It's very scary, and not just in a typical gory slasher or jump scare way; it generates actual tingles. (And if you're scared of clowns, it's even worse.) Things get pretty gory; characters are stabbed, impaled, and beaten with rocks and blunt objects.
Originating in Stephen King's iconic and universally adored IT (1986), Pennywise the Dancing Clown has become one of the most recognizable and utterly terrifying creatures the horror genre has ever produced.
But aside from his sinister grin, what makes Pennywise so terrifying is his multifaceted abilities. Not bound by the limits of physical reality, the terrifying creature has a plethora of deadly powers he employs to hunt the children of Derry.
Out of all the characters in Stephen King's works, the scariest is, without a doubt, Pennywise from It. Because Pennywise isn't given a tragic backstory in the films, all viewers know is that the killer clown is a paranormal entity who resides in drains and lures in children.
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Can Pennywise hurt you if you're not scared?
He's a demon and the general idea is if you are not scare, it will only be harder for Pennywise to kill you as he needs to bait you. He can kill you if he wants to anytime and doesn't care. Although, if you are not scared, he will either leave you be for a little while or just kill you in the instant .
According to It, when humans got scared, "all the chemicals of fear flooded the body and salted the meat". This is why he prefers to feast on children -- their fears are simple, pure, and powerful compared to the complex, pathological fears of adults.
They reach the conclusion that Pennywise has all of the adults under some sort of spell that prohibits them from seeing him. The adults of Derry are shown to be villainous in their own right as well. The adults of Derry are shown to be true villains of the story in the same way as Pennywise.
Throughout the novel (and its adaptations), IT kills many, many people, mostly children as their fears are easier to represent (as explained in the novel, the fears of adults are more complex and abstract, making it more difficult for IT to take a specific shape), but it never got to the Losers (at least not when they ...
Pennywise never seems to bother offing the older folks in Derry, but he has taken out older teenagers and young adults as well as children. It's established early on that Pennywise prefers the taste of children over other types of prey, but such a diet would undoubtedly raise too many questions.
Stephen King's IT introduced readers to a one-of-a-kind creature that can take any form, the most common one being Pennywise the Dancing Clown, and as menacing as it is, this creature has one big enemy it's truly scared of: Maturin, the turtle.
Pennywise does not need to scare his victims in order to kill them, he simply prefers to. The reason he does this is because it supppsedly tastes better. He says it's like "salting the meat." Pennywise feeds off the fear as much as he does the consumption of Children.
Though there are some IT characters just as scary as Pennywise, the film's main villain proves to be its deadliest, with a kill count that actually reaches into the tens of thousands. Reddit user u/angelholme estimates that Pennywise actually took the lives of between 12,117 and 18,011 people.
So in this case, Pennywise is an entity that feeds on fear and fear actually gives him power, but he needs a constant supply of it, otherwise his physical form weakens and can eventually be destroyed.
It slept for millions of years, then, when humans appeared in the area, It awoke and began a feeding cycle lasting about a year, feeding on people's fears and frequently assuming the shape of whatever its prey feared the most. After feeding, It would resume hibernation for approximately 30 years before reappearing.
Twenty-seven years after their first showdown with the murderous clown, the now-grown members of the Losers' Club converged on Derry to defeat Pennywise forever. In their final battle, the Losers' Club was able to kill Pennywise by reducing him to a child-like form as they overcame their fears.
There was a human Pennywise the Dancing Clown, but IT just takes his form. In the movie canon, Pennywise the Dancing Clown was a real person whose image IT decided was a terrifying enough basis for his child-scaring campaign.
This proves to be its undoing; Eddie nearly chokes it when it takes the form of a leper and is small enough for him to do that. When sufficiently weakened, the Losers kill It by crushing the heart it must have in the form of Pennywise the Dancing Clown.
If you read the book and seen IT Chapter 2, you would know that Pennywise is only the physical avatar that belongs to a much larger cosmic entity. What Pennywise actually eats or feeds off of,is Fear. We know that some of the bodies left by him have been partially eaten or at least chewed on, but why is this?
IT arrived on Earth through an event similar to an asteroid impact, landing in what would later become Derry, Maine. Once there, IT adopted its usual pattern of hibernation that lasted between 27 and 30 years, awakening to kill and eat and then going back to sleep.
(According to King's book, Pennywise actually is a spider—sort of. That's really just the closest visual approximation to what Pennywise's true form actually is, at least to our puny human minds.)
The spider-clown shrinks as the Losers hurl taunts at It, until it's tiny and weak enough that they pluck out its heart and squash it into nothingness. In the end, they defeat Pennywise by, uh, making him feel really bad about himself.
