What is the real form of Pennywise in Stephen King’s IT?

Build iconic and often unkillable serial killers. March with your armies of the undead in the hundreds. But honestly, if you want to impress even the most demanding horror fans, all you have to do is show them a clown relaxing in a storm drain.

Pennywise the Dancing Clown in “It” is really a bit of nightmare fuel, a lot Even his creator, Stephen King, believed Pennywise would outlive him Like a horror that will never die. But there’s much more to King’s famous monster, who follows a strict diet of fear and children. First, he is an ageless being who does not age between the Losers’ Club’s first encounter and their exciting reunion and 27 years later, when they still bear the scars of other-worldly trauma. Their terror of what awaits them in the underbelly of their city keeps it going and takes on many shapes and sizes throughout the story, which spans nearly three decades.

Besides the nightmarish clown with the red button nose, Pennywise also appears to the Losers as a wolf man, a sick homeless man living under a house, a lonely old lady, and giant axe-swinging lumberjack Paul Bunyan. However, the truth behind Derry’s darkest, darkest secret is that while Pennywise may sneak up on children in the form of a clown, his true nature is much stranger.

When we first meet Pennywise in King’s horror classic, he claims to have broken out of a circus and found himself drowning in a storm drain, where he meets distressed young Georgie Denborough. It’s all a facade, though; Pennywise may look like a clown, but it doesn’t take long for the mask to slip and the monster to reveal himself. The Clown is the form in which Pennywise is most commonly seen when he stalks the streets of Derry and into the heads of Bill and the Losers, and he was Stephen King’s carefully chosen villain.

Pennywise came from his passion to write a book, as King put it before an audience in Hamburg in 2013 (via YouTube), “All the monsters were in it.” By throwing vampires, werewolves, and mummies (oh my!) into the mix, it was clear that the author needed something special to keep them all together. “There has to be one bound, horrible, disgusting, disgusting creature. The kind of thing you don’t want to see. It makes you scream just to see it.'” From there, King had his light bulb moment. “So I said to myself: What scares children more than anything else in the world?” The answer was “the clown.”

He’s not wrong. Besides the iterations of Bill Skarsgård and Tim Curry, there are enough scary clowns in the horror world We made our own list. But thanks to a few extra special tricks, Pennywise sets himself apart from the rest of the circus.

One of Pennywise’s many powers It is the ability to transform into anything its victim fears. The clown is not always present, but is often the disguise used by the creature. As King has said many times in interviews, clowns are always scary and that’s why they became the main form of the monster in the movie “It.” talking to YahooThe author recalls his aversion to artists who wear big shoes. “I mean, if I was a sick kid and I saw a clown coming, all the red lines on my equipment would explode, because I’d be scared to death! That’s why kids are afraid of clowns.”

In both the book and movie, individual members of the Losers Club are manipulated by Pennywise/IT in various ways. For Ben Hanscom, it’s a mummy. For Bill Denborough, it’s his dead brother. For germaphobe Eddie Kaspbrak, he was a homeless man offering sexual favors (yes, that’s in the book). However, Pennywise the clown will always appear in every encounter, until our heroes learn the true history of the monster. In the sewers of Derry, the Losers are offered something that readers and even some of the stars who brought “It” to life have had some trouble with.

By the end of “It”, the Losers learn that Pennywise is an ancient evil not even of this world. An alien has landed on Earth in the 16th century from a dimension known as the Macroverse, and its hunting method has been in place long before our heroes encounter it. They eventually tracked him to his hidden domain deep within Dire, where he presented himself as close to his proper form as possible. It was terrible.

In the book’s final chapter, Pennywise takes the form of a giant egg-laying spider, appearing as such in both the 1990 miniseries and the more recent big-screen version by director Andrés Muschietti. The first attempt at live action was a mix of stop motion and puppetry and was absolutely fun killing it, but it was true to the book. However, it didn’t go down well with the original Pennywise, Tim Curry, who later said he “I was very disappointed with the ending“When I turned into a rather unconvincing spider.”

Of course, just like the nature of “it” itself, fear is in the eye of the beholder, as Carey rightly points out: “I think everything that scares you when you’re a kid is an image that always stays in your mind.” You.” Well, sure. Well, it’s better than the spotlight, isn’t it?

After the clown, the lumberjack, and the spider who lives in the sewers, Pennywise’s true form is known as the Deadlights. Described as orange lights, any human unlucky enough to look at these glowing rays runs the risk of going insane. The Deadlights are used in the book to ensnare victims by finally revealing their true form, and they briefly possess Bill during his childhood, though he fortunately escapes. In the 2017 film adaptation and its sequel, Beverly and Richie endure the same experience, but are also liberated from the public eye. No matter which version you watch, there’s no denying that it’s definitely a good fit for one of these The weakest ending in King’s back catalogue.

Years later, the Deadlights would return in King’s “Dark Tower” series when the Crimson King (believed to be Pennywise) uses the Deadlights to travel between the levels of the Dark Tower. He even mentioned Derry at one point. This intertwining of worlds still didn’t make these infernal fairy lights exquisite. Aside from being floating yellow balls that drive people crazy, they don’t really hold a candle to the most commonly used form of the creature. Pennywise will always leave losers and horror fans alike fearing the clown who only smiles a little too much.