"So far, It: Welcome to Derry has mined this dynamic for numerous scares: Lilly's dead father sliced up into pickle jars, the pieces congealing into an octopuslike monster ordering his daughter to give him a kiss; Teddy's father's stories about the Holocaust transforming his son's lampshade into a lattice of screaming faces, all matted hair and stretched skin. These are nightmares made real, given cogency and urgency by how well they mine the sense that parents are both our first benefactors and our first tormenters."
"Brutal childbirth has increasingly become TV shorthand for the burden of being a woman. Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, House of the Dragon, and have all featured grueling and gory depictions of what those series frame as women's work, punctuated with founts of blood and soundtracked by screams. The focus in them all is the mother: her pain, her fear, and the inherent danger to her body. If something goes wrong (which is often), then the primary cause for concern is her."
A supernatural entity in Derry consumes children's fears and amplifies generational cruelty by transforming parental abuse and resentment into physical monsters. Parental insistence that children obey, and the reciprocal resentment that builds, become recurring sources of nourishment for the entity. The series stages visceral manifestations of familial trauma, including a dead father reconstituted into a jarred octopuslike figure and a lampshade formed of Holocaust imagery. Labor and childbirth are depicted as sites of corruption and gendered suffering, aligning televised depictions of brutal childbirth with themes of maternal pain and inherited torment.
Read at Vulture
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