Watching the second episode of It: Welcome to Derry, you’d be forgiven for assuming that the Mother Thing, one of the HBO show’s many terrifying surreal creations, came mostly out of postproduction. The parent of young Ronnie (Amanda Christine), who died during childbirth, emerges in a hallucinatory sequence while Ronnie is hiding under her blankets — she finds herself stuck in a strange sort of womb, with her mother taking on the form of the bed. It’s slimy and creepy and wholly fantastical.
And yet much of this was actually filmed on set: The bed was constructed to fit two actresses, with one playing the upper body, and several minute details of the scene were captured closely in-camera. “We built out and slimed up a very disgusting-looking intestine that she got to reach onto,” reveals VFX supervisor Daryl Sawchuk. “That stuff that we photographed was real — the drapery, the lighting, everything in the room was a solid foundation. We went in and withered the mom away and made her more of a corpse, with a dried-out mummified effect, but we had such a great foundation to work on.” They added some extra goo, too.
This was the way of Welcome to Derry. Building off of his two It films, series co-developer Andy Muschietti shared a broad philosophy with the VFX team when it came to developing the look of this prequel. “We’re both big believers in shooting as much practically as possible, trying to get really good photography — he loves old-school practical prosthetics and makeup effects and slime and goo, and stuff that’s very visceral,” says Sawchuk. “There’s sometimes a convenience factor when you can shoot something against a bluescreen and deal with it down the road, but that doesn’t always give the best results. Holistically, there was a great partnership in terms of the creative ideation and how we wanted to approach the show.”
