In the dense narrative of It, Pennywise seems to embody some of the most vicious evil in the universe. “But then I thought to myself, ‘There ought to be one binding, horrible, nasty, gross, creature kind of thing that you don’t want to see, it makes you scream just to see it.’ So I thought to myself, ‘What scares children more than anything else in the world?’ And the answer was ‘clowns.’” 2.

“I thought to myself, ‘I’ll get of the monsters together as I possibly can I’ll get the Vampire, I’ll get the Werewolf, and I’ll even get the Mummy,’” King said in 2013. In short, clowns have been scaring people for a long time.įor It, King wanted to devise a villain who could take the shape of several indelible monsters of the 20th century. He was convicted of her murder, but then escaped a prison farm. In 1912, clown/con artist Charles Conway strangled a roommate in Chicago. While there are benevolent clowns like Ronald McDonald, there was also John Wayne Gacy, the notorious ‘70s serial killer who worked as a clown for birthday parties. On the outskirts of normalcy, it was no great leap to consider clowns had a malevolent streak.

Why are clowns perceived as scary outsiders? Some historians point to the role of the court jester, who could evade punishment from the royal courts and was therefore perceived as being exempt from regular social standards. Stephen King wanted Pennywise to be a clown because clowns terrify children.Ĭoulrophobia, or the fear of clowns, had been around long before King began writing It in the early 1980s. But Pennywise has nonetheless seeped into popular culture, stoking a widespread fear of clowns while living his best life beyond King’s pages in a cult classic 1990 miniseries as well as two big-budget features. The clown is merely one guise the malevolent creature takes on to terrorize the children of Derry, Maine, who believe they’ve vanquished him only to see him return 27 years later. Pennywise is not, strictly speaking, the villain of It.

But King’s greatest achievement in terror is likely Pennywise, the sadistic clown from his mammoth 1986 opus It. Novelist Stephen King has contributed a number of villains to our shared (and scared) public consciousness, from the rabies-infected Cujo to the demonic Randall Flagg of The Stand and The Dark Tower fame.

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