Stephen King on the inspiration behind Pennywise
Of all the skin-crawling monsters that lurk in the shadows of horror cinema, Pennywise is undoubtedly one of the most unnerving. The carnivorous clown first crept onto our screens in the autumn of 1990, but he’s been haunting bookworms for even longer, having been given life by Stephen King in his 1986 book IT. Here, the revered horror writer reveals the inspiration behind one of the most sinister monsters of film and fiction.
When Stephen King sat down to write IT, he’d already published 18 works of fiction. The likes of Carrie, The Shining and Cujo earned King a reputation as a master of horror. Despite publishing fantasy books like The Stand and thrillers like Roadworks, it was King’s ability to make his readers sweat with fear that made him an icon. By 1986, King was happy to give his readers what he knew they wanted: a book of undiluted horrors.
Speaking with Nicole Schröder during a public event in Hamberg [transcribed by Comicbook], King revealed the inspiration behind IT and its iconic antagonist. “I had an idea when I was in Colorado that I wanted to write a really long book that had all of the monsters in it,” he began. “I figured if people think I’m a horror writer — I never considered myself to be that myself, I’m just a writer-writer — I thought to myself, ‘I’ll get all 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.'”
The author continued: “But then I thought to myself, ‘There out to be one binding, horrible, nasty, gross, creature kind of thing that you don’t want to see, [and] 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’. So, I created Pennywise the Clown. Then, what happened was, ABC came along and said they wanted to make a mini-series out of it and wanted to cast Tim Curry as Pennywise. I thought it was a strange idea but it really worked and it scared a whole generation of young people and made them scared of clowns, but clowns are scary for children to start with.”
King’s decision to delve into the primordial fears of children led to the creation of a horror mainstay. He understood that our infantile fears, no matter how irrational, never truly dissipate. We don’t overcome them; we tuck them away in the library in our heads and pray that they don’t tumble down. King’s power as a writer was to pick the darkest tomes from that library and recite them back to us. “Come on back and we’ll see if you remember the simplest thing of all,” he writes in IT, “How it is to be children, secure in belief and thus afraid of the dark.”
