“Nothing in life is to be feared,” Marie Curie once wrote, “it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”

Curie died more than a decade before Stephen King was born, but the Nobel-winning chemist and physicist anticipated the central theme of the horror novelist’s oeuvre. Nowhere is this more relevant than in It: Welcome to Derry, the vividly terrifying new HBO Max prequel to the 1990 television miniseries, the 2017 film, and the 2019 film sequel (the latter two directed by Andres Muschietti) adaptations of King’s legendary bestselling novel, It.