What’s worse than Clowns? Nothing…
Coulrophobia: Medical term for fear of clowns.
When you look back through the catalogs of classic horror movie villains and monsters you tend to see the main stage characters in the forefront. Classic creatures like The Werewolf, Dracula, The Mummy, Frankenstein’s Monster, even Swamp Thing, all have left their marks forever in cinema. When you look towards the more modern end of the spectrum, you get the brutal killers like Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, and Michael Myers. What most people tend to overlook is, in my opinion the most terrifying category of all horror movie monsters…The Clowns, more specifically, Pennywise.
We all know Stephen King is a horror legend, and his tale of how a group of small town kids are tormented by an eternal being that takes the form of a circus clown is easily my favorite and most feared. I remember as a kid my parents took me to a circus in Boston and we sat in the very front row. I was horrified when the clowns came out and one of those monstrosities came right up to me and sprayed joke flower water right in my face. Needless to say lil Rob sobbed for what may have been minutes or hours, but we left and I have never gone to a circus ever since. Years later my best friend Mike and I stumbled across the movie It on television…and we have both been haunted by steady streams of nightmares ever since.
Entertainment Weekly dropped the first image of this generations Pennywise, who is being played by the fantastic young Swedish actor Bill Skarsgard. Skarsgard hasn’t been in anything too big up until this point in his career. I was a big fan of Netflix’s Original Series Hemlock Grove, in which he plays Roman Godfrey, but that is about as much as I have seen form him. Regardless, his Pennywise looks truly menacing, but he has some enormous clown shoes to fill after Tim Curry’s titular performance as the dancing clown in the 1990 original It. As fucked as that movie got me when I was a kid it is still almost a tradition for me and Mikey to watch it once every year or so when we get home shitfaced from a long night of drinking. It pretty much reminds us of our mortality and we need that as punishment for the ridiculous shit we get ourselves into when we are drunk. So shout out to the OG Best Friend Mikey, we have to watch it one more time before I leave for grad school. Needless to say, I cannot wait to see what Andres Mushietti and Bill Skarsgard can do with this film.
