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

Sort out your iconic and often unkillable serial killers. Marching in his immortal armies with hundreds. But frankly, if you want to thrill 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 really nightmarish, so much so that even his creator, Stephen King, believes that Pennywise will survive him like a horror that will never die. But there is much more to King's iconic monster, which has 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 the trauma of another world. Their fear of what awaits in the belly of their hometown continues to mark it and leads it to take on different shapes and sizes throughout the story, which spans nearly three decades.

Along with the nightmarish red-nosed clown, Pennywise also appears to Losers 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 best-kept and darkest secret is that while Pennywise may sneak out of children in clown form, his true nature is even stranger.

When we first meet Pennywise in King's classic horror, he claims to have been blown out of the circus and into a storm drain, where he meets the doomed Georgia Denborough. All this lies ahead, however; Pennywise might 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 often seen as he stalks the streets of Derry and gets into the heads of Bill and the Losers, and was carefully chosen by villain Stephen King.

Pennywise had a passion to write a book, which, as King expressed to an audience in Hamburg in 2013 (via YouTube), had “all the monsters in it”. Throwing vampires, werewolves, and mummies (oh my!) into the mix, it was clear that the author needed something special to bring them all together. “There's got to be one compelling, horrible, nasty, gross creature. The kind of thing you don't want to see. It makes you scream just seeing it.” “From there, King had a lightbulb moment. “So I thought to myself, 'Who the kids scares more than anything in the world?” And the answer was “clown”.

He is not wrong. Besides Bill Skarsgård and Tim Curry's iterations, there are enough scary clowns in horror that we made our own list. But thanks to some special tricks, Pennywise sets himself apart from the rest of the circus.

One of Pennywise's many powers has the ability to transform into whatever his victim fears. The clown is not always present, but is mostly a camouflage for the creature. As King has said countless times in interviews, clowns are always scary, which is why they became the main form of monster in “It.” Talking to Yahoothe author recalled his distaste for entertainers wearing big shoes. “I mean, if I was a sick kid and I saw a clown coming, all the red lines would go down on my gear because I'd be scared to death! So kids are scared of clowns.”

In both the book and the movie, Pennywise/IT toys with individual members of the Losers Club in various ways. 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 a sexual favor (yes, it's in the book). However, Pennywise the Clown always appeared in every encounter until our heroes learned the beast's true history. Down in the sewers of Derry, the losers are being served something that both readers and even some of the stars who brought It to life had a problem with it.

By the end of “It,” The Losers have learned that Pennywise is an ancient evil that isn't even from this world. An alien that descended on Earth in the 16th century from a dimension known as the macroverse, its method of hunting was established long before our heroes encountered it. They eventually track down It's hidden domain deep beneath Derry, where It manifested Himself as close to His true form as possible. It was terrible.

In the book's final act, Pennywise takes on the guise of a giant egg-laying spider, appearing as such in both the 1990 miniseries and the more recent big screen adaptation from director Andrés Muschietti. The first attempt at live action was a mixture of stop-motion and puppetry, and it was an absolute killjoy, but true to the book. However, this did not sit well with original Pennywise Tim Curry, who later said that he “was very disappointed with the endingwhen I turned into a rather unconvincing spider.”

Of course, like the essence of “It,” the fear is in the eye of the beholder, as Curry rightly pointed out: “I think anything that scares the pants off you when you're a kid is an image that always stays with you.” Well, of course. Well, it's better than a spotlight, isn't it?

After the clown, lumberjack, and sewer-dwelling spider, Pennywise's true form is known as the Deadlights. Referred to as orange lights, any person unfortunate enough to gaze upon these glowing rays risks going insane. Used as bait for victims, finally revealing their true form, the Deadlights in the book briefly captured Bill during his childhood, though luckily he escaped. In the 2017 adaptation and its sequel, Beverly and Richie went through the same thing, but were also taken out of sight. No matter which version you're watching, there's no denying that it's definitely a good fit the weakest ends in King's back catalogue.

Years later, the Deadlights would return in King's “Dark Tower” series, when the Crimson King (who is believed to be Pennywise) uses the Deadlights to travel between levels of the Dark Tower. He even mentions Derry at one point. However, this interweaving of worlds still doesn't make these hellish fairy lights cool. Aside from being floating yellow balls that drive people crazy, they really don't hold a candle to the creature's most commonly used form. Pennywise will always make losers and horror fans fear the clown who only smiles a bit too much.