Stephen King’s It— a 1000 page epic of a shape-shifting evil from beyond time— features a clown named Pennywise. The clown doesn’t
This dancing clown grins through all the horror and gore in It and exudes malevolent wit. While King’s villains are often frightening, Pennywise’s wit approaches camp without really being funny.
Zach Handlen describes It as “set largely in a single small town in Maine. [W] hile it spans decades, the main action takes place in two distinct time periods.
—1958, which tells the story of the Losers Club’s first confrontation with Pennywise The Clown; and
—1985, when the grown-up losers come back to finish the job they started as children.
[Handlen confesses that It was…] scarier then any of the other King novels I’d read, scarier even than that time my best friend Lucas summarized the plot of Nightmare On Elm Street for me. My paperback copy was a tie-in edition with the TV miniseries, and it had Tim Curry on the cover in full clown make-up….
It is arguably King’s most consistently terrifying piece of writing, a pervasive and nightmarish vision of a town that’s sold its soul to a monster that puts on masks and eats children.”
No wonder creepy crown sightings have troubled communities across the US and the UK of late.
Facial symmetry & averageness” is lacking in some clowns.
Linda Papadopoulos is a psychologist and author. In the essay below, she describes how facial symmetry—and lack thereof—explains the creepiness of some clowns:
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