John Wayne Gacy, one of the most notorious serial killers of the twentieth century, was caught in 1978 after a reign of terror that shocked not only his local Chicago suburb, but the world. Convicted of thirty-three murders, Gacy had hidden twenty-six of his victims in the crawl space of his home. His victims were all male, many of them teenagers. At a time when serial murder was rather a new concept, the notion that Gacy was a successful businessman and community volunteer made the reality all the more terrifying. And on top of it all, the images of Gacy as “Pogo the Clown” brought goosebumps. Gacy enjoyed performing for children as Pogo, dressing in the typical Auguste style with his signature triangular eye paint. Along with the Joker and Pennywise, Pogo has joined the pantheon of evil clowns, all the more horrendous, as he did not spring from the imagination, but is the real thing.
In the winter of 2017, before It hit theaters, researchers published a study in the European Journal of Pediatrics. Their aim was to discover if children in pediatric wards were scared of medical clowns, and if so, why. Medical clowns have long been a hospital tradition, think Robin Williams’s wacky character in Patch Adams (1998). The researchers used a sample of over one thousand children, and involved the medical clowns in the study. After the clowns entertained the children for about ten minutes, with the typical tricks and prop gags, they filled out a form about how many of the young patients experienced coulrophobia, or a fear of clowns. Children and parents voiced their opinions as well.
Out of the 1160 children, only 14 children experienced coulrophobia of any severity (1.2 percent). The average age of children experiencing coulrophobia was three and a half years (range one to fifteen years). Most of the children who experienced coulrophobia were girls (twelve out of fourteen). Of the fourteen children experiencing coulrophobia, six had it in a severe form (43 percent) responding to the clown’s visit with significant fear, crying, and apposition behavior. The rest of the patients exhibited moderate fear (eight children, 57 percent). Based on the a-priori determined criteria, none responded with mild coulrophobia. The anxiety responses observed by the research assistant were variable: crying, anger, standing still, and holding on to the caregiver. Eight out of the fourteen participants in the coulrophobia group responded with crying during the medical clown visit. Out of fourteen participants in the coulrophobia group, twelve were reported as trying to avoid further contact with the medical clown (hiding, staying in the room, etc.)4
This led the researchers to conclude that it was a relatively low number of patients who had actual coulrophobia. Their reasoning was that evil clowns were not as prevalent in the media as they had been in the 1980s. Also, the medical clowns in the study wore little makeup, which may have been a contributing factor. We have to wonder, with the advent of the two new It films, if the study would have different results now?
In 2016, there were over one hundred suspicious clown sightings in the United States which led to some arrests.
One reason clowns may bring us unease is the concept of the uncanny. German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch first coined the term, with Sigmund Freud further developing the idea. The uncanny essentially refers to something familiar though mysterious. Clowns are humans, yet their makeup, dress, and behavior are in contrast to what we expect. Freud wrote:
Frightening things would then constitute the uncanny; and it must be a matter of indifference whether what is uncanny was itself originally frightening or whether it carried some other effect. In the second place, if this is indeed the secret nature of the uncanny we can understand why linguistic has extended das Hemlich (‘Homey’) into its opposite das Unhemlich; for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something that is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it through process of repression.5
While this concept may sound esoteric in the writings of Freud, it really comes down to the unnatural feeling we often sense around humanlike robots, dolls, and those pesky clowns.
If you have coulrophobia, consider gradual exposure therapy led by a professional. By looking at pictures, videos, and eventually being in the presence of clowns, you can train your brain to lose the fear!6
The creature living in the sewers of Derry will do anything to scare the children above. They taste better scared! No wonder it plays upon their greatest internal fears to lure them in. Little did it know that the Losers Club would work together to kill it. Pennywise is an extension of the creature, yet he has become the face of It, spawning many look-alikes in haunted houses across the world. There was even a surge of clowns terrorizing small-town America in 2016. From Ohio to South Carolina and beyond, reports of clowns stalking the night flooded emergency services. In the documentary Wrinkles the Clown (2019), an unidentified man chronicles his quest to scare “misbehaving” children, paid by their parents.
If the presence of a clown makes you uncomfortable, you can thank Stephen King. While the media might not be all to blame, it certainly seems to exacerbate our already unnerved reaction to the uncanny. As the author himself says, “Clowns are scary. There’s just no way around that. Clowns can be as angry as they want, and that’s their right—they’re clowns!”7
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Drawing of the Three
If you’re familiar with Stephen King’s work, then you notice when the number nineteen pops up. In his introduction to The Drawing of the Three, King recalls nineteen was the age he was inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings to write an epic of his own. He put it off, but kept the thought in his mind. Years later, while watching Sergio Leone’s movie The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), King realized he wanted to combine Tolkien’s sense of quest and magic set against a majestic Western backdrop.
King’s other inspiration for the series included Robert Browning’s 1855 poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” Several character names are contained within it and the plot even mirrors some of the imagery created by it:
Thus, I had so long suffer’d, in this quest,
Heard failure prophesied so oft, been writ
So many times among “The Band”—to wit,
The knights who to the Dark Tower’s search address’d
Their steps—that just to fail as they, seem’d best.
And all the doubt was now—should I be fit?1
The poem has been interpreted by many and after Stephen King read it in the late 1960s, it stuck with him.
Browning never says what that tower is, but it’s based on an even older tradition about Childe Roland that’s lost in antiquity. Nobody knows who wrote it, and nobody knows what the Dark Tower is. So, I started off wondering: What is this tower? What does it mean? And I decided that everybody keeps a Dark Tower in their heart that they want to find. They know it’s destructive and it will probably mean the end of them, but there’s that urge to make it your own or to destroy it, one or the other. So, I thought: Maybe it’s different things to different people, and as I write along I’ll find out what it is to Roland.2