fascism

A mutant killer baby. Lampshades and pickle jars that come alive. Sinister sewers. A demonic clown that preys on children.

HBO Max’s “It: Welcome to Derry,” the latest adaptation of Stephen King’s epic 1986 novel about a deadly clown named Pennywise, has already scared up a lot of buzz since its Oct. 26 premiere with its mix of evil events and nightmarish images.

The first episode featuring Robert Preston warning “Ya Got Trouble” via the classic musical “The Music Man” is an ominous introduction to the subsequent terrors. Gruesome sequences revolving around birth in the first two episodes will likely make several viewers cover their eyes. (The second episode drops Friday on HBO Max in time for Halloween, and it will air in its usual 9 p.m. PT Sunday slot on HBO.)

A prequel to 2017’s “It” and 2019’s “It: Chapter Two” — both directed by Andy Muschietti — the new drama is set in 1962 in the fictional small town of Derry, Maine. Bill Skarsgård, who played Pennywise in the films, will reprise his role during the season.

The large ensemble of child actors and adults features several Black characters, including Air Force Maj. Leroy Hanlon (Jovan Adepo); his wife Charlotte (Taylour Paige), a civil rights activist in a Jackie Kennedy pillbox hat; and son Will (Blake Cameron James). Also featured is Hank Grogan (Stephen Rider), the town’s theater projectionist, and his teen daughter Ronnie (Amanda Christine).

Developed by Muschietti, his sister Barbara Muschietti and Jason Fuchs, the creators have prioritized increasing the intensity of the films. But the Muschietti siblings add that they are also incorporating certain messages into the mayhem. Many of the Black characters face bigotry and resistance in the predominantly white town that echo challenges that people of color currently face.

“Stephen is a master of weaving these issues into his stories, and it’s impossible to think of doing one of his stories without having that texture front and center,” Barbara Muschietti said.

The Muschiettis, in a video call, discussed diving deeper into the story of Pennywise, getting their young cast to act like kids from the 1960s, and what gives them nightmares. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Siblings Barbara Muschietti and Andy Muschietti on the set of HBO’s “It: Welcome to Derry.”

(Brooke Palmer / HBO)

How soon after the two “It” movies did the idea of a deeper dive into the world of Pennywise come about?

Andy Muschietti: The novel was the inspiration. There are all these enigmas still lingering, enigmas intentionally left unresolved in the book. Part of the greatness of the novel is that you finish 1,200 pages and at the end, you still have no idea what “It” is and what it wants. It’s all speculation. We had conversations with Bill about how great it would be to do an origin story of Bob Gray, this cryptic character, and give him the opportunity to play the human side, the man behind the clown. It’s about completing the puzzle and uniting the stories that lead one to another, creating a story with the final purpose of getting to this conclusive event, which is the creation of Pennywise, the incarnation of evil.

Barbara Muschietti: Once the idea start percolating, we got in touch with Mr. King and he loved the idea. At the beginning of the pandemic we went to (then-Warner Bros. TV chief) Peter Roth. He bought it in the room and we’ve been on it ever since. Not a day of rest.

“The Music Man” plays a prominent role in the first episode, and it gets dark pretty quickly. I’m a huge fan of that movie, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to look at that joyful musical the same way again.

Andy Muschietti: I actually wanted us to create a musical ourselves that would pretend to be a movie from 1962. But we would have spent so much money and energy. So we started a quest for the right musical. “The Music Man” was made by Warner Bros. in 1962, and it’s about someone coming to a small town not unlike Derry, talking about trouble, trouble. And it just seemed to fit.

Barbara Muschietti: We also hope a lot of younger people will be curious and go see “The Music Man.”

What is the superpower of “It” that makes it a story that keeps giving and giving?

Andy Muschietti: There are a lot of things people connect to. One of them is childhood. Most of us cherish those years as being full of magic and imagination. We’ve all been children and we’ve all been afraid of something. The novel is a testament to the virtues of childhood, and those virtues normally disappear when you become an adult. Arguably the adults are always the enemy in the world of ‘It.’”

Apart from the clown, there’s a whole mythology that has yet to be connected. My purpose in this series is to reveal the iceberg under the water.

Black characters, including Hank (Stephen Rider), Ronnie (Amanda Christine), Leroy (Jovan Adepo) and Charlotte (Taylour Paige) play central roles in HBO’s “It: Welcome to Derry.” (Brooke Palmer / HBO)

You could not have planned the timing of the show coming on, but it seems like the topical issues addressed in this show, like bigotry, have a relevance to what’s going on in the country today.

Andy Muschietti: What’s going on is not new. It’s just found a new expression. It has been going on and on in cycles. We have this illusion that things are good, but around the corner is another dictator trying to come. We came from Argentina, and we don’t have the kind of racial tension that America has had for hundreds of years. Most of Stephen’s books are a song to empathy in general, and denouncing injustice everywhere. It is important to show, especially in an era where some people in the country are trying to delete history.

Barbara Muschietti: Sadly, these horrors keep haunting us, and racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia is still sadly a human condition, needing to find someone below you that you can punch. Yes, our history makes us a little more sensitive. We live in the United States, it’s a country we love, but it is surprising …

Andy Muschietti: Alarming.

Barbara Muschietti: … that more people are not more concerned.

Andy Muschietti: It’s the fog that Stephen King was talking about. People, basically out of fear, look the other way, trying to suppress things they see, and forget. It’s all part of the same reflection.

It’s immediately obvious that some horrific things will be happening in this show, even more so than the films. The imagery is really nightmarish.

Andy Muschietti: Being a shape-shifter is the thing which keeps giving and giving, and there was a clear intention for us to raise the volume of intensity. You need to meet the expectations of the audience — they don’t want to see more of the same. And we are also dealing with a different time when the collective fears were different because of the social and political situation of that era — the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis — was just around the corner. Then there’s social unrest and segregation.

Barbara Muschietti: I’d like to say it’s all very cathartic. We’re very nice people. I swear.

A demon baby birthed in Episode 1 is among the monsters seen in “Welcome to Derry.”

(HBO)

The show also has a great feel and look to it when it comes to depicting the 1960s.

Andy Muschietti: There was a lot of instinctive respect and attention to accuracy, aesthetically and spiritually. It was the true work of a team in every department, the same folks who had worked on the movies. There was also the research from the writers.

Most of the cast members are kids who did not live in that era. How do you communicate that era and feel to a young cast?

Andy Muschietti: There is a lot of talking. Stephen King knows a lot about this because he was a kid in the 1950s. The book is so rich in detail. We have Ben Perkins, who is a child actor coach. And there is imagination. These kids like to play and at this age, they thrive when you don’t put a lot of restrictions on them. The only thing that went overboard was the cursing.

Barbara Muschietti: That’s one thing that Stephen came back to us with. “There’s too many f—.” We also send the kids with Ben who basically sets up a camp — a bicycle riding camp, a swimming camp, stuff like that which kids in 2024 did not have access to. We’ve been doing that since 2016 very successfully. Because of all of this, all these kids have an incredible bond. They’re friends for life. They get to say goodbye to adolescence on our sets in the most beautiful way.

How long will you keep expanding the ”It” universe?

Andy Muschietti: It’s Derry, Derry, Derry all day. “Welcome” is an arc that expands over three seasons. Why is “It’” Derry, and why is Derry “It”? We will eventually reveal a bigger story revolving around the existence of Pennywise.

I have to ask — what gives you two nightmares? What is scary to you?

Barbara Muschietti: Fascism. Guns.

Andy Muschietti: Violence in general. We’ve come so far as a civilization, and it seems like we haven’t learned anything. What happened to empathy, and seeing what makes us similar, instead of things that divide us?

Barbara Muschietti: And love and respect.

Polish director Jan Komasa might be best known in the United States for his 2019 Oscar-nominated film “Corpus Christi,” but his biggest box-office success was in Poland for his 2014 film “Warsaw 44,” about the Warsaw Uprising, the bloody effort by the Polish resistance to expel the occupying German army from the city toward the end of World War II.

Komasa knows authoritarianism in its most flagrant, brutal forms, but his new film “Anniversary” imagines a scenario in which fascism doesn’t stomp in, jackbooted, but creeps, pretty and ladylike, on kitten-heeled feet. It’s a thought experiment more than anything else, from a story by Komasa and Lori Rosene-Gambino, the latter who wrote the screenplay.

“Anniversary” maps five years in the life — and obliteration — of an American family, a microcosm of a larger rapid political devolution that turns suburban utopia into a dystopia with a speed that could make your head spin.

Meet the Taylors — we’ll get to know them across reunions and celebrations starting with an anniversary party for Ellen (Diane Lane) and Paul (Kyle Chandler). She’s a professor at Georgetown, a public intellectual caught up in the university culture-wars debate; he’s a chef, and they have four children upon whom they dote: Cynthia (Zoey Deutch, also in this week’s “Nouvelle Vague”), an environmental lawyer, Anna (Madeleine Brewer), a provocative comedian, high-school science nerd Birdie (Mckenna Grace) and brother Josh (Dylan O’Brien), a nebbishy, struggling writer. The camera knits them all together in long shots, swirling around their idyllic backyard.

Josh has brought home a new girlfriend, Liz (Phoebe Dynevor, of 2023’s “Fair Play”), who is carefully coiffed and poised, immaculately presented and mannered, though her perfection gives his sisters pause. After the introductions, she and Ellen have a quiet, awkward moment together. As one of Ellen’s former students, Liz wrote a thesis that scandalized the professor, which Ellen describes to her husband as having “radical anti-democratic sentiments,” advocating for a single-party system. The title? “The Change.”

While Liz says she “came here with the best of intentions” and claims she and Josh were introduced by their shared agent, Ellen is suspicious and rightly so. The enigmatic Liz is mild-mannered and quiet, but her ideas are anything but. As she hugs Ellen, she whispers, “I used to be afraid of you but I don’t think I am anymore.” That is never more clear than when she sends Ellen a copy of her newly published book, “The Change,” dedicated to “the haters, the doubters and the academic stranglers.”

Two years later, the Change is officially afoot. Liz is a celebrity, now working with a mysterious organization called the Cumberland Company. She and Josh are married, pregnant with twins, and he’s achieved a conservative glow-up. New flags are popping up in the Taylor’s well-heeled neighborhood and things are shifting in ways that make Ellen uncomfortable, enraged even. But in the spirit of politeness and family unity, she acquiesces to Paul’s desire for a nice family Thanksgiving, despite their political differences.

Therein lies what might be “Anniversary’s” biggest warning: Don’t let the fox into the henhouse, even if it seems rude not to. Ellen maintains an appropriately wary distance and skepticism of Liz, but Paul’s fatal flaw is his assumption of good faith. He hasn’t even read “The Change” because, frankly, he doesn’t want to know. But as Liz attaches herself to Josh like a parasite, perhaps in an attempt to enact revenge on her former professor, so too do the other Taylor children topple as the nation changes under their feet.

Some might find “Anniversary” too vague: What, precisely, is Liz’s political stance that makes her so powerful and so repugnant to Ellen? She has advocated for a “single-party system” branded under the guise of “solidarity,” but the result is an autocratic surveillance state that suppresses free speech, upheld by a violent paramilitary police force. The film never gets into the specifics, perhaps because the only ideology of fascism is the concentration of power. “Anniversary” suggests the rhetoric doesn’t matter when we can turn on each other so easily, humanity and freedom crushed under such a state.

It is fascinating that recent movies that attempt to grapple with contemporary sociopolitical issues often feminize the threat: the #MeToo cancel culture fable “Tár” or this year’s academia scandal film “After the Hunt.” “Anniversary” situates a nonthreatening woman as the vessel for such evil, even as Liz’s male host, Josh, starts to embody the most extreme outcomes of what she has set in motion.

“Anniversary” is a deeply nihilistic film that can’t be described as a cautionary tale — that horse has already left the barn. Rather, it’s a hypothetical question as character study, an examination of how this happens and an assertion that a system like this shows no mercy, not even to its most loyal subjects, despite what we want to believe.

Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

When “Kiss of the Spider Woman” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, it was in the shadow of President Trump’s return to office.

Just days earlier, Trump had begun his term with a wave of executive orders to expand the country’s immigration detention infrastructure, fast-track deportations, remove protections preventing Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials from targeting schools and churches, and a declaration that the U.S. government would recognize only two sexes.

Referencing these developments ahead of the screening in Park City, Utah, writer-director Bill Condon told the audience: “That’s a sentiment I think you’ll see the movie has a different point of view on.”

Released in theaters Oct. 10, “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is set in the final year of Argentina’s Dirty War, the violent military dictatorship that spanned from 1976-1983. The story begins in the confines of a Buenos Aires prison, where newfound cellmates Valentin Arregui Paz (Diego Luna) and Luis Molina (Tonatiuh) find they have little in common. Arregui is a principled revolutionary dedicated to his cause, while Molina is a gay, flamboyant window dresser who’s been arrested for public indecency.

Undeterred by their differences, Molina punctuates the bleak existence of their imprisonment — one marked by torture and deprivation — by recounting the plot of “The Kiss of the Spider Woman,” a fictional Golden Age musical starring his favorite actress, Ingrid Luna (Jennifer Lopez), casting himself and Arregui as her co-stars. Transported from their dreary cell to the bright, indulgent universe of the musical, their main conflicts become a quest for love and honor, rather than a fight for their basic human rights.

When Argentinian author Manuel Puig began writing the celebrated novel, “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” in 1974, it was just a year into his self-imposed exile to Mexico as his native Argentina lurched toward authoritarianism. By the time the book was released in 1976, a military junta had seized control of the government. The next seven years were marked by the forced disappearance of an estimated 20,000-30,000 people, many of whom were kidnapped and taken to clandestine detention camps to be tortured and killed. Among those targeted were artists, journalists, student activists, members of the LGBTQ+ community and anyone deemed “subversive” by the regime.

Initially banned in Argentina, Puig’s novel has been adapted and reimagined multiple times, including as an Oscar-winning film in 1985 and a Tony Award-winning musical in 1993. With each iteration, the central elements have remained unchanged. And yet, as the 2025 adaptation arrived in theaters this month, this queer, Latino-led story of two prisoners fighting the claustrophobia of life under fascism feels at once like a minor miracle, and a startling wake-up call.

Tonatiuh, left, and Diego Luna in the movie “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”

(Sundance Institute)

In the months since the film’s Sundance premiere, the parallels between the fraught political climate of 1970s Argentina and that of our present have only become more pronounced.

Under Trump, an endless stream of escalating violence from masked federal agents has become our new normal. ICE officers have been filmed apprehending people outside of immigration court; firing pepper balls, rubber bullets and tear gas at journalists, protesters and clergymen; and, earlier this month, they descended from Black Hawk helicopters, using flash-bang grenades to clear a Chicago apartment building in a militarized raid that had men, women and children zip-tied and removed from their homes. As the country’s immigrant detention population reaches record highs, widespread reports of abuse, neglect and sexual harassment, particularly against LGBTQ+ detainees, have emerged from facilities across the U.S.

Amidst these headlines are people just like Molina and Arregui — activists, artists and human beings — finding their own ways to survive and resist an increasingly paranoid and repressive government. And while Arregui’s instinct is to remain unwavering in his cause, Molina’s is to retreat into the glamorous, over-the-top world of the “Spider Woman.”

In dazzling musical numbers expertly performed by Lopez, who delivers each song and dance with all the magnetism of a true Old Hollywood icon, both the prisoners and the audience can’t help but be drawn further and further into her Technicolor web.

Jennifer Lopez and Tonatiuh in the movie “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”

(Roadside Attractions)

It might be easy to write these moments off as nothing more than a superficial distraction, as Arregui does early on, and characterize musicals as shallow and cliche. At first, Molina is happy to admit that’s why he loves them, but the truth is more complicated.

During Argentina’s dictatorship, discrimination and attacks by paramilitary groups against LGBTQ+ people became more and more frequent. Molina accepts the role society has cast him in, allowing himself to be the “monster,” the “deviant” or the “sissy” that people want him to be, while retreating mentally into the world of classic films and pop culture. For him, their beauty is a salve — an opportunity to abandon reality and cast himself in a role that doesn’t actually exist for him.

Though he never explicitly claims an identity, it’s made clear that he doesn’t just love “La Luna” — he wants to be her. And in their first feature lead role, the queer, L.A.-born actor Tonatiuh embodies all of Molina’s contradictions — his bluster, his pain, his radiance — to heart-wrenching effect.

As Molina and Arregui grow closer, the boundaries between reality and fantasy begin to melt, and their formerly rigid perceptions collapse along with them. Arregui takes on some of Molina’s idealism, and the musical he once saw as a tired cliche becomes something invaluable: a sliver of joy that can’t be taken from him. A cynic convinced of the world’s brokenness, he realizes that revolutions need hope too.

In the film’s final act, while the world around Molina hasn’t changed, he has. Still trapped within the confines of a society that is doing its best to crush him, he adopts Arregui’s integrity and realizes that he has a choice: “I learned about dignity in that most undignified place,” he says in the film. “I had always believed nothing could ever change for me, and I felt sorry for myself. But I can’t live like that now.”

Like the film within the film, “Kiss of the Spider Woman” isn’t an escape. It’s a lifeline — and a reminder that, even in the darkest of times, art has the power to transport us, sustain us and embolden us to be brave.