20 best movie villains of all time

Pennywise (It)

If you have a clown phobia, you might want to skip to the next slide ASAP, or else you’ll float too! Ha ha ha ha!

Pennywise The Dancing Clown is one of the personifications of the ancient evil entity, IT, which can take many forms. What makes IT so dangerous and so terrifying is that this entity can morph into any other person, animal, or object in order to mess with the mind of their victim, to make them doubt what is real and what is fake. IT feeds on the flesh of humans, especially children, and their fear fuels them.

Pennywise is one of the most common forms that IT takes, and probably the most terrifying, because hello, clowns are scary as can be. Pennywise terrorizes the children of Derry, Maine and seems to have brainwashed all the adults of the town, who don’t seem to care that much when their children go missing. Pennywise lures children in by appearing to be a lovable circus performer (but come on, look at him, he is terrifying), like in the 2017 film adaptation, when he lures in Georgie with a red balloon.

Pennywise originates from the 1986 Stephen King novel IT, which was adapted into a TV mini-series in 1990 and the most recent 2017 film (and its upcoming 2019 sequel). In every iteration of the story, Pennywise is blood-curdlingly evil without even trying. No matter what form they take, whether Pennywise or another form that IT can transform into, they can instill fear into the bravest of kids — and now Pennywise has made a whole new generation of horror-loving children scared of clowns all over again!