How can America win its war against creepy clowns hanging out outside and being generally disturbing? Outside of Rob Zombie luring them into a spookiest of party buses, solutions have been rather slim. What can a weary nation do now? Asking Pennywise spawner Stephen King for his take isn’t a bad idea.
The Bangor Daily News, the hometown paper for the horror legend, asked King about the bizarre nightmare fuel epidemic that’s been particularly harsh in the Carolinas. Considering King’s credentials as a conjurer of scary things and the mental trauma It has wreaked on readers (and eventually viewers), he’s definitely a good expert to consult on the subject of sinister merrymakers.
“When I wrote my novel IT, 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,” King wrote this week in an email to the Bangor Daily News. “Take a little kid to the circus and show him a clown, he’s more apt to scream with fear than laugh.”
King suspects this current wave of creepy clowns to be a “low-level hysteria” not unlike what one might associate with Slender Man. His response to the Bangor Daily News cites previous examples of similar runs of “phantom clowns” generating hysteria in the ’80s.
“The clown furor will pass, as these things do, but it will come back, because under the right circumstances, clowns really can be terrifying,” offered King on what’s both a comforting and chilling note.
Of course, under other circumstances, clowns can make for best buds!
(Via Entertainment Weekly)