In the 1986 book, the deadlights are a sea of destructive orange lights that drives most humans insane upon sight or ultimately kills them. It uses them to paralyze his victims before he completely consumes them. They are also probably responsible for the orange glow in Pennywise's eyes.
The Deadlights are orange writhing lights that exist in Todash Darkness. Pennywise uses the Deadlights to break a person's mind because one look at the Deadlights will make a person go insane due to it not being able to be comprehended by a human mind.
The deadlights are IT's true form in the macroverse. “You'll all float" is referring to the deadlights. The only person to have ever glimpsed the deadlights and come back is Audra Denbrough.
But, the Deadlights have a deeper connection to IT. The Deadlights are the true form of the being and are even its life essence. Some references have even been made to Deadlights being the name of the dimension that the IT species - called Glamours - originated from.
Once down in the bowels of the town, the Losers encircle an engraved leather vessel, and chant “Turn light into dark” until the pure rotten energy that forms the core of the demonic Pennywise—three orbs of light called the “Deadlights”—are sucked into the vessel, which the Losers then try to close.
Pennywise offers Georgie his boat back, but when Georgie attempts to reach out to it, Pennywise grabs Georgie's arm and bites it off, leaving Georgie to bleed to death in the rain.
Being such a powerful being, Pennywise clearly sensed that the yellow coloring was unsettling to Georgie, so he changed his eyes to blue on the fly as a way to make Georgie associate him with family and safety. This made Georgie all the easier to lure in to his bloody demise.
In It (2017), Pennywise changes the colour of his eyes from yellow to blue, which are the same colour as Bill's, to lure Georgie. "There were yellow eyes in there: the sort of eyes he had always imagined but never actually seen down in the basement.
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.
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.
Kersh tells Beverly she's the daughter of a carnival worker who happens to look just like Pennywise. As explained in Stephen King's IT, this man is Bob Gray — and IT, that pesky inter-dimensional force of evil, stole his likeness. For 85-year-old Gregson, the character of Mrs. Kersh was initially even more mystifying.
But they still have to face the clown-spider hybrid. When Richie gets caught in the Deadlights, Eddie hurls the fence post from the Neibolt house — that Bev told him “kills monsters if you believe it does” — at spider-Pennywise, wounding It and releasing Richie from his trance.
While playing Pennywise in IT and IT Chapter Two, Bill Skarsgard wears a set of prosthetic teeth, for times when the dancing clown really needs to show off his razor-sharp chompers. The problem is, these teeth caused Skarsgard to drool, and not just a little. The teeth caused full-on torrents of slobber from the actor.
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.
It can manipulate weak-willed people, making them indifferent to the horrific events that unfold, or even serve as accomplices. In the novel, It claims that its true name is Robert "Bob" Gray, but decided to be named “It”. Throughout the book, It is generally referred to as male, usually appearing as Pennywise.
Its physical form lives in our world as a shape-shifting manifestation of your worst nightmares, but in King's novel things get much, much weirder, Its true form is a Lovecraftian, ambiguous demigod that lives in the so-called Macroverse -- an unnameable and unknowable malevolent force that considers itself Eternal.
Why Art The Clown Is The Scarier Than Pennywise. First and foremost, Art the Clown is a human serial killer, unlike Pennywise. Though he does possess supernatural abilities, his kills are marked through very brutal — and very human — means.
But, the film makes clear, It (sometimes written as “IT”) isn't just a clown. Oh no. As detailed in King's novel, he's an ancient, cosmic being, described in the novel as an “Eater of Worlds”, who is able to adopt a variety of nasty guises.
A common interpretation of this phrase is that it refers to where the souls of IT's victims go after they die, as they wouldn't go to heaven nor hell, staying instead in the “deadlights”, which would be a sort of limbo, thus “floating” in that middle point for eternity.
In the novel, It's origins are nebulous. He took the form of a clown most frequently, Mr. Bob Gray or Pennywise, but his true form is an ancient eldritch entity from another universe who landed in the town that would become Derry by way of an asteroid and first awoke in 1715.
Pennywise the Clown is not a clown at all. The Pennywise the clown origin story sees an ancient, evil being that is perhaps as old as the universe itself. In the novel, however, the entity IT/Pennywise has a real name — Bob Gray. Bob Gray isn't human, however, and shares the same origin as IT.
Making Pennywise IT's go-to form wasn't a random decision from King, who initially envisioned the creature as a troll like the one in the story “Three Billy Goats Gruff”, but later changed it to a clown as he realized that children hate clowns more than trolls.
One of Pennywise's most recognizable features though is his ridiculously large head. My theory is that he's got such a big head because when he first came up with his Pennywise shape, he was basing his appearance on the humans that he had spent most of his time with: infants.
