[Kitsa]

The hair monster's name is Gossamer.

Those Scary Stories illustrations creeped the everloving shit out of me, especially that one.

I can't remember if I said this before, but when I was in elementary school the It miniseries came out and they did a special-edition paperback of the novel. My mom, for whatever ill-advised reason, bought it for me. It had this giant luminous scowling pennywise on the cover and I didn't want anything to do with it, so I stuck it in the back of a bookcase in the basement behind some other books. I know for a fact that it was behind other books because Pennywise was on the spine too and I didn't want to look at him.

So this one night I was home alone, doing laundry in the dark basement, and it was storming and damned if that book didn't FALL OUT OF THE BOOKCASE FACING ME and all I could see was this glowing Pennywise face in the darkness. I became convinced that Pennywise had somehow really gotten to me through my reading the book and this was one of his ominous appearances. I dropped the laundry and ran upstairs and turned on every light, tv and radio in the house.

Later on, when other people were home, I tore off the cover and the spine-paper, tore them into tiny shreds, and flushed them down the toilet so he could go back to the sewer where he belonged. I've had several copies of IT since (hardcover...one's on my desk right now actually)...but I always do away with the dust jacket first.

In the director's commentary of the miniseries, the actors said that Tim Curry was so legitimately scary and authentic that everyone avoided him during filming. No one talked to him and he always had to eat his meals alone.