It’s Pennywise Has a Major Connection to Another Stephen King Villain (And They’ve Never Appeared in a Movie)

IT: Welcome to Derry was a successful spinoff launch for HBO and Warner Bros., not to mention another great brand-builder for author Stephen King. In fact, the longform backstory of Pennywise the Clown intrigued a lot of fans so much that there’s been an uptick in deep dives into Stephen King lore. A lot of casual fans are therefore learning, for the first time, that Stephen King’s works are linked in one shared universe.

There is one aspect of Pennywise’s lore that Welcome to Derry only hinted at in Season 1, but for hardcore Stephen King fans, it was an important one. That’s because, for the first time, onscreen, there were Easter egg hints that the entity known as Pennywise is connected to another major Stephen King work: The Dark Tower, and a major villain whose influence is found across many Stephen King works.

Pennywise Is Connected to Stephen King’s Biggest Villain

It (best known as Pennywise the Dancing Clown in corporeal form) is an entity that is theorized to come from the Macroverse, a realm that is home of several major entities or locations from King lore (including “The Turtle” and “The Other”). However, it’s also been implied in King’s massive sci-fi/horror opus, The Dark Tower, that Pennywise is a being who is also connected to another evil god-like being: The Crimson King.

Who Is Stephen King’s Crimson King?

The Crimson King isn’t just the main villain of The Dark Tower series: it’s been pretty well established by now that he is the evil force behind the entire Stephen King multiverse, and all the many stories the author tells within it. Without getting too deep into the web of lore, the Crimson King is a bastard child of Arthur Eld, the greatest ancient warrior and defender of the Dark Tower (the nexus of realities), who inspired the legend of King Arthur and Excalibur. At some point, Arthur Eld mated with a demonic insectoid woman of the “Prim” (the primordial darkness before the Dark Tower established the light of existence) named “The Crimson Queen”; that child became The Crimson King, a powerful entity hell-bent on destroying the Dark Tower and remaking existence in the dark image of the Prim.

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While the Crimson King only appears in certain texts (mainly the latter installments of The Dark Tower), his presence, mentions of his existence, or schemes he masterminds, run back as far as 1984, in the Stephen King novel Insomnia. That’s all to say: it’s a villain King has been seeding into lore from very early in his career, and returns to often.

How Is Pennywise Connected to The Crimson King?

No story or text from Stephen King directly addresses or explains a connection between Pennywise and the Crimson King, but the circumstantial evidence is all over the place.

In The Dark Tower, it’s revealed that the Crimson King is in contact with the “Deadlights,” aka the collection of lights that exist within Pennywise, which It uses to hypnotize victims and break their minds, before consuming them. It’s been theorized that the Crimson King and It are from the same family of entities, in that they both are known to exist simultaneously in physical form and metaphysical forms like the Deadlights. The Crimson King is also a “Were-Spider” who can transform into an insect-like creature, not dissimilar to Pennywise’s “true” form in the IT novel. Both have claimed to be a god-like, “Eater of Worlds,” which again suggests that they come from a similar kind of origin.

However, the exact nature of a “family relation” between Pennywise and Crimson King has not been explicitly defined by Stephen King. That hasn’t stopped fans from theorizing that Pennywise may be the offspring of the Crimson King (like Mordred Deschain), while others believe that It is a sibling of the Crimson King, also born of the Eld line. Other theories go so far as to say that Pennywise is just one of many forms the Crimson King takes: both characters target children, so the Crimson King may just have adopted the form the clown to better hunt for victims on the Earthly plane (as seen in Welcome to Derry).

That’s the fun of a TV show like Welcome to Derry: It has the freedom and space to build on these implied connections, in more significant ways. Season 1 of the HBO series revealed that the mystical prison constructed by the Native American people of Derry, to trap Pennywise, used 13 shards of meteorite, which directly mirrors the structure of the 12 beams and Dark Tower that hold up existence. The show also revealed that the experiments the military are doing in Derry tap into Pennywise’s connection to Stephen King’s “Macroverse,” where the Dark Tower and other major entities reside.

In fact, Welcome to Derry showrunner Andy Muschietti has outright said that the connection between Pennywise and The Dark Tower lore will be revealed in later seasons of Welcome to Derry: “The purpose of the show, among others, is to open a window to the other side… and give the audience the feeling,” Muschietti explained to TV Insider. “Everything that is on the other side, it’s connected to the Dark Tower because it’s the same universe, the macroverse.”

So could The Crimson King appear in IT: Welcome to Derry? It sounds possible! For now, you can stream Season 1 of the series on HBO Max, while Season 2 is in development. Let us know your best Stephen King theories on the ComicBook Forum!