After only 10 record-breaking days of release, It has made over $200 million at the box office, and the creepy clown film isn’t expected to slow down until after it becomes the highest grossing horror movie ever. No one’s happier about It‘s success than Pennywise himself, Bill Skarsgård (who finally found an excuse to break out his uncomfortable smile), except maybe Stephen King, who wrote the novel the movie is based on. But despite creating the dancing clown, the author was still terrified during It, especially in one scene.

In an interview with Collider, Barbara Muschietti, who produced It with her brother Andy (who also directed), talked about an e-mail King sent after seeing the movie. “And it’s something that actually, Stephen King, the first email he sent to Andy when he had seen the movie, the one fear he wrote back, he said, ‘I f*cking love the woman in the painting, it scared the sh*t out of me,’ so.” She called King her “hero,” and that she remembers “the feeling of Pet Sematary and Danse Macabre and the magic that had, all through our teens, he would bring, every time we’d read a book. It was mind blowing.”

The woman in the painting is horrifying, although it’s a puppy barking out rainbows compared to the (thankfully omitted) sewer orgy scene

(Via Collider)