We’ve all read and seen our fair share of horror story monsters. Whether it’s an elusive ghost, a servant of the devil, a wild creature, or a human gone rogue, there are plenty of icons strange enough to dampen your pants where you stand (or sit); however, there is one that will go down in literary and film history for outdoing all the others in terms of terror and versatility: IT.
Though IT is known best as Pennywise, the Dancing Clown, that is only one of the petrifying forms the entity has taken. From giant spiders, deceased siblings and friends, and rotten-corpse stepdads, IT has no bounds when it comes to terrifying (or seasoning) IT’s victims before devouring them.
To celebrate the second film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel of monstrous proportions, here are five facts to prove IT is the strangest monster ever to haunt a work of fiction.
IT is an entity from a universe outside of our own.
Cue the confusion! We can all agree that this fact is quite out there . . . literally. According to the Stephen King Wiki from Fandom, IT is a being from the Macroverse, an alternate universe that eclipses our own. This is where IT was created and lived for presumably countless billions of years before making a home of Derry, Maine.
IT’s arch nemesis is a giant turtle that incited the Big Bang.
It is easy to see IT as being purely a nuisance on earth — he sneaks around, eats children, then takes a thirty-year hiatus until he gets hungry for a new generation; however, his evil extends all the way back to his Macroverse years. There, life was a bit more balanced. One of IT’s fellow inhabitants was a giant turtle that, according to the Stephen King Wiki, was IT’s brother. The two clashed with opposite natures: IT being evil and the Turtle being good.
IT’s true form is known as the Deadlights.
There are some things that, once seen, you can never forget (no matter how much you may want to). The same is vastly true for the characters unlucky enough to have witnessed IT in original form: the deadlights. As portrayed in the most recent adaptation, the deadlights are a set of orange-glowing bulbs that have the power to make one go insane by just looking at them. Forget about the horrors of Google Images DIY medical diagnoses; there’s no coming back after IT’s mouth peels back to reveal IT’s true monstrous self.
IT was delivered to earth by an asteroid.
It’s bad enough that IT has viciously hunted the people of Derry across the town’s history. But IT’s arrival on earth made an impact from the very start, described by the Stephen King Wiki as “a massive cataclysmic event similar to an asteroid impact.” The monster is the extreme embodiment of failing to read the room.
IT existed on the earth for millions of years before Derry, Maine was built.
After forcing itself onto its new and involuntarily-shared home, IT proceeded to adopt a lazy bachelor lifestyle of sleeping, according to Screen Rant. Knowing the foul nature of this blood-lusting demon, it’s more interesting to hypothesize that IT ran about Ice-Age North America, feasting on Woolly Mammoths and Sabertooth Tigers. He had nothing else better to do until Derry was founded.
What other strange facts about IT do you know of? If you want more interesting facts regarding this shape-shifting nightmare, read Craig Klein’s article “What Does Pennywise Mean When He Says We’ll Float?”