Key cast and crew take us behind season 1’s massive set piece and the major story changes.

Burning of the Black Spot: How It: Welcome to Derry adapted the traumatic book moment — death scene and all

Key cast and crew take us behind season 1's massive set piece and the major story changes.

By Nick Romano

Nick Romano is a senior editor at ** with 15 years of journalism experience covering entertainment. His work previously appeared in *Vanity Fair*, Vulture, IGN, and more.

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December 7, 2025 10:00 p.m. ET

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The burning of the Black Spot on 'It: Welcome to Derry'. Credit:

- The* It: Welcome to Derry* cast and crew explain the key story changes in adapting the traumatic moment from Stephen King's *It* novel.

- We also get a reaction to that big character death.

- The show couldn't pull of one moment from the book because of budgetary reasons.

**Warning: This article contains spoilers for *It: Welcome to Derry* episode 7, "The Black Spot."**

It's a relatively short passage in the context of Stephen King's 1,000-plus-page *It* novel, but it takes center stage on the HBO prequel series *It: Welcome to Derry*.

Decades before Pennywise torments the Loser's Club, members of the Maine Legion of White Decency, a white supremacist group, set fire to the Black Spot, a military speakeasy catering to Black patrons, with all of its revelers trapped inside. The event marks one of the earlier sightings of the shape-shifting, child-devouring It entity as dozens of victims burn alive.

For Andy and Barbara Muschietti, the sibling executive producers who developed *It: Welcome to Derry* out of their two *It* movies, this horrific tragedy was the anchor around which the entire HBO drama's first season was built. They expand the interlude into a pivotal set piece that stares down the hatred in the 1962 setting while adding to the lore to explain exactly why it happened and who of the crucial characters did not survive.

"It is one of the few big climatic moments of the arc of the show — it all builds towards that," Andy Muschietti, who directed the scene in the seventh episode, tells **. "There was a lot of thought put behind it. I really wanted to create an immersive experience of the horror of being inside the Black Spot. That's why the camera, for a long part of the sequence, doesn't come out of it. We are there with the characters."

The Maine Legion of White Decency on 'It: Welcome to Derry'.

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For Jason Fuchs, a co-creator on the series along with the Muschiettis and a co-showrunner with Brad Caleb Kane, episode 7 is both a Greek tragedy and "the tragedy of our very real American experience."

"We approached 7 with a lot of reverence and seriousness because, although the events of the Black Spot are fictionalized canon, they are extraordinarily grounded in the truth of America's experience with racism and, specifically, anti-Black violence," Fuchs says. "We knew we couldn't avoid it."

He refers to it as "the seminal event of this cycle," meaning the 27-year cycle when It awakens and feeds. "How do we handle this?" he recalls wondering. "How much do we show? How much *don't* we show you? This was an ongoing conversation throughout the process."

In the context of *It: Welcome to Derry*, which adds to the lore around the Black Spot of the book, the Maine Legion of White Decency goes to the watering hole because that's where Hank (Stephen Rider) is hiding out. It's only when the patrons band together to stop them from lynching him that the masked white supremacists burn the venue to the ground — even though young Ronnie (Amanda Christine), Will (Blake Cameron James), Marge (Matilda Lawler), and Rich (Arian S. Cartaya) are all inside.

Cartaya remembers the note the younger cast's acting coach, Ben Perkins ("Mr. Ben," as he's known on set), relayed for filming Rich's big death scene: "If you ever think that you're gonna laugh, just either bite your cheek or your tongue."

He kept that in mind when shooting on top of the cooler that protected Marge from the flames. "What I thought about was my family member of choice, my cat," Cartaya says, laughing. "My cat is my favorite person/mammal in the world, so just thinking about that really got me emotional in the scene."**

Rich (Arian S. Cartaya) protects Marge (Matilda Lawler) on 'It: Welcome to Derry'.

Brooke Palmer/HBO

The trick must have worked because he remembers an assistant director, Emmanuel "Manny" Whitney-Alexander, crying off to the side of the set. "When they yelled cut and I was wrapped, he just went over and gave me a hug for like five minutes straight," Cartaya says. "Shout out to Manny! I love you."

Because so much of the carnage occurs off camera, the actors had to let the horror read on their faces. Rider leaned into Hank's specific fear in this moment, which was about keeping his family alive — Ronnie as well as the community that stuck their necks out for him. Rider commends his acting teacher, Tony Greco, and his coach, Latarsha Rose, for the character work.

"I have to then start to look at my life and look at times where I've tried to protect people," the actor says. "There's a lot of questions in terms of the thematics of your life right now at your age that you didn't ask 10 years ago. I had to allow myself to sit in these thoughts that, a lot of times, caused me to be paralyzed."

Rider becomes overwhelmed for a moment thinking about his dad. Tears begin to well up as he remembers the scene in which Hank steps out from the crowd, ready to give himself up to the masked men. "It hit me," he recalls of filming it. "It was like, 'I'm never gonna see my dad again.' My dad was never in my life, and it just made me start crying. It was that part of me that wasn't allowing to let that go, but I had always yearned to see my dad. That was the missing ingredient."

Let it “shine”

Dick Hallorann (Chris Chalk) on 'It: Welcome to Derry'.

Beyond Hank and the kids, much of the scene is told through the eyes of Chris Chalk's "shining"-blessed military member. One nugget that King leaves for readers in the original novel is the presence of Dick Hallorann, but the author doesn't dig too much into those details. *It: Welcome to Derry* fills in the blanks.

Dick goes to the Black Spot that fateful night in an attempt to drown out all the ghostly visions bombarding him with a few "Air Force Cokes" (Coke plus alcohol), but he turns his perceived curse into an advantage. Dick communes with the dead — all spirits who have unfinished business with Derry — to find the survivors and extract as many as he can and bring them to safety.

For the writers of the horror-drama, this became a major moment in Dick's journey to becoming the character we know from King's *The Shining* and *Doctor Sleep*. It is then, Fuchs says, that Dick pivots from self-preservation to helping others.

Andy Muschietti points out "a bit of a oner" that occurs within the sequence, to make the audience feel like they are there with the actors. Chalk remembers the highly choreographed blocking that went into it, between thrown molotov cocktails to candy breaking.

"We had to be very, very conscious of each other in a very tight space," he says. "It's like our own *Nutcracker* ballet, in a way... I didn't realize we were actually moving that fast. I thought we were moving quarter speed or 50 percent. So to be able to capture all that at that speed and intensity, I thought, was pretty amazing."

The ghost of a Native chief walks through the chaos of the Black Spot burning on 'It: Welcome to Derry'.

King fans may notice that one book moment isn't included in the episode. The author writes very clearly how the It entity takes a red balloon–adorned bird form to snatch up victims amid the chaos. Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) is present for the Black Spot burning on *It: Welcome to Derry, *and he does feed. However, this mostly involves Mrs. Kersh (Madeleine Stowe), in her Periwinkle costume, confronting the being she thinks is her father, Bob Gray.

"There are multiple drafts of 107 with that bird in it. It just didn't make the final shoot for practical reasons," Kane explains. "That's the honest answer: for budgetary reasons. The Black Spot is a massive set piece. On normal shows, you get 10, 12, maybe as many as 13 days of production — and that's generous. [On *It: Welcome to Derry*,] 13 days of production would take you *just* through the burning of the Black Spot itself, *maybe* 10 days of production, and there's a lot more story told in 107 than just the Black Spot fire."

From the ashes

The patrons of the Black Spot on 'It: Welcome to Derry'.

Brooke Palmer/HBO

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The production employed a real shack, which they burned down for the exterior shots of the sequence, while the interiors were filmed on confined studio stages using flame bars, as well as smoke and lighting techniques. "It was insane because Andy is an explorer," Barbara Muschietti says.

The initial plan was to use a volume to digitally project the image of a burning Black Spot around the actors. "We ended up deciding that was never gonna look as real as we wanted it to look," Barbara says. "So we had to find techniques to shoot with as many special effects as possible, and that meant a lot of pieces, a lot of different sets."

The team filmed the Black Spot on four different sets. "It was very elaborate. Many days, many elements. Not a TV schedule — a film schedule for sure. Also, we were putting a lot of our cast through loads of discomfort. They were just unbelievable at putting up with the days and days in this small space."

The Black Spot burning of 'It: Welcome to Derry'.

Kane was (and, to some degree, still is) nervous about the audience reaction to the Black Spot burning, given the sensitivity around the visuals of a brutal hate crime. "This has to occur for the story to be told properly," he says, "but we want to do it in a way that we're not shoving Black trauma in people's faces for exploitative reasons."

He asked for feedback from some of the cast, who are predominantly Black, as well as other writers of color that the showrunner knows personally. The response from Rider and Chalk, specifically, eased some of those concerns. "[They] felt we'd done it justice without being exploitative, and I legitimately and honestly hope that's true. Knock on wood," Kane says. "It was done in that spirit."

The season finale of *It: Welcome to Derry* airs on HBO and HBO Max on Sunday, Dec. 14, at 9 p.m. ET/PT.**

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