The features that we often define individuals by—their skin, their hair, their smile—with Pennywise and the Joker, these features are abnormal and disturbing. There's something twisted about them. They don't feel human.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 (also commonly known as Pennywise) is an ancient alien/eldritch monster and the title character and the overall secondary antagonist of the Stephen King multiverse, serving as the titular main antagonist of the It Miniseries and it's two film adaptations IT and IT: Chapter Two.
And if his victim believes him to be powerless, he will become powerless. And so the group figures out that their best bet is, essentially, to bully the bully: They mock Pennywise, telling him he isn't scary. Humiliated, Pennywise begins to shrink, transforming into an almost Benjamin Button–like, melted clown-baby.
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.
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.
If he feeds on the actual emotion of fear why eat people. Mike in the book states theorizes that this is because the fact that children imagine that the worst thing a monster does to you, is eat you when it catches you. Essentially, we drive the monster to that.
The entire town of Derry is essentially infected with ITs evil. That's why children are bullied, parents are abusive, and adults seem not to see the rampant dysfunction around them.
Almost certainly the most well-known evil clown (save for Batman¹s archnemesis, the Joker; more on him later), Pennywise is modeled after real-life serial killer John Wayne Gacy, aka Pogo the Clown, a.k.a. "The Clown Killer." Gacy was convicted of sexually assaulting and killing 33 boys in 1980; he posed as a clown ...
Now, when the Losers crushed IT's heart while in its spider form, they killed IT's physical form and severed its connection to Derry, thus why the town was destroyed, but the true entity still lives in another plane of existence.
Georgie's death was unique in It. While Pennywise's later victims were composed exclusively of high school students, Georgie was only six when he died. The added horror of killing someone so young and innocent immediately established Pennywise as a terrifying villain.
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. The Losers come to believe It may be female after seeing it in the form of a monstrous giant spider that lays eggs.
Georgie Elmer Denbrough is a fictional character created by Stephen King from his 1986 epic horror novel It. Georgie is the younger brother of Bill Denbrough, and falls prey to Pennywise the Clown.
The novel explains that IT landed on Earth during an asteroid impact and established itself under the land Derry would be later built on, and initially preyed on indigenous tribes. From that point of view, IT/Pennywise would be billions of years old, but his clown shape wouldn't be that old.
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 .
Art the Clown, from the Terrifier franchise, has fast become an icon amongst horror fans, and is far more brutal than IT's Pennywise. While Pennywise the Dancing Clown developed audiences' fear of clowns in IT, the emergence of Art the Clown in Terrifier brought this to a whole new, scarier level.
Kersh is Pennywise's daughter. Or at least the daughter of the man who originally had Pennywise's face. Additionally, the trailer offers a first glimpse of Bill (James McAvoy), Ben (Jay Ryan), Richie (Bill Hader), Eddie (James Ransone), and Mike (Isaiah Mustafa) back together.
