Editorial note: Spoilers ahead for “IT: Welcome to Derry.” Trigger warning for graphic imagery.
About halfway through the series premiere of “IT: Welcome to Derry,” the Uris family sits down for a typical Shabbat dinner. Teddy, his brother and parents say the brachot over challah and wine. Rabbi Uris asks Teddy if he’s been preparing for his bar mitzvah. And then Teddy, thinking of his mysteriously missing classmate Matty, asks his father if someone could kidnap a child and keep them underground for months.
“We are Jews, Theodore,” Rabbi Uris says. He reminds Teddy of his grandparents who survived Buchenwald, where, according to him, lampshades were made from the human skin of prisoners. (One lampshade made from tanned human skin was recovered from SS housing at Buchenwald after the Holocaust. According to the Buchenwald Memorial website, skin from dead prisoners was also turned into other everyday objects.) He goes on, “We know better than anyone the real horrors of this world. Reality is terrifying enough as it is. Cut it out with the fantasy.”
Cut to the next scene where both Teddy and the audience are greeted with a jump scare by a lampshade made of wailing human faces.
To be sure, “Welcome to Derry,” a prequel series to “It” and “It Chapter Two,” is not short on macabre elements. The opening sequence of the show depicts Pennywise the Clown attacking Matty with a newly born, winged demon baby, for example. But does mining the Holocaust for a jump scare in a horror show cross the line? Personally, I think it does. And I’m not alone.
On X, one user called the scene “offensive” and “genuinely disgusting” and Alex Zalben, a writer on ComicBookClubLive.com offered that the jump scare never should have been made. “There’s something to be said for how Pennywise, Derry’s resident demon clown, mines the psychology of his victims to terrorize them, and surely the rabbi’s comments about the Shoah affect Teddy’s young mind,” Olivia Haynie wrote in the Forward last week. “But one can point to epigenetic Jewish trauma in other ways.”
It feels painfully obvious to say, but transforming the real-life murders and desecrations of death camp victims into fodder for horror entertainment is reductive. It flattens both the truth and experience of what happened, and the audience reaction to it. Instead of empathy, sadness and moral clarity, we are driven only to feel disgust and terror directed at the victims themselves. At a time when there’s a real concern that the American populace doesn’t know enough about the Holocaust, the moment feels even more inappropriate.
Regardless, let’s hope the rest of the season of “Welcome to Derry” largely sticks to what the “It” franchise does best — scary clowns — and leaves the Holocaust out of it.
