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Happy Halloween, horror fiends — and to celebrate 2025’s spookiest day of the year, HBO has released the opening titles to its latest massive hit, IT: Welcome to Derry, to lure viewers into the show ahead of the second episode, premiering early on October 31 for a seasonal one-off instead of its traditional Sunday night slot.

The credits sequence was released as a standalone video on YouTube by HBO, marking not only Halloween 2025 but also the fact that the show had the third-biggest series debut in HBO history (beaten only by House of the Dragon in 2022, and The Last of Us in 2023). Series executive producer Andy Muschietti described the animated title sequence as “a descent into dread” that lays the groundwork for the show itself, telling The Hollywood Reporter, “It reflects our desire to show the big catastrophic events [described in Stephen King’s book IT], all leading to the explosion at the Ironworks.”

Creation of the sequence fell to design house Filmograph — you’ll have seen their work on everything from Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher to HBO’s Task — and studio executive producer Seth Kleinberg told THR, “We imagine viewers really looking at this from an Easter egg perspective, just like the show…There’s so much opportunity to not skip the intro and to really look at the finite details of what we’ve created, and I think that that’s really special. This is seriously one of our most favorite projects we’ve done.”

Check out the title sequence below, and be grateful that the team behind it had the common sense to rein things in at a particular point — according to Kleinberg, there was a point where one of the characters literally had her eye fall out while running towards the viewer. “That was too much and we dialed that back,” admitted Kleinberg.

IT: Welcome to Derry episode 2 debuts October 31 midnight Pacific time (3am ET) on HBO Max; the episode will air on HBO November 2 at 9pm Eastern.

In the immortal words of Danny Elfman, "Life's no fun without a good scare." Join Popverse's weekly explorations of the best opening moments of horror cinema in The Coldest Open, and then check out:

• The best horror movies of all time, according to horror aficionado Greg Silber
• The most underrated horror movies from the past couple years
• All the new and upcoming horror movies for 2025 and beyond

And much gore. Er, more. Much more.