ABCFor many people, the name Tim Curry brings up his iconic performance as Dr. Frank N. Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, his scheming butler in Clue, or perhaps the haughty concierge in Home Alone 2. But for people coming of age 35 years ago, Curry became the stuff of nightmares as Pennywise the Dancing Clown in the 1990 ABC miniseries It, based on Stephen King's doorstop novel. There’s always been something unsettling about clowns, but Curry crystallized our fears with a performance that traumatized a generation of viewers and set the gold standard for all evil clowns to come, including Bill Skarsgård's later interpretation of Pennywise in the modern It films.The miniseries is successful in many ways — there are several chilling sequences — but it also suffers from its network TV origins, which imposed commercial breaks every 15 minutes or so. By necessity, screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen and co-writer/director Tommy Lee Wallace streamlined much of the story and split the book’s parallel timelines, in which a group of friends confront an ancient, evil entity in the sewers of Derry, Maine, first as children and then again as adults, into two halves over two nights. The acting by both the children and adult actors is uneven, as are some of the visual effects. But Tim Curry’s portrayal of Pennywise continues to stand out.Thanks to his outrageous breakout debut in Rocky Horror, as well as his stylized work in Clue, Curry had a reputation as a comic actor, even after playing the diabolical Lord of Darkness in Ridley Scott’s 1985 cult classic Legend. But perhaps it was the actor’s underlying combination of menace and humor, a part of his characters going back to Frank N. Furter, that convinced Tommy Lee Wallace that Curry was right for Pennywise, even as actors like Harvey Fierstein, Roddy McDowall, Malcolm McDowell, and even shock-rocker Alice Cooper were considered.According to the Cleveland Clinic, coulrophobia — the fear of clowns — often stems from the way clown makeup distorts the performer’s features, hiding their real face and emotions and creating feelings of unease and distrust. So it’s no surprise that clowns have been an unsettling part of screen entertainment since the earliest days of cinema, from Lon Chaney’s damaged former scientist in He Who Gets Slapped (1924) right through to Jack Nicholson’s Joker in Batman (1989).Some viewers may have had their childhoods ruined, but these kids had an even worse time. | ABCYet Curry’s performance as Pennywise — and the fact that a vast number of people, including children, watched It when it premiered — escalated the frightening potential of the pop culture clown to a new level. "The portrayal of clowns went from 'Yeah, we're probably gonna have some clowns over for little Johnny's birthday party' to... probably not,” says Tony Dakota, who appeared in the miniseries as the doomed Georgie Denbrough, in the documentary Pennywise: The Story of It. Curry adds in the same documentary, “A lot of people have told me that It poisoned their childhood.”What made Curry’s Pennywise so jarring was his jauntiness. In the It films, Bill Skarsgård’s interpretation, while fantastic, is visually darker, shabbier, and more alien (remember that drifting eye?) with a high-pitched, whispery voice that oozes creepiness. Curry’s clown is brightly garbed and more human-looking, and his voice is that of a Borscht Belt comedian from the Bronx. “Tim Curry managed to capture the humor that a clown can bring,” says Chris Eastman, who played Belch Huggins, in The Story of It. “And then just managed to switch it and be this magnificent, evil villain that would eat you like that.”Curry’s Pennywise had a dark, terrifying playfulness. | ABCWhen It premiered, it had only been a decade since John Wayne Gacy, who performed as a clown at children’s parties, was convicted of murdering at least 33 people, further soiling the reputation of a profession once known more for harmless circus entertainers or kids’ show hosts like Bozo the Clown. By the time Pennywise arrived on network TV via Curry’s mostly improvised characterization, psyches both young and old were ready to be, as the actor said, “poisoned” by the ancient, malevolent entity with a painted face and a handful of balloons.The influence of Curry’s evil clown lives on 35 years later, not just in the big-screen version of It, but in the slew of murderous, grinning harlequins that have followed since, including Captain Spaulding from Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses (2001), the Clöyne in Jon Watts’ directorial debut, Clown (2014), and, of course, Art the Clown in the recent Terrifier trilogy. Curry himself poetically captured the unnerving nature of his leering, prancing jester — and perhaps all the malignant clowns that followed him — in a 1990 interview with Fangoria magazine, saying, “I think of him as a smile gone bad.”