Evil isn’t clown­ing around in the It Chap­ter Two trailer

After decades of cop­ing with the trau­mas depict­ed in 2017’s chill­ing It Chap­ter One, an adult Bev­er­ly (Jes­si­ca Chas­tain) returns to the town of Der­ry, Maine to con­front the specters of her past. The specters, it turns out, are a bit more lit­er­al than she’d like.

The first and most intrigu­ing sec­tion of the new­ly unveiled trail­er for It Chap­ter Two straight­for­ward­ly excerpts a scene instead of cross-cut­ting like mad, show­ing Bev­er­ly as she revis­its her for­mer home. It’s now inhab­it­ed by an old woman with a kind­ly dis­po­si­tion, except­ing the pro­tract­ed dead-eyed star­ing and sus­pi­cious lesions on her chest and the fact that she’s the spawn of an immor­tal demon that feeds on fear.

Beverly’s joined by all her pals from the Losers Club: there’s de fac­to leader Bill (now played by James McAvoy), lov­able loud­mouth Richie (Bill Had­er), a new­ly suc­cess­ful Ben (Jay Ryan), town­ie Mike (Isa­iah Mustafa), hypochon­dri­ac Eddie (James Ran­sone), and depend­able Stan (Andy Bean). Their reunion isn’t all clink­ing beers and rem­i­nisc­ing about the good ol’ days, however.

Pen­ny­wise the Danc­ing Clown (still Bill Skars­gard) has returned, and he’s starved for car­nage. The trail­er catch­es him pop­ping out like a deranged jack-in-the-box, float­ing on a clus­ter of his trade­mark red bal­loons, and gen­er­al­ly mak­ing everyone’s blood run cold — includ­ing ours.

Return­ing direc­tor Andy Muschi­et­ti appears to have out­done him­self, judg­ing by the sol­id taste of ter­ror that the open­ing scene offers us. He makes a com­pelling argu­ment for this par­tic­u­lar method­ol­o­gy of trail­er-cut­ting; drop in a scene and let the work speak for itself.

It Chap­ter Two comes to the­aters in the US and UK on 6 September.