30. Before Stephen King’s It, Clowns Were Already Horrifying
If you thought that the idea of clowns being creepy originated with Stephen King, think again. Did you know that they initially designed clown make-up to imitate the appearance of a deceased person? If you have read Shakespeare, you may know that the clowns he wrote of worked in graveyards. This picture is of the actor Lon Chaney. He played the phantom in The Phantom of the Opera in the 1924 movie He Who Gets Slapped. He runs away from an overwhelmingly stressful life and becomes a clown in the film. Chaney reinvented the horrifying clown of Shakespeare and may have served as a bit of inspiration for Stephen King.