Why does pennywise turn into a spider

Since all of the Losers' animosity towards Pennywise was derived from IT's clown form, retaining him as a clown in his spider-shape helped make Losers fighting IT - and ultimately winning - feel much more personal and cathartic. John Orquiola is a Features staff writer who has been with Screen Rant for four years. As a lover of film and film theory, John wrote humorous movie reviews on his blog, Back of the Head, which got him noticed by Screen Rant.

John can be found on Twitter BackoftheHead if you want to see photos of the food he eats. By John Orquiola Published Sep 09, As in the ABC miniseries, which starred Tim Curry as the terrifying clown, Pennywise takes the form of a giant spider for the final battle.

Each of the Losers then faces another individual nightmare, and each almost dies. Richie is nearly inconsolable, and remains that way through the end of the fight and afterward. And if his victim believes him to be powerless, he will become powerless.

However, Its favorite and most common form is that of a circus performer named "Pennywise the Dancing Clown," as most small children love a clown [2] and generally, it seems that the people in Derry happily accepted the presence of a stray circus performer. At the same time, many people are afraid of clowns, making them an easy fear to exploit.

Its real name if indeed, it has one is unknown. This may be an allusion to real-life child cannibal Albert Fish, who reportedly used the name "Robert Gray" as an alias. He may also get his first name from Robert "Bob" Bell, the man who originally portrayed Bozo the clown. Its primary goal is to feed on humans, generally preferring children over adults since they were easier to scare and manipulate.

According to the creature, frightened flesh tastes better and uses fear to "salt the meat". It originated in an undiscovered void containing and surrounding our entire Universe, another far off universe referred to as the "Macroverse. Other evidence from this series suggests It is the creation of a separate omnipotent creator referred to as "the Other" who may be the entity Gan.

This "Other" helps the defeat of it at the end, and may also be responsible for the creation of " The Turtle ", who is It's natural enemy. In It the novel, the Turtle refers to It as his "brother". It may be one of, or a Twinner of, the six greater demon elementals mentioned by Mia in Song of Susannah as the Spider is not one of the Beam Guardians.

It's possible that there are other creatures of the same species as It, due to the fact that It is revealed to be pregnant. It arrived on Earth in a massive cataclysmic event similar to an asteroid impact, landing in a location in North America that would eventually become Derry, Maine.

Once people settled over this location, It adopted its usual pattern of a year hibernation, waking to kill and eat. Each awakening and return to hibernation is sometimes marked by a violent and tragic act, such as a mass murder, suicide or weather event.

In the period between, a series of child murders occurring in Derry are never taken too seriously or solved. It is outwardly explained that a series of murders, no matter how gruesome, don't get reported if they happen in the small town.

However, the real reason is that the influence of It prevents anyone from investigating too deeply. The film places those events in He then slaughters Adrian in front of his lover before presumably using his blood to write a message to Mike about its return.

As such, It wasted no time in hunting the children of Derry, such as when it uses empathy to lure a young girl named Victoria into getting closer to it under the false assumption that he'd help make the birthmark on her face disappear.

To further torment Bill, It sends him a skateboard, explicitly letting him know that it was going to go after the young Dean next. Realizing that Dean was heading to the carnival, he chases after him into the hall of mirrors. Unfortunately, It gets the upper hand and gruesomely kills the young boy in front of him.

Horrified to have lost another young boy after Georgie, Bill decides to head to the Neibolt house to personally kill It after Henry wounds Mike and Eddie. After each member of the Losers Club went down their own quests to retrieve artifacts from their pasts to complete the Ritual of Chud, the ritual seems to work when it traps Its deadlights inside of the vase, but it goes awry.

A giant version of Pennywise emerges, revealing that the original natives who had performed the ritual were immediately slaughtered by It. This version of It is a combination of its default form Pennywise the Dancing Clown and the Giant Spider as described in the book. It then warps the Losers Club into different nightmarish scenarios, but they inevitably overcome their fears. It traps Richie in its deadlights, forcing Eddie to grab the pole Beverly gave him earlier and attacks Pennywise with it under the belief that it could kill It.

Unfortunately, Pennywise impales Eddie with one of its spiderlike appendages, swings him around like a ragdoll, and tosses him, leaving him with a large wound in his abdomen. This one act proves to be its undoing, however, when the Losers Club realize that in order to defeat it, they had to make it believe it was smaller. Despite its insistence that it was the "eater of worlds," the remaining Losers insult the clown repeatedly until It is forced into a smaller, infantile form.

It attempts to lash out at Mike, but is too weakened. To its horror, Mike reaches into its chest and grabs its beating heart. It tries to grab it to no avail, and is left crying like a baby, its final words being "Look at you The Losers each mutually take ahold of the heart and crush it slowly.

It reacts in pain until the heart exploded into a pasty substance, killing it and avenging everything IT has caused. It falls silent as its body turning to ash. After its death, Richie tries to coerce Eddie's corpse awake, not accepting that he was truly gone. His attempts of taking the body with him fail when Its lair and the Neibolt house start to crumble and collapse in response to its master's demise.

The Losers are forced to leave Eddie's body in It's lair, and the Neibolt house collapses on itself, sinking into a hole in the ground. Pennywise the Dancing Clown in his silver suit with orange pom-pom buttons, as described in the novel. It is a deadly predator that primarily hunts for food. But only if it can scare its prey before feasting on it. It is a predator of humans, and prefers children to adults.

Most importantly, It desires to consume those it has made terrified of Itself. The creature implies that this enhances the flavour. It's preference for children prey may be due to how they taste, but also may be due to the fact that children are easier to scare.

Its only goals are to eat and sleep. That is to say, It smells like all of Derry, the adults there have just lived with it for so long they never noticed. It Chapter Two more explicitly suggests Pennywise was an actual clown who may have been possessed by It, just as Henry Bowers is in the movies. This is implied when Beverly Marsh Jessica Chastain visits the apartment she grew up in with her abusive father.

Bev then examines old photos that look far too ancient, even for an elderly woman in Muschietti appears to be implying Pennywise was a human familiar who It corrupted and then enjoyed so much It incorporated his shape into its file cabinet of monsters. Was Bob Gray a real person? Is he incarnated in that thing because Bob Gray played a clown? He knew it attracted children, so that was a perfect bait?

We can thereby conclude that in It Chapter Two that Bob Gray was a 19th century clown or thereabouts in a traveling circus who made the mistake of coming to Derry. In the book, this is both clearer and more confusing. Those deadlights, cosmic beams of malevolent energy that Pennywise reveals by opening his mouth in the movies, are probably the closest thing to Its true final form. The ending of the book—which gets into some cosmic weirdness that Muschietti wisely avoids—reveals that It is older than a few million or a few billion years.

Indeed, It is older than our entire universe as its true form exists beyond our understanding of existence. It comes from the Macroverse, which wraps around our universe, and It is a sibling to a giant space turtle called Maturin, who created our universe by accident when he had a tummy ache and barfed it out.

This transposes his consciousness across the universe and drags him to its limits.