IT: Welcome to the Derry Team debunks popular fan theory

SPOILER ALERT: This article is full of spoilers for the season finale of “IT: Welcome to Derry.”

“IT: Welcome to Derry” co-creator Andy Muschietti is putting to rest a fan theory that has had some social media users excited.

If you’ve been tuning into the HBO series, which is a prequel to the 2017 and 2019 “It” movies, you’ll know that the show has seamlessly intertwined elements of Stephen King’s multiverse with nods and connections to the horror icon’s “Dark Tower” and “The Shining” universes.

The final episode of the show titled “Winter Fire” that aired on Sunday showed an eerie fog, started by the villain Pennywise, engulfing the entire town of Derry, Maine, creating the perfect veil for the ancient entity to capture the entire Derry high school student body.

The presence of fog led fans to speculate that the misty landscape could be a possible connection to another of King’s famous horror works: “The Mist.” King’s 1980 novella, “The Mist,” was adapted into a 2007 film of the same name starring Thomas Jane, as well as the 2017 Spike television series starring Morgan Spector.

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King’s novella “The Mist” centers on a group of people trapped in a Maine supermarket as a mysterious fog filled with creatures envelops their town.

But according to Muschietti, Derry has nothing to do with “The Mist.”

“There is no connection to ‘The Mist,'” Muschietti told Entertainment Weekly in an article published Sunday. “I’m sorry to disappoint everyone with this.”

Explaining that the fog has “its own logic,” Muschietti continued: “You see it in episode 4 at the end, when Taniel [Joshua Odjick] He is telling the story and we see how the asteroid hits the Earth. “After the explosion, we see that the Deadlights are basically surrounded by this fog of smoke trailing back.”

The filmmaker added: “We decided to make that the language of its expansion.”

Muschietti went on to tell EW that he used the fog in “IT: Welcome to Derry” to “visually convey” how expansive the entity can be.

“If it weren’t for the indigenous community of the 17th century, it would have spread throughout the world, but it is caged,” he said. “Now that the pillars are up and the cage is open, I wanted to visually convey that the force of the supernatural is expanding.”

Showrunner Brad Caleb Kane stepped in to further explain why there couldn’t be a connection between “The Mist” and “IT: Welcome to Derry.”

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“I don’t want to be too nerdy, but for that to be ‘The Mist,’ a portal would have to have opened to the Todosh Darkness, specifically,” he said, referencing the name of the deadly void between universes that is filled with monsters and acted as a passageway for the creatures to attack Earth in the novel.

Elsewhere in the interview, Kane explained that the fog in “IT” is a direct callback to the final scene of King’s novel “It,” in which a flash flood occurs as the Losers Club confronts Pennywise for the last time.

“It really is a direct consequence of that fight that is taking place, and of the psychic and spiritual power that the being and its fear and anger have,” he explained. “That creates these very specific conditions in Derry. You can compare this here because something great and emotional happens to the creature, realizing that the path is open for it to go out into the wider world.”

“IT: Welcome to Derry” season 1 is streaming on HBO Max.