pennywise begins feasting on the panicked survivors, cheerfully gnawing on a woman’s face while taunting those he has not yet devoured. King’s monster makes a similar appearance, but in a much different form. After escaping through the window, Will notices several “ghosts” running to the forest, eventually realizing that they are the sheet-clad racists who started the fire. But one is grabbed by a mysterious monster, and it takes Will a moment to gather his courage before he can tell Mike what he saw. “‘Twas a bird… Right over the last of those runnin men. A hawk, maybe. What they call a kestrel. But it was big. Never told no one. Would have been locked up. That bird was maybe sixty feet from wingtip to wingtip… But I seen … seen its eyes … and I think … it seen me.”

Will describes the monstrous creature hovering over the flaming shed to pick off those fleeing the scene. Horrified, Mike recognizes the bird from his own battle with It in the summer of 1958 when he was terrorized near the Kitchener Ironworks, leading his father to an ominous clarification. “‘It didn’t hover,’ he said. ‘It floated… There were big bunches of balloons tied to each wing, and it floated.'” Constant Readers and It fans alike will recognize this as Pennywise’s signature phrase, “you’ll float too,” indicating either bodies submerged in his sewer dwelling or those caught in his terrible Deadlight beams.

After telling his son this harrowing story, Will notes that Derry came together in the wake of the tragedy. Hospitals treated victims free of charge, and people showed up in droves for the funerals of victims, Black and white. Though the perpetrators were never punished, the fire effectively ended the Derry chapter of the KKK. Of course, none of this support brings back the sixty lost souls, nor does it excuse generations of racism that laid the groundwork to light the match. But it does signal that Pennywise has gone to ground and the town’s heightened hostilities have begun to abate.

We’ve yet to see Derry react to the fire in Muschietti’s world, but an egregious radio announcement sets an ominous tone. The event is described as an electrical fire at an illegal speakeasy on the outskirts of town. The deceased servicemen are blamed for it all, and the racist murderers who started the blaze have been reframed as concerned citizens helping the wounded. Both versions of this tragic sequence show the very real cost of racism and hatred, rivaling the story’s supernatural villain. After all, humans caused this horrific fire, with Pennywise only planting the seeds.

King has famously stated his belief in evil, insisting, “Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.” One of the most upsetting chapters in the Master of Horror’s catalog, the fire at the Black Spot bears this point out, with human hatred proving to be much more dangerous than a child-eating clown.

For even more on It: Welcome to Derry, check out episode by episode coverage from The Losers’ Club: A Stephen King Podcast.

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