What is Pennywise’s true form in Stephen King’s IT?

Build your iconic serial killers who are often unkillable. March in your undead armies by the hundreds. But honestly, if you want to move even the most discerning horror fans, all you have to do is show them a clown chilling in a storm drain.

Pennywise the dancing clown in It is truly nightmare fuel, so much so that even his creator Stephen King believes that Pennywise will survive him like a terror that will never die. But there’s more to King’s famous monster, who follows a strict diet of fear and children. First, he’s an ageless being who doesn’t age between the first meeting of the Losers Club and their pulse-pounding reunion, and 27 years later, when they’re still scarred by otherworldly trauma. Their fear of what awaits below in the belly of their hometown keeps Him going and causes Him to take on different shapes and sizes throughout the story, which spans nearly three decades.

In addition to being a nightmarish red-nosed button-nosed clown, Pennywise also appears to the Underdogs as a werewolf, a sick homeless man living under a house, a lonely old lady, and a giant axe-wielding lumberjack, Paul Bunyan. However, the truth behind Derry’s darkest secret is that while Pennywise may creep out the kids as a clown, his true nature is even stranger.

When we first meet Pennywise in King’s classic horror film, he claims to have been surprised by a circus and washed into a storm drain, where he meets doomed little Georgie Denborough. However, this is all a facade; Pennywise may look like a clown, but it won’t take long for the mask to reveal itself to the monster. The clown is the form in which Pennywise is most often seen as he walks the streets of Derry and gets into the heads of Bill and the Losers, and was a villain that Stephen King carefully chose.

Pennywise came about out of a desire to write a book, which King told an audience in Hamburg in 2013 (via YouTube), it had “all the monsters”. Throwing vampires, werewolves, and mummies (oh my!) into the mix made it clear that the author needed something special to hold them all together. “There must be one binding, horrible, hideous, hideous creature. The kind you don’t want to see. It makes you scream just to see it.” From there, King had a light bulb moment. “So I thought to myself, ‘What scares children the most in the world?’ And the answer was “clown”.

He is not wrong. Aside from the Bill Skarsgård and Tim Curry iterations, there are enough scary clowns in horror that we have compiled our own list. But with some extra special tricks, Pennywise stands out from the rest of the circus.

One of Pennywise’s many powers it is the ability to transform into whatever its victim fears. A clown is not always present, but for the most part it is a creature in disguise. As King has said many times in interviews, clowns are always scary, which is why they became the main form of monster in It. Talking to Yahoo– the author mentioned his aversion to artists wearing shoes. “I mean, if I was a sick kid and I saw a scary clown coming, all the red lines would disappear on my gear because I’d be scared to death! Therefore, children are afraid of clowns.’

In both the book and the movie, Pennywise/IT plays with individual members of the Losers Club in various forms. For Ben Hanscom, it’s a mummy. For Bill Denborough, it’s his dead brother. For germophobe Eddie Kaspbrak, it was a homeless man offering sex (yes, it’s in the book). However, Pennywise the clown always appeared in every encounter until our heroes learned the true history of the beast. Down in the sewers of Derry, Loser presents something that readers and even some of the stars who brought It to life had some trouble with.

By the end of It, the Losers have learned that Pennywise is an ancient evil that isn’t even from this world. An alien who landed on Earth in the 16th century from a dimension known as the Macroverse. His method of hunting was put into action long before our heroes encountered him. They eventually track Him to His hidden domain deep beneath Derry, where He has presented Himself as close to His proper form as possible. It was terrible.

In the final act of the book, Pennywise takes the form of a giant egg-laying spider, appearing as such in both the 1990 miniseries and the later film adaptation directed by Andres Muschietti. The first attempt at a live performance was a combination of stop-motion and puppetry and was thoroughly enjoyable, but it was true to the book. However, this did not sit well with the original Pennywise, Tim Curry, who later said that “was very disappointed with the endingwhen I turned into a rather unconvincing spider.’

Of course, like the very nature of It, fear is in the eye of the beholder, as Curry rightly points out, “I think anything that scares you as a child is an image that always stays with you.” Of course .Well, it’s better than a spotlight, right?

After the clown, the lumberjack, and the sewer spider, Pennywise’s true form is known as Deadlights. Described as orange lights, anyone unlucky enough to gaze upon these glowing beams is at risk of going insane. Used to trap victims to finally reveal their true form, the Deadlights in the book briefly capture Bill as a child, but luckily he escapes. In the 2017 film adaptation and its sequel, Beverly and Richie went through the same thing, but were also deprived of their eyes. However, no matter which version you watch, there’s no denying that this is definitely one of the weaker ends in King’s back catalogue.

A few years later, the Deadlights would return in King’s The Dark Tower series, when the Scarlet King (who is believed to be Pennywise) uses the Deadlights to travel between levels of the Dark Tower. He even mentions Derry once. However, this interweaving of worlds doesn’t make these hellish fairy lights cool. ​​​​​​While these are floating yellow orbs that drive people crazy, they really don’t hold a candle to the most commonly used form of the creature. Pennywise will always leave losers and horror fans in awe of the clown who just smiles a little too much.