IT: The Classic Children's Story That Inspired Stephen King's Book
One of the inspirations behind Stephen King's iconic It comes from a surprising place— the classic children's story, The Three Billy Goats Gruff. On a day where King was wearing rather loud shoes, he thought of what would happen if he crossed the troll's bridge in the children's story. That bridge eventually morphed in his head to Pennywise's sewer.
The Three Billy Goats Gruff tells the story of three goats who attempt to cross a bridge that happens to be home to a troll who threatens to eat anyone who crosses it. The parallels between the story and It are clear, as Pennywise eats children who gets too close to his sewer. Naturally, King took the threat of something horrific in a children's story and turned it into the stuff of nightmares.
A dominant theme of It is how childhood experiences stay with people into adulthood. Quite often, that includes the things that scared them as children. Because of that, it's perfectly fitting that the inspiration for a story like It comes from a children's story. Here's a closer look at how The Three Billy Goats Gruff shaped It.
The day in which King's shoes conjured a mental image of the troll in The Three Billy Goats Gruff, his imagination began to run wild. In his chain of thoughts, he eventually got to his hometown in Maine, which had a series of interconnecting canals under the city. He eventually settled on a troll-like creature that lived in the underground canals. All the while, he couldn't get the idea of a ricochet effect out of his head. That became the split timeline between the Losers Club's childhood and adulthood. The inclusion of their childhood became a perfect ode to The Three Billy Goats Gruff, as it goes to show that the monsters in children's stories often stick with kids into adulthood.
The troll in the The Three Billy Goats Gruff is not an inherently scary figure when looked at as an adult, but reading about a monster as a child has a way of embedding itself into a young person's mind. Many older stories, particularly fairytales, typically were a bit scary, as they intended to teach their young readers important life lessons and morals. By utilizing that years-old idea, King made It a scary and relatable story on how childhood fears never really leave kids behind entirely, and can even go on to influence them in unexpected ways.
Many prominent horror writers and directors have cited scary movies they watched or books they read as children as what sparked their interest in the genre. The theme of childhood—and its associated innocence—allowed King to create Pennywise, who has gone down in cinematic and literary history as one of the scariest villains of all time. Outside of the story influence, clowns are a commonly cited fear—even for adults.