‘IT: Welcome to Derry’s Most Grotesque Scene Yet Broken Down by Star – Eyes Front, Listen In.
This article contains spoilers for It: Welcome to Derry Episode 4.
It: Welcome to Derry has delivered the most grotesque moment of the entire franchise, in a scene that anyone who gets the ick about eyeballs may need to watch through their fingers. In Episode 4, Marge Truman sets up Lilly Bainbridge to take a fall at the request of The Pattie Cakes – Mean Girls of Derry, essentially – but as she finally gets a conscience and decides to confess everything, It strikes in one of the most gruesome ways to date.
After watching a school video on slugs, Marge suddenly finds her eyes bursting from her head on the ends of two huge stalks, just like a slug. Frantic, she runs into an empty classroom and ends up using a bandsaw to slice off the offending stalks. As Lilly tries to stop her from taking a chisel to her face, the real world rushes in around them and Lilly is seen by her classmates standing over Marge with a bloodied chisel. Marge is shown to have lost an eye.
The scene is much cleverer than it seems at first, showing It preying on Marge’s fear that she revealed in the opening episode of the series: she worried her new glasses would make her eyes look big. However, that does not make her decision to attempt to cut her own eyeballs out any less shocking, which actress Matilda Lawler, who plays Marge, agreed. She told Decider:
“No. I had the same reaction. I was like, ‘Girl, please, please, please, no!’ But it was honestly a blast to film that. The way that we filmed it, I was wearing like a half head of prosthetics. So I had like a prosthetic piece that they put on and then they would attach these little wires into the hole of my eye or the hole of the prosthetic, and the wires would just stick out.”
“So I was basically like running down hallways, screaming, crying over these wires coming out of my eyes. And yeah, so I guess if a stranger saw that, they might question my mental sanity. I think it turned out well. I love how the CGI looks, and it was just a blast at the end with Clara coming in. We got to have a really good time with all the blood spraying on me and that like physical action of like you trying to rip it out of my hand. I just remember that being an intense, but very fun scene.”
‘It: Welcome to Derry’ Is a Novel in TV Form
HBO Max
There have been many complaints about the lack of a certain clown in the opening four episodes of It: Welcome to Derry, and you can’t always remind people that Pennywise is not the creature that came from outer space’s only form. Similar complaints have also been made about other King shows in the past, but as the master storyteller once said himself, this is like a novel made for TV.
While It shows Pennywise from the outset, as he claims Georgie Denbrough as the first victim of King’s original novel, Welcome to Derry doesn’t need to. It is an entity that wants to be feared, and, as has been proven, the people of Derry have many things they fear more than a clown.
However, we are now on the cusp of Bill Skarsgard’s long-awaited return as the maniacal clown, with red balloons and a certain house on Neibolt Street having appeared in the latest episode of the series. How It will manifest the clown for the first time, and who it will present itself to first, is something we will probably finally find out in Episode 5, which airs on Sunday, November 23.
Release Date
October 26, 2025
Network
HBO
Directors
Andy Muschietti
Franchise(s)
IT
