Stephen Kings Speaks About Terrifying Clown Sightings In US

Stephen King is kind of responsible for generations growing up scared of clowns.

Thanks to Pennywise from his 1986 horror novel ‘It’, played terrifyingly by Tim Curry in the 1990 mini-series, clowns are now something of a horror staple (see also Twisty from the anthology series ‘American Horror Story’).

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But the novelist has now spoken out after a rash of real-life creepy clown sightings in the North Carolina and South Carolina areas, causing anxiety for residents and issues for local police.

There have been sightings in Greenville, Greensboro and Wintson-Salem, with local law enforcement not seeing the funny side.

“It’s illegal, it’s dangerous, it’s inappropriate, it’s creating community concern,” Greenville Police Chief Ken Miller told reporters last week, warning that arrests will be made if the clowning continues.

“We are taking these reports very seriously, especially because of the allegations that they were trying to lure kids to the woods,” he added.

So King’s local newspaper, the Bangor Daily News in Maine, got in touch with him to get his take.

“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,” he wrote in an email.

“The clown furor will pass, as these things do, but it will come back, because under the right circumstances, clowns really can be terrifying.”

As for why he chose the clown to scare people with in the first place, he added: “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.

“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.”

And that’s Stephen King saying that…

Image credits: Rex Features/Getty