Why Did IT Choose its Pennywise the Clown Form? WELCOME TO DERRY Reveals the Answer Eric Diaz | usagoldmines.com

Mention Stephen King’s It to anyone, and they’ll immediately think of the malevolent Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Some might think of Tim Curry from the ‘90s TV version, others the version from the feature films played by Bill Skarsgård. But the creature that haunts Derry, Maine can look like anyone or anything it wants to. It just chooses to appear as Pennywise for a good chunk of the time. But the seventh episode of Welcome to Derry finally revealed why this evil entity likes its Pennywise the Clown form so much when tormenting and killing the children (and sometimes adults) of Derry and how it came to wear this guise.

The episode opens with a flashback to the entity’s first 20th-century feeding cycle in Derry, in the year 1908. In the traveling Santini Brothers carnival show, we see the real Pennywise the Dancing Clown perform for a rather large group of children. The kids love his on-stage antics so much, that they swarm the stage and begin mimicking his dance moves, elated. They start popping all his red balloons until he ducks backstage to evade them. All the while, we see what looks like a child watching the show from a distance. But this is no child — this is the entity we know as It seeing the iconic Pennywise the Clown form it will become for the first time.

Shortly after, we witness a brief and sweet moment where Pennywise is sitting in his makeup room with his young daughter, Ingrid. She excitedly reveals her own clown makeup to her beloved Papa. Pennywise gives her the name Periwinkle the Clown, the same name her (presumably now deceased) mother used. The suggestion here is that Pennywise and Periwinkle were once circus performers together. Pennywise promises her a future as a father/daughter clown duo, and the two embrace. But this happiness is short-lived.

Later that night, Pennywise the Clown/Robert Gray is having a drink and a smoke after the show. Soon, out of the nearby woods, It, the “child” who was spying on him approaches him. It says rather bluntly, “The children are drawn to you.” He convinces Pennywise to go into the woods with him to help him find his missing mother. And as we see him take the clown by hand into the woods, we know that’s the end of the road for Pennywise. At least, it’s the end for the real Dancing Clown. This is just the beginning for the entity we now know as Pennywise the Clown, who has found his new favorite form.

Later, the carnival performers find Pennywise’s handkerchief covered in blood. It has his initials sewn in –“R.G.” for Robert Gray, his real name. His daughter, Ingrid, bursts into tears when the carnival performers tell her he was probably dragged away and eaten by wolves. But, of course, that didn’t happen. Instead, we learn on IT: Welcome to Derry, just how and why It came to choose his Pennywise the Clown form.

Like every human life It takes, It absorbs part of their personality and memories. Bob Gray’s ability to draw in children, let It find his favorite persona, especially as It prefers feeding on kids over adults. In Pennywise the Clown, It finds the perfect form to lure children in. Something we’d see work all the way until the ‘80s, when It used the clown form to draw Georgie into the sewers, and his grisly fate.

Over the next 54 years, every time Its feeding cycle would begin, It would use the form of Pennywise the Clown. Part of the reason is that it used the real-life daughter of Bob Gray, now Ingrid Kersh (Madeleine Stowe), to help him acquire victims. Ingrid was fooled into believing Pennywise the Clown was her real father. Although, as the seventh episode of Welcome to Derry revealed, on some level, she always knew he wasn’t. It was just using her father’s face and voice. After the Black Spot fire in 1962, It kills Ingrid’s husband, Mr. Kersh, in his Pennywise the Clown form and feeds on him, right in front of her. After staring into the Dead Lights, medics cart her off in an ambulance, presumably to a mental hospital. 

In the film It: Chapter Two, It assumes the form of an older “Mrs. Kersh,” in order to attack Beverly Marsh. We don’t know when the real Ingrid died, or how. However, it had to be some time before the events of that film, which take place in 2016. The real Ingrid Kersh would have been 120 years old by this point. Maybe future seasons of It: Welcome to Derry, which will take us back in time to previous Pennywise the Clown cycles, will further explore this twisted “father/daughter” relationship. And how It exploited the form of Pennywise not only during 1908, but also in 1935. We still have many unanswered questions about the entity that calls itself Pennywise. But, for now, thanks to Welcome to Derry, we’re content to know just why It takes on a clown form.

It: Welcome to Derry drops new episodes every Sunday on HBO Max.