10 Things You Never Knew About Pennywise

10. He's Older Than The Universe

It was Stephen King’s eighteenth novel and the title is an apt name for the book’s antagonist, a creature of indeterminate age and gender with no fixed identity. Though Pennywise is the creature’s preferred form, his backstory is far more complex than your average horror icon.

Pennywise existed long before The Big Bang (the cosmological model for the universe, not the TV show…. although the It miniseries does predate it by 17 years) in a dimension known as the Macroverse. After crash landing on Earth, he entered a state of hibernation and awoke in early 18th century America to sustain himself on human victims before returning to his slumber.

He subsequently adopted a hibernation pattern that allowed him to wake and claim new victims roughly every 27 years. In the mid-18th Century, for instance, he was behind the disappearance of 300 settlers in Derry.