12 Movie Monsters Way Scarier Than Pennywise The Clown

Thanks to the success of the "It" cinematic duology as well as "It: Welcome to Derry" on HBO Max, Pennywise the Clown (Bill Skarsgård) has enjoyed newfound prominence in the horror realm. It's easy to see why, as Pennywise exists as a malevolent being capable of exposing (mostly) children to their deepest fears. Pennywise's powers include shapeshifting, so you never fully know where he's about to strike next, as well as the ability to control the minds of others. Pennywise plays with his food before devouring whatever soul was unfortunate enough to wind up within his grasp.

Skarsgård's delightfully twisted performance (in addition to Tim Curry's before him) has turned Pennywise into an icon as well as a fun Halloween costume. But is Pennywise truly the scariest movie monster of all time? Pennywise is plenty scary, but he also has one of the worst death scenes of all time in "It: Chapter Two" when he deflates like a balloon because the Losers Club made fun of him. Any entity that can be defeated by a mean comment on reddit can't be all that terrifying.

That's slightly in jest, but you'd likely find the following horror movie monsters way scarier if you encountered them in real life. For my money, Pennywise isn't even the scariest horror movie clown.

Some will tell you the real monster in "The Babadook" is grief, as the widowed Amelia (Essie Davis) tries her best to raise her son Sam (Noah Wiseman) following the death of her husband. Grief is terrible and all, but it becomes manifest within the Babadook itself, a creature that becomes unleashed on them after reading a storybook. We don't see much of the actual Babadook throughout the film, but its presence is always there. It's less about what the Babadook does and more about what it manages to do to Amelia. 

In "It," Pennywise amplifies Henry Bowers' (Nicholas Hamilton) hatred and rage, turning him even more sadistic to where he murders his father and goes after the Losers Club with greater gusto. Honestly, most bullies in Stephen King stories are sociopaths to begin with, so Pennywise probably didn't have to try too hard to turn Henry mad. But imagine instead of your bully acting slightly stranger than usual, your own mother was going after you. 

Amelia grows more isolated and eventually lashes out at Sam, trying to kill him. There's nowhere for Sam to turn, no one else he can trust. Even though he saves his mother at the end, the Babadook is still there, a piece of their anger and hatred they will forever have to deal with. 

Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) has had a bizarre evolution, but he's grown into an iconic horror movie villain who arguably surpasses Pennywise. In the first "Terrifier," Art is a human serial killer. That doesn't sound as bad as some of the supernatural threats on this list, but it's haunting to think that a human being could decapitate someone or saw his victim in half while they're still alive. After dying, Art gets resurrected via supernatural means and he becomes even more sadistic in the sequels.

Pennywise and Art both torture their victims first. Pennywise has a knack for subjecting his victims to horrifying visions, like making Beverly (Sophia Lillis) in "It" witness a geyser of blood coming out of the sink. That's plenty scary in its own right, but usually when an adult enters the room the child realizes what they saw wasn't real. 

When Art tortures someone, they're aware every second of the way. "Terrifier 2" has a scene that's too brutal even for hardcore horror fans where Art savagely maims Allie (Casey Hartnett). The scene goes on for minutes where you, as the audience, feel every piece of flesh getting hacked off and Art keeps Allie alive just long enough for her mom to see her in a mutilated state. With Art the Clown, you'll be begging for death long before it finally comes.

Pennywise is a terrifying shapeshifter, but even he would need to bow down to the scariest shapeshifter in all of horror, namely the alien from 1982's "The Thing." The creature infiltrates an isolated research station in Antarctica via the form of a dog. Once inside, it can perfectly replicate any organic being, including one of the many humans inside. The rest of the researchers now have no idea who to trust until it's too late, as the thing can make itself known at any point to assimilate others into its form.

The alien from "The Thing" is the true definition of cosmic horror. It is an unknowable presence taking bizarre forms that are difficult to comprehend. At least the Losers Club in "It" have one another they can rely on. With this shapeshifting entity, no one is able to trust anyone else, and that includes MacReady (Kurt Russell) and Childs (Keith David) at the end of "The Thing." They'll both likely freeze to death because they can't allow the possibility of that creature getting loose, so their paranoia becomes their doom. 

A supernatural entity gets passed from person to person through sexual encounters and the being will continue pursuing the final individual on the chain until it kills them and moves onto the next. "It Follows" is one of the best horror movies of the 2010s because it takes a simple idea and what seems like a straightforward metaphor for STDs and turns it into a chilling exercise of where the terror may spring from next. 

Like Pennywise, the creature in "It Follows" is a shapeshifter, but it doesn't have the same theatrical flair. Whereas you can see where Pennywise is coming from a mile away, this force of nature takes an unassuming form. It can look like anyone. It assumes the identity of a regular person walking toward its victims, meaning they may not even realize is malevolent until it's far too close. 

The creature in "It Follows" is totally unknowable. There's no reasoning or bargaining with it. You can't make fun of it until it shrivels up. It will simply keep following you until the job is done, so the best the characters can hope for is to pass the curse along and hoping it gets far enough away that it won't bother them for a while. 

When most people think of the monster in "The Exorcist," their first thoughts likely turn to the possessed Regan (Linda Blair) with her blotchy skin and vomiting ways. But that version of Regan is only possible through the demon Pazuzu (Eileen Dietz). What's most haunting about the demon is that there is no defeating it once and for all. "The Exorcist" ends with Karras (Jason Miller) offering himself to Pazuzu in exchange for Regan's freedom and then Karras jumping out of the window to his death; but given Pazuzu's return in the franchise, it will always be around. 

We only get brief glimpses of Pazuzu's face, but that's more than enough to send chills down the spine. More than anything, we witness Pazuzu's handiwork, as it possesses people, bending them to its whim. 

Both Pazuzu and Pennywise are ancient evils. Whereas Pennywise subjects children to monstrous visions, Pazuzu assumes total control. There are ways to get Pazuzu out of a body, but it needs another host. No matter what, someone has to accept the demon into their body, and the knowledge that this entity will always be out there is unnerving (and a good way to keep the franchise going).

/Film raved about "Nope" when it first came out. It's a chilling cosmic horror story of siblings O.J. (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald (Keke Palmer) trying to find out more about a UFO seen around the ranch. However, they discover it's not a vessel but an organic creature that soon starts wreaking havoc, including sucking up a crowd of people into its mouth where we see them slowly moving through whatever extraterrestrial digestive system it possesses. 

What makes Jean Jacket so scary is the fact that it's almost ... beautiful? There's a reason why Jupe (Steven Yeun) uses it as an attraction at his park. He realizes there's a way to profit off something so otherworldly, even though that winds up being his own undoing (and that of everyone else in the vicinity). There are also a ton of questions concerning Jean Jacket's true nature, with some theorizing that it's a biblical angel that could be here to usher in the apocalypse. 

Jean Jacket takes a cue from "Jaws," remaining hidden throughout much of the film. This adds a layer of spectacle and dread. We, as the audience, know something is out there, but it's not until it's too late that we see what it is. And even then, there's an unknowable quality to it. 

Sadako (Rie Inō) from 1998's "Ringu," and by extension Samara (Daveigh Chase) from the 2002 American remake "The Ring," is chilling to behold. Seven days after someone watches a tape, she emerges from a television set to kill them. There's no stopping her, and once a character watches the tape, their fate is sealed. 

A major factor to Sadako's terror is the inevitability of it. Her victims know precisely how much time they have left, leading to intense psychological dread that their fates are coming sooner rather than later. Pennywise is a bit of a wild card in that regard. Sometimes, he'll just kill a kid right away, like when he eats Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott) as soon as he stumbles upon him as opposed to letting his victims stew in their fears for a bit. 

It's the age-old question of whether you would want to know when you're going to die versus how. Maybe Sadako isn't scary to some because, hey, at least they know they have seven days left. Still, that means the last image those people see is a little girl with mangled hair inching ever closer. 

Xenomorphs are called the most perfect organism for a reason. They're the perfect killing machine, specifically designed to kill anything in their path while being incredibly difficult to put down by a regular human. For the sake of simplicity, I'm putting the entire life cycle of the Xenomorph in this spot because, quite frankly, anything from the facehugger to the full-fledged adult would be horrific to come across. 

Pennywise subjects you to psychological horrors, but a Xenomorph literally gets inside you. It begins its life as a parasitic entity that burrows into its host before breaking out of their ribcage and growing at a rapid pace. It's a far more visceral threat, and even though they often rack up a kill count before even reaching five seconds old, that's not even the half of it. 

Adult Xenomorphs have agility and strength that allow them to overpower any human. And while people may pack firepower, there's still the matter of acid blood squirting everywhere. Pennywise pretty much stays confined to Derry, but in space, any Xenomorph can hear you scream.

It's interesting how similar Pennywise and Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) are, at least at first glance. Both target young kids and teenagers, they can manipulate reality (or in Freddy's case, the dream world) to whatever they want to inflict maximum psychological damage on their victims, and you never know when they're going to pop up next. 

Naturally, Freddy's only a danger when you fall asleep, but that's seven to eight hours a day. That's a third of people's lives where they're exposed to Freddy if he decides to take a stab at them. Here's the kicker though: The characters ultimately defeat Pennywise by laughing at him. They overcome their fears so that Pennywise has nothing to feed on and he shrivels up. But Freddy's a jokester; he loves a good pun. He'll crack wise while tearing teens to shreds. 

The good news about both is that they tend to only terrorize people in their respective towns, with Pennywise in Derry, Maine, and Freddy in Springwood, Ohio. But at least the kids in Derry only have to worry about Pennywise once every 27 years. Freddy's a perennial threat. 

One underrated scary aspect about Pennywise (and similar monstrosities) is that no one else believes in the threat. Kids will tell their parents or authority figures about seeing something nefarious but no one listens to them because it's a pretty outlandish story to say there's a clown lurking in the sewers. When Godzilla shows up, though, there's no denying that everyone is doomed. 

Godzilla is a force of nature, a giant lizard exposed to radiation that has made him as big as skyscrapers and who possesses atomic breath in an assortment of colors to level anything in its path. Pennywise has been on Earth for a long time and has likely accumulated a pretty high body count, but from what we see in the "It" movies, it seems like he does a little at a time. Five people die throughout the events of 2017's "It" (with a couple more in deleted scenes), and a few dozen others are referenced as having been killed in the past. With a single swing of its tail to knock down a skyscraper, Godzilla could kill hundreds in an instant. If it decides to use its atomic breath, it could wipe out thousands (if not millions), and that's not even accounting for the residual nuclear fallout affecting people over time. 

Pennywise is interesting as a psychological construct, but you don't need any fancy degrees to appreciate the sheer terror of a movie monster. Godzilla destroys everything, and that's enough. 

According to scientific studies, "Sinister" is often cited as the scariest movie ever made. For that reason alone, it's worth considering the Babylonian god Bughuul (Nicholas King) as significantly scarier than Pennywise. 

Without a doubt, one of the most haunting sequences in "Sinister" is when Ellison (Ethan Hawke) discovers old film reels chronicling ritualistic sacrifices of families with Bughuul lurking in the background. In each case, Bughuul is able to control the mind and body of a family's child who becomes the physical manifestation of Bughuul to carry out his sadistic desires. Then, once everyone else is dead, Bughuul consumes the child's soul. 

With Bughuul, there's the added layer of families watching their most vulnerable member succumb to Bughuul's whims as they systematically murder everyone they're supposed to love. Everyone meets a particularly cruel fate, and there's the additional sense of dread that it all happened at the hands of someone who was supposed to be a total innocent. Bughuul corrupts everyone who lives in the house, so viewers have been right to be utterly terrified of him.

Body horror and cosmic horror merge into one with 2016's "The Void." A group of people become trapped in a hospital surrounded by cultists, and slowly but surely, the people inside begin transforming into grotesque, tentacled monsters. They're disturbing to look at and leave ample carnage in their path, but the humans are able to take them out with axes and guns. They might be able to kill them, but there's plenty of sheer terror left to be found in "The Void." 

We learn that Dr. Richard Powell (Kenneth Welsh) made a deal with an entity from another dimension to bring his daughter back to life. He gets his wish, but in true monkey's paw fashion, she comes back a horrific creature with others following suit. Like "The Thing," there's something unknowable about all of the horrors taking place. People become mutated, with characters witnessing people they know become something incomprehensible to the human mind. 

The monsters combined with the cultists paint a world in which humanity is merely a plaything for something much grander than we could ever imagine. Daniel (Aaron Poole) and Allison (Kathleen Munroe) wind up in another world by the end, making this an existentially ghastly universe where humans are like ants to some cosmic deity.