15 Scariest Stephen King Movie Moments

7. Meet Pennywise - It (1990)

The original 1990 mini-series/movie of It might not be the best adaptation (and it's aged quite badly), but it did basically give the world its obsession with demonic clowns and Tim Curry's performance as Pennywise transcends the limitations of the rest of it by some distance.

There are lots of moments that could have made it into this ranking from his antics, but there's no getting round the fact that his first appearance is the most iconic. His smiling face in the storm drain is one of the staples of horror movie visual vocabulary. It doesn't even have the overt gore or the unsubtle attempts to scare that the 2017 remake did (necessarily to ramp things up) - it's simply about Curry's charisma, and it's arguably scarier because of how out of place it all is.

It was the scene that launched a million memes, and if it wasn't for it, we wouldn't have the superior remake.