After reports ofscary clownsightings started surfacing in North Carolina and South Carolina this week, some suspected that it may be a publicity stunt for the new adaptation ofStephen King’sIT, which is currently in production. Today we have confirmation that this rash of clown behavior has no connection to the movie, whileStephen Kingshares his thoughts on this new clown outbreak.
While it isn’t illegal to dress up as a clown in either North Carolina or South Carolina, there have been a half-dozen reports of suspicious clown behavior in an area along the border of both states, which includes Greenville, South Carolina, Greensboro, North Carolina and Winston-Salem, North Carolina. A family in Greenville said that they saw a clown attempt to lure their children into the woods, while a Greensboro man chased off another clown with a machete. TheBangor Daily News, the newspaper ofStephen King’s hometown of Bangor, Maine, reached out to the author about this recent phenomena. Here’s what he had to say.
“I suspect it’s a kind of low-level hysteria, like Slender Man, or the so-called Bunny Man, who purportedly lurked in Fairfax County, Virginia, wearing a white hood with long ears and attacking people with a hatchet or an axe. Theclown furorwill pass, as these things do, but it will come back, because under the right circumstances, clowns really can be terrifying.”
Production onITis currently under way in Canada, far from these North and South Carolina sightings, but this isn’t the first time creepy clown sightings have surfaced. There were numerous suspicious clown sightings in the 1980s in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Arizona and other locales, but they happened before theITbook was published in 1986. Here’s whatStephen Kinghad to say aboutITand why he createdPennywise the Clown.
“When I wrote my novelIT, I set it in Bangor, because it’s a town with a tough and violent history. I chose Pennywise the Clown as the face which the monster originally shows the kiddies because kids love clowns, but they also fear them; clowns with their white faces and red lips are so different and so grotesque compared to ‘normal’ people. Take a little kid to the circus and show him a clown, he’s more apt to scream with fear than laugh.Lon Chaneysaid (or is reputed to have said), ‘There’s nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight.’ Meaning, I suppose, a clown seen outside of its normal milieu, in the circus or at the fair. If I saw a clown lurking under a lonely bridge (or peering up at me from a sewer grate, with or without balloons), I’d be scared, too.”
It isn’t known exactly what started this recent rash of clown sightings, but they have nothing to do with the movieIT.Bill Skarsgardis playing Pennywise, who terrorizes a group of kids known as The Losers Club. The movie that is shooting now will be the first part of this sprawling adaptation, with the second movie featuring adult versions of The Losers Club, who must reunite to take down Pennywise once and for all.
