Nobody really trusts clowns, do they? I don’t know if it’s the makeup, hiding their real faces; if it’s the sense of enforced fun, this idea that you’ve got to be laughing, that the laughter should never end; or maybe it’s just that we don’t like anything that tricks us, repeatedly, and makes us keep coming back for more. Clowns are fools who enjoy making others look foolish, after all. Nothing more distrustful than that.
But did we always find them absolutely terrifying? Or is that terror because of something Stephen King has done to our collective unconscious? I read It when I was 13 or so. And what scared me from the book wasn’t even really Pennywise the Dancing Clown; it was the giant spider, it was the assorted universal monsters It took the form of, it was Henry Bowers the bully.
After all, the clown was a form that It took in order to lure kids to it, to get them close. It was unsettling but theoretically harmless – as much as King knew that readers would be scared of them, he also knew that we were fascinated, amused, entertained. What better way to get a kid to a sewer than the promise of a balloon? What better way to mask screams than giggles of laughter? I didn’t like Pennywise, but it didn’t keep me up at night.
And then I saw the 1990 television adaptation. Here’s how I remember the experience: it’s hours and hours long, this massive, sprawling thing, bridging the story of the Losers’ Club meeting It when they’re children, and then returning to defeat it as adults. Hours and hours of horror, of Pennywise tormenting the Losers’ Club. There was the giant spider, sure, and Henry Bowers’ terrible shock-white hair; and there were abuses and losses of innocence and personal demons, but most of all there was Pennywise. Tim Curry’s performance, seemingly designed to be simultaneously repulsive and alluring – let’s not pretend there isn’t some of that Rocky Horror showmanship there, a suggestion you want to see more of where Pennywise will take its routines – was unbearably unsettling.
After it got its hooks into you, the flakiness didn’t matter. The script didn’t matter. What mattered was Pennywise, somehow the second most terrifying thing I could think of. (For what it’s worth, the first was the twins from Kubrick’s The Shining.) It wasn’t even those Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera teeth, or the way that his head reared back to show those teeth in all their terrible glory. It was his eyes: with their curiously pathetic puppy-dog quality to them, these unerringly human bits of the person behind the mask.
I forced my sister to watch it with me, of course. She was four years younger than I was, coerced into being some sort of co-pilot on my teenage horror adventures: somebody physically there with me so that I could act like I wasn’t scared, but in whom I could see the effects of the horror itself. (I realise now, writing this, that my behaviour sounds a little like that of a nascent serial killer, torturing animals just to see what happens.) I’m not sure that she truly understood It, and I don’t know if she’s ever subsequently read the book. But I do know that for her, and for many people around the world, Pennywise has become the reason that clowns are scary.
To this day, it’s Pennywise that people turn to if you ask them to picture a scary clown. Far more people than ever read the book have seen pictures of Curry’s Pennywise, or have watched clips, or remember their siblings forcing them to watch it with them. The TV miniseries is the very definition of a cult hit: not a massive success at the time, but something that’s outlasted almost any other adaptation of King’s work (aside from the aforementioned Kubrick adaptation). And that’s because of Pennywise.
The performance transcended the medium, let’s be honest. While I think not many would say that it’s Curry’s finest moment (because that’s clearly Wadsworth the Butler in Clue), it could be argued that it’s his role with the largest impact on nostalgic pop culture – even above Rocky Horror. Still, to this day, people dress as his Pennywise for Halloween parties; his jovial form has become the shorthand for Scary Clown in generic fancy dress shop costume rentals. And when the 2017 movie of It was announced, it was the casting of Pennywise that people concentrated on; because, how do you follow Curry? How do you reinvent something that, over time, became so iconic?
The answer is, you don’t. You change it. In Bill Skarsgård’s performance, you get a very different sort of clown: less terrible old-timey Brooklyn accent, more unnervingly juddery Victoriana ghoul. Scary to kids coming to It for the first time now; perhaps less so to those of us reared on Curry’s vamping.
Watching the It miniseries now, it’s somewhat shocking to me: how short it actually is, running only 20 minutes longer in total than It: Chapter 2; how horrifyingly 1980s some of the costumes/music/performances are; how clunky some of the writing is, and how soapy many of the performances are. But perhaps I’m ill-equipped to judge. Because I still love it. I love the sense of camp it has, and I love the terrible moments where Pennywise tells jokes that I didn’t understand when I was a teenager, and aren’t funny to me now. I even sort of love the crap effects: the shot where Pennywise appears in the moon is genuinely atrocious, and the less said about the spider the better.
But most of all, I love Curry’s Pennywise. I love how innocuous he is, at first. How unsettling his performance is: when he’s being jolly in luring Georgie to the sewer, there’s something of the serial killer to him, rather than the immortal creature from the deadlights. This sense of him understanding how to get his prey, how to make them come to him; how to break them down without resorting to modern horror jump scares, but by using their own neuroses and fears. In the novel, King used Pennywise as the last in a line of classic horror story creatures, and in Curry’s performance, that came to life: he’s terrifying in a way that feels absolutely original, and absolutely earned.
