Science of It: Deadlights and Derry

If you’ve read Stephen King’s “It” or recoiled in fear from the 2017 film and the 1990 miniseries, then perhaps you’ve wondered what science can reveal about Pennywise the Dancing Clown and the horrors of Derry, Maine. Join Robert and Christian as they consider the monster science of the creature itself and various, real world explanations that grown-ups might turn to for a town gone bad.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind New York Comic Con Stranger Things. Yes,
it all comes together on October six, from seven pm
to eight thirty pm at Hudson Mercantile in Manhattan. If
you're in the area, join us for Stuff to Blow
Your Mind Live Stranger Science as we explore the exciting
science and tantalizing pseudo science underlying the hit Netflix show

(00:20):
Stranger Things. Stuff you missed in history class has a
show right after us in the same venue, so you
can really double down on your stuff. You do not
have to have a New York Comic Con badge to attend.
It is a separately ticketed event, and hey, the three
of us would love to meet you. This is the
opportunity to do it. Learn more and buy your tickets
at New York Comic Con dot com slash n y

(00:44):
C C hyphen presents Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your
Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey you wasn't
Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lawn
and my name is Christian Sager, and I made a

(01:06):
mistake this summer. Oh yeah, I decided it would be
a good idea to reread Stephen King's It over the
course of the summer in preparation of the new film
that just came out. How's that a mistake? That's a
that's a that's a fat book. But a good one
it was, and I was very happy with having read it,
but obviously my nightmare quota filled up rather quickly. Uh.

(01:28):
And there are some really disturbing stuff in that book
that uh isn't really an either film version, but they're
definitely percolating up here in the old brain noggin. Yeah,
there is quite a bit of traumatizing material in that book.
It's been a long time since I've read it, but yeah,
there are certain things that that stand out to me today. Now.

(01:49):
Of course, we had that that mini series based on
Stephen King's It Comcourage that the day before I went
and saw the new movie too, so I've had a
full IT experience this summer. Awesome. Yeah, I mean the
mini series was was was fun for the time, very flawed,
but you had a wonderful performance by Tim Curry. Tim
Curry nails in them playing penny Wise, the dancing clown,

(02:12):
one of the many terrifying forms of this extra dimensional,
fear eating, child killing monstrosity. Right. Yeah, and then you
had what Oh, John Boy was in it. That's right,
John Boy was Bill down Burrow, John Ritters in it. Uh,
what's his name from Night Court? Yeah, Harry Harry Anderson

(02:35):
plays Ritchie. But I was gonna say Richard Major from
the Thing isn't as Stan grown up Stan. Yeah, there's
an amazing scene in the in the old mini series
where he is a severed head inside a mini fridge
talking to everybody. It's it's played for laughs, but it's
pretty funny. And of course this year were two thousand seventeen,

(02:56):
we just had this magnificent adaptation of at least the
first half of the novel. Yeah, and and I just
saw it the other night, Sunday night actually, and I
thought it was terrific me too. I saw it as well,
and I was grinning ear to ear because it's very
rare one that you get a good horror movie and

(03:17):
two that you get a good Stephen King adaptation. And
this was I just coming off the heels of the
Dark Tower movie. This was this was spectacular because that
Dark Tower movie was a little disappointing. Yeah. My only
gripe about this latest hit movie is we didn't have
a nice, cheesy Stephen King cameo. That's right. I know,
I forgot about that. Yeah, he used to do all this.

(03:39):
Has he done those lately though he's not like stan Lee,
but he used to in the eighties and the nineties.
I think he's done some for television. I thought I
saw something on his Twitter the other day where he's
doing Okay. Yeah, it's always fun to catch him, all right.
So obviously we're fans of it. We're we're fans of
of both adaptations. So we thought, hey, everybody's it crazy
right now? The films just performing like gangbusters out there,

(04:04):
So why don't we do an episode on the science
of it? And you know why, because it's October and
what do we do in October and stuff to blow
your mind? All Halloween theme topics, That's right. So we
are this is the beginning of our bonanza for four
weeks of doing topics on things not not necessarily it'll
scare you, but that are related to horror or the season. Yeah,

(04:28):
we keep it seasonal to the point that we're actually
shoehorning material into September or postponing it until November, just
so we can focus on Halloween. Al Right, So in
this episode, We're just gonna lay out a few sort
of ground rules for everybody, so you know what we're
gonna do, what we're not going to do. First of all,
if you're wary of spoilers, we're not going to get

(04:51):
into like really hard spoilers. But we are going to
talk about characteristics of the novel of of the movie,
especially so you know, if you want to go in
just knowledgeless, uh, then maybe skip this episode and come back. Yeah,
I mean, I would say, like if you've seen any
of our other monster science videos or episodes, like the

(05:12):
stuff that Robert and I have done on like zombies
or vampires, or the the science of the vampires from
the Strain, things like that, Like, for the most part,
we don't get into spoiler territory or deep plot details.
It's mainly about like how the monster works and then
how real life science applies to it. And likewise, we're
also not going to get into some of the more
esoteric stuff that is in the books but isn't necessarily

(05:33):
in the films. Right, right, So I want to start
off with a revelation. My grandfather was a clown. Good
for you, He was actually a doctor, but he was
also a clown like his thing was as a member
of the Shriners, he and a neighbor of his would
dress up like clowns and perform as clowns at various

(05:55):
hospitals or children's centers and at the circule us. And
I remember as a young kid going to the circus
and seeing my grandfather, I'll clowned up horsing around down
there on the stage and entertaining people. And so I
have some sympathy for Pennywise, but I also understand what
makes Pennywise so creepy. Well, I think one thing to

(06:18):
keep in mind with with Pennywise is that Stephen King
wrote this book really ahead of the full blown creepy
crunk clown culture, and certainly it played a part in
developing that culture. But I don't really blame King as
much for it, because the whole gimmick here is that
this awful creature from another dimension wants to take on

(06:40):
a pleasing form in order to lure kids in, and
then it also like manipulates that in terrorizing them. So
it makes sense that it would pick something you know,
pure and innocent and fun, the clown, yeah, right, rather
than like my little pony Yeah, like, if it were
operating today, the thing is probably would not use the clown,

(07:02):
would probably use something like, you know, a character from
Dinosaur Train or something, because kids is today have been
sort of generationally poisoned against the clown. They they haven't
grown up in the age of the clown. They've grown
up in the age of the creepy clown. And unless
you were going out of your way to foster an
appreciation for clowns, uh, then they're probably just not gonna

(07:23):
have it. Yeah, it's true, and I'm sure you're aware
of this, but there's been this backlash from actual clowns
who are saying, like, this movie is going to make
it harder for me to earn a living as a clown.
And it's kind of like, guys, I think it's maybe
more than the movie. I think, as Robert said, the
age of the clown is maybe coming to an end, right, Uh,

(07:44):
because we waged war against it and killed it. Like
there was this thing that was it was innocent and fun,
and as a culture we couldn't help but tear it
to pieces. And we have to address this right up
at the top. This is what we're referring to is
color phobia, which is the fear of clowns, the supposed
not really. Robert has covered this, uh in many venue. Uh.

(08:06):
We have a stuff to blow your mind video that's
all about this that you did, gosh four years ago maybe. Uh.
And then there's a blog post in our site about
it as well. But let's just get it out of
the way, because it's what most viewers and commentators of
it are talking about right now. Um. So, okay, the
behavior of clowns is unpredictable in their body movements are
wild and exaggerated. So obviously that's something that can kind

(08:27):
of freak you out right. Uh. And in fact, they
nailed that with Pennywise in the movie. I thought, like
the the way that they had his body contortant, unusual ways,
I think really worked. Well. Yeah, I mean, but it
was it was not necessarily clownish, it was exaggerated. The
point where it was it was it was grote is monstrous. Yeah. Yeah.

(08:48):
According though to author John G. Robertson, the term corephobia
is almost certainly a product of pop culture and the
Internet and isn't actually in any of the expected litter
narture on phobias. So this is like one of those
things that's it's great to talk about on the internet,
but it's not something that like a psychiatrist is actually
going to diagnose you with. It's probably not in the

(09:09):
D S M. Yeah, you know, I think by and large, yes,
a child can be scared by a clown, no question. Uh.
A grown up can have maybe even dramatic memories of clowns.
But this idea of like there's this widespread phobia of clowns,
you know, I I tend to be very skeptical of that. Yeah,
and I think part of it, and you addressed this

(09:30):
in both of your pieces, is that for the last
couple of decades, we've had this plethora of scary clown imagery,
not just Pennywise from the book, in the mini series
and now this big movie, but you've got killer clowns
from outer Space, You've got the real life story of
John Wayne Gacy. Right, there's just all of this stuff
floating around that kind of makes clowns sinister. What's the

(09:51):
House of a Thousand Corpses? Right? His clowns? Yeah? Oh yeah,
he just came out with the whole clown movie, didn't he.
I forgot about that. Yeah. Uh so but there is
a study. It's a two study at the University of
Sheffield that was published in Nursing Standard, and they found
that out of two hundred and fifty children, most kids
who were ages four to sixteen dislike clown imagery. Big surprise.

(10:15):
So what's the lesson here, Well, okay, they said, maybe
we shouldn't have clowns in hospitals anymore, especially because those
are places where kids are unsettled and scared. So if
my grandfather were still alive, I'd have to say to him,
like me, you might want to lay off the whole
clown thing. This is why in children's hospital it's so
funny that Rob Cordrey is always in clown makeup. Yeah,

(10:36):
well then that's that sort of adds. They don't go
straight up with the creepy clown on that show, but
they do kind of toy with it a little. Well,
he's always got he's always got clown makeup on. But
then like his um smock, I guess you would call
it is always covered with blood as if as if
he just got out of surgery. Well, so here's something
I do want to point out, and that is, Uh,

(10:56):
first of all, I think a lot even perhaps even
the study. I don't have to study in front of me,
so I can't speak to it specifically. But I think
when people talk about fear of clowns, even if they're
not bringing to mind creepy clown imagery, like overtly purposefully
creepy clowns, they are bringing to mind certain clowns. They're
bringing to mind like a certain um, you know, archetype
of the you know, the full white makeup, red hair,

(11:19):
kind of a bose of the clown or a pennywise appearance.
And there's it's not really fair to reduce all clowning
traditions to that. Like there's there's a rich tradition of
clowning that spreads across cultures. In many cases these were
these are sacred traditions, um, you know, especially when you
look to various Native American customs like the gesture of

(11:40):
the clown, the fool, these are culturally important figures. Also,
the whole idea of like the Carnivalesque in in Europe
being sort of an active resistance the Comedia del arte,
that something along those lines, Right, there's a long history
behind all this. Oh yeah, and like if you go
to say a CIRCUSLA show, you'll see a lot of

(12:01):
a lot more modern takes on clowning. And I have
to say, as far as hospitals go, uh, my my
son was in in the children's healthcare center here in
Atlanta a few years back, and I did see some
clowns making the rounds and they did not look like
Bozo Pennywise clowns. They were they were using very light
clown makeup, they were using musical instruments, and it was

(12:23):
it was just kind of a delightful thing for the children.
So I do think that criticisms of clowns and discussions
of fear of clowns, it doesn't always take into account
the rich variety of clowning out there. Well, here's an
alternative theory, okay, And you actually presented this, but you
paired it with a nice bit of academic research. There's

(12:45):
a clinical psychology professor named Paul Salkov Skiss, and he
points out that children in general are far more susceptible
to extraordinary and unusual imagery. Right, So you then offered
this that it let's compare the clown to a shopping
mall Santa, Right, they're kind of equally terrifying and scary

(13:06):
to children, Like, how many times have you seen a
little kid forced to sit in Santa's lab at the mall?
It's just screaming, just absolutely upset. My nephew has done
this so far every time my sister takes him to
go see Santa. Um. So this I think speaks to
the idea right that the age of clowns is over
and is maybe just weirder to us than it used

(13:29):
to be, because as far as Santa's go, there's certainly
plenty of creepy Santa imagery out there, plenty of horror
films at cre that employ a killer Santa, mutant Santa, monster, Santa,
you name it. Yeah, yeah, there's probably more than clowns. Actually, yeah.
But it's resilient to this kind of shift because we
still culturally put a lot of value on it, and

(13:50):
we and we refuse to give up the wholesome vision
of Santa uh for the sake of this unwholesome with
the clowns. We weren't willing to main tane what was sacred.
So you want to take a break and then when
we get back, we can come back to we can
get past this clown stuff. And we can get into
the real nitty gritty of the science breakdown of Pennywise. Alright,

(14:16):
we're back. So what about Pennywise can't be explained by
science because, let's be honest, there's a lot of weird
stuff going on in these stories. Yeah, it's it's difficult
with with it because we're essentially talking about a magical
creature from outside of our world. Um, and also it
has psychic abilities that are also beyond our reality. However,

(14:39):
it does have to work in our world. It has
to interact with our world. It's engaging physically, into some
degree biologically with biological organisms. So we can derive I
think a number of biological parallels here. We can, we
can even get a little fringe at times, but I
think we just have to keep an eye out for
times when we're uh, you know, waiving the cudgel of

(15:01):
science after you know, imaginary monsters. Right. Yeah. I do
have to say though, after doing the research for this,
I was surprised at how well Stephen King's uh like
taxonomy of Pennywise fit into actual biological theories, to the
point that it made me wonder if he had done
like a lot of research along those lines, or if

(15:22):
it was just sort of common sense, for instance, like predators,
like how how actual predators act in the wild. Well,
this is something I think about a lot when I
do you know, monster science, bounce for the week, stuff
for stuff to blow your mind, and that's that you
have these fantastic creatures and then you find all these
biological parallels. So you ask yourself, how did this happen? Yeah?

(15:44):
Is it in situation where somebody sat down and planned
it all out? I mean sometimes a creator is really
you know, clued into the scientific data out there. Other
times I think it's just this is the world we know,
This is what we assume bowle things out of, and
it matches, It ends up matching those forms in the

(16:04):
you know, in the same sense that one as symbols
a chimera out of existing animals. You kind of do
that on a subconscious level. But then also I think
it just comes down to the just the utter weirdness
and and the amazing nous of the natural world that
no matter how weird our imagination is, no matter just
how fantastically creative, Uh, this monster is that we dream up,

(16:29):
the natural world is gonna have as beat. Like that's
just how weird and wonderful um our our world of
biology is. Yeah, I mean, I can't list all of
the episodes that we've done on natural organisms that are
just like utterly crazy compared to anything I've ever seen
in a horror movie. I'm talking a lot of like
the underwater creatures we've covered, like the osadax bone worm

(16:51):
or the hydra stuff like that. Oh yeah, And in fact,
we'll be coming back around to some marine examples that
line up with various functions, uh of of its anatomy.
But first tell me this, So it lives in a sewer?
What other what other creatures that live in a sewer?
Does it have parallels with? Well, I mean you can

(17:12):
look at it two different ways, right, because they are
numerous examples of troglozines. Uh. And these are you know,
creatures that that live underground, but they don't completely finish
out their life cycle there. They have to you know,
come up for something in the case of of it
it comes up to eat in order to hunt at
any rate. Uh. So you have various subterranean creatures that

(17:35):
line up there, and indeed you have subtraining creatures that
live in a guano rich environment. Uh as with the
environments where the cave is filled with bat guano and
yet lives in a sewer. On the other hand, you
have a number of species that are very well adapted
to artificial human made subterranean systems, rats, fleas, and of
course mosquitoes, which we've talked about on the show here

(17:57):
in terms of the London mosquito, which is seems to
be diverging from the surface mosquito by virtue of its
life underground. And then coming back to that whole extreme
excrement thing as well. I mean, you have everything from
say a dung beetle to the African penguin depend on
feces for their life. So it's not something that I
think King really got into in the books or or

(18:19):
shows up in the movies at all. But you know,
it's not completely unrealistic to say that you would have
this strange creature that lives in such close confines with
with human excrement, human waste. Yeah, that does make sense.
I'm trying to remember from all three iterations, there's no
moment where they really address that beyond just and this
is in the trailer for the new movie where they

(18:41):
talk about gray Water and what gray water is, and
and uh, just the idea of them trapesing around in
this dirty water throughout the entire time that they're down there.
But yeah, there's no point where like, there's nothing scatological.
I think it's it's a suitably foul place for a
foul creature to live. But it seems to have other
benefits to it besides what it contains. Now, all right,

(19:03):
this maybe a spoiler, although I think like for this
the length of this story, this is just kind of basic,
uh role playing game rules of how it operates. Right.
So it's a periodic predator, right right, Uh, Yeah, one
of its most notable features is it has for starters
a ridiculously long life life span. And then as far

(19:25):
as this life cycle goes, it has these twenty seven
to thirty year hibernation periods. So it comes out, it eats,
and then it goes away for seven to thirty years
and then comes back again. And in the book, in
the show, it's been doing this since the mid eighteenth
century when people first started living in the dairy area. Yeah,

(19:47):
that's right, Like there's there's always these incidents, these horrific
incidents that precipitate it's a hunting period, right. So, like
they've got one where it's I think it's called the
Bradley Gang. They're like a bank rob regang. There's this
huge massacre with them, and then twenty seven years after that,
you've got the fire at the Black Spot where like
a lot of people died in this horrible fire. So

(20:10):
the thing is lengthy hibernation periods like this and not
completely out of keeping with the natural world. You have
thermophilic bacteria that may hibernate for up to a hundred
million years before they're swept from chilling depths to hot
spots of geothermic activity. And that's exactly the sort of
sleep cycle that even a you know, a billion year
old creature like it can probably appreciate. Now. Hibernation, of course,

(20:31):
is a way for an organism to ratchet down energy
expenditure and survive on energy reserves in order to survive
periods of otherwise lethal resource depletion or environmental change. Yeah,
and there's actually a pretty interesting mathematical model that we
can turn to here to try to understand that system

(20:51):
a little better. It's called predator prey modeling, and it's
when you take equations to show a system in place
between a predator species like it and a prey speech
She's like the children of dairy main uh. And this
form of math helps predict how these species will interact,
especially when one is the primary food source for the other.
So the famous example that's been used in this is

(21:13):
a relationship between wolves and moose on Isle Royale in
Lake Superior. It's been studied since the nineteen fifties because
first of all, there's very little food for the wolves
to eat other than the moose on this aisle, and
second of all, the aisle itself is geographically isolated, which
limits other factors that would come into play, like, for instance,
hunting or migration. Now it's worth pointing out here just

(21:37):
because this this comes up a little bit here and
comes up later on. But for all intents and purposes,
it is stuck in dairy like. It does not seem
capable or willing to move to another area. It was
happy to just sit there and wait for people to
come to it. And I think this model may help
us figure that out a little bit. So the most
famous of these equations is called the Latka Voltaire system,

(21:59):
and it's aimed after the scientists who came up with it.
Latka argued that you can apply physical principles to biological systems,
and this was part of his broader work in this
book called The Elements of Physical Biology. Vol Terra was
a physicist who was trying to help his son in
law actually with a biology problem, and subsequently he ended
up working on the interactions of species, searching for a

(22:22):
mathematical theory of evolution. So this whole thing comes together.
Usually these equations boiled down to representations of the change
in a prey population versus the change in a predator population.
We saw something similar when we did that episode on
Zombie Math last year, which may have been one of
our October episodes I can't remember. But without getting too

(22:43):
far into the weeds on the math, each equation essentially
uses the following form birth function minus death function. Now,
in the ile royale example, the model looks like this.
In the absence of predators, the prey should increase at
a rate that is proportional to the current quantity of
the prey. Basically, what this means is the more moose

(23:06):
there are around to mate with each other without being hunted,
the more calves are going to be born, but in
the absence of prey, the predators should die off at
a rate that is proportional to the current predator population.
So if there are more wolves and they eat all
the moose and there's no more moose to eat, the
wolves are going to start to starve. So Latka argued

(23:26):
that prey should decrease and predators should increase at rates
that are proportional to the product of the prey times.
The predators, or alternatively, the moose deaths should be related
to the interaction of the wolves and the moose, as
should the wolf births, so since then they will need

(23:46):
plenty of moose for food to have healthy pups. Right.
Either way, there's this relationship between the predator population and
the prey population. Too many prey results in more predators,
who then swamp the prey, which then subsequently called as
a decrease in their population. This would lead to the
predators dying out in the whole cycle beginning again. Now
let's apply this to the it Pennywise example. Okay, there's

(24:10):
far more prey than there are predators since there's only
one Pennywise that's going around and eating children, So this
should mean that there will be a proportional increase in
the population of human children, which there is as far
as we can tell. When we see the history of
Dairy the town gets bigger and bigger every time there
are these twenty seven year gaps. Pennywise as big as

(24:32):
fear then should be that it itself will run out
of children to eat, which is probably why it hibernates
every twenty seven years. Ultimately, this assists it so it
doesn't starve to death or subsequently it would have to
leave its layer for the rest of the broader unknown
territory of the rest of the world. Right, we don't

(24:53):
know why it never leaves the sewers of Dairy, Right Theoretically,
I guess it could just like rampage around all of
them Erica and eat everything in its wake. But eventually
it would probably be discovered and taken down. Yeah, or
we just presume that it it cannot move for some
reason or another. So what if Pennywise, though, were to

(25:14):
somehow give birth to more monstrosities, It may then face
difficulties feeding this brood if there isn't enough food available
to it. So perhaps this is why Pennywise allows the
dairy population to grow in these waves every twenty seven years,
so when it has children itself, there will be more

(25:36):
than enough to eat for its entire family. But it's
worth noting that Dairy's population isn't hunted by anything else,
and it has the capability of migration, right, So this
is a lot more complex of a food system than
we see on this aisle with the wolves and the moose.
So I think there has to be something else going
on here, possibly psychological, and maybe we'll talk about this

(25:59):
later in the episode that keeps the people in Dairy
so that food is always available every time Pennywise wakes up. Now,
the scariest pragmatic rule about these predator prey models is
this quote. Predators are always hungry and eat the same
proportion of prey no matter how large the number of

(26:21):
prey gets. So this implies no matter how big Dairy gets,
Pennywise is always going to eat dozens of kids every
twenty seven years, and that I think is part of
what is so ultimately terrifying. Yeah, now here's a here's
another reason to vanish for such long periods of time
in between meals to counter anti predator adaptation. Okay, So,

(26:44):
so think about it. Periodical cicada's come up from time
to time and reference to it. They come up in
the movie, and I presumably came up in the book
as well. There's been a while. Uh. These are highly
successful insects that are also prey species, and they spend
most of their life cycle underground, only emerging in massive
broods in order to overwhelm the predators. Predators have a

(27:07):
feeding frenzy. They grow fat, but they can't eat everyone.
That's the that's the basic cicada way. And then after
that that feeding frenzy, they disappear for seven thirteen seventeen years.
These are all prime numbers, by the way, before they
emerge again and again, you know, just overpower the predators
with sheer numbers. And the theory here is that the

(27:29):
prime numbers involved keep the predators from receiving periodic population
boost by synchronizing their own generations to divisions of the
cicada's emergence period. This guy is according to a two
thousand one paper in Complexity Journal by Goals, Shoels and
Marcus titled prime number selection of cycles in a predator

(27:50):
prey model. Okay, okay, so then so the theory applied
here then would be that it is doing something similar.
It's trying to uh only have periodic population boosts by
synchronizing its generations. But as far as we know, it
hasn't had an eight children yet. Uh correct, So yeah,
it's it's not really a you know, a one to
one comparison, because one is a model of of of

(28:13):
of prey species dealing with predators, as a predator that
is hibernating in order to maximize its utilization of the prey.
And then the other factor here is that it's dormacy
years may or may not be prime. It kind of
depends how you you cut it. Twenty seven is a
popular number, especially in the movie, but I've also seen
it described as a twenty seven to thirty year dormacy,

(28:35):
so it could be prime. Uh. Perhaps it's periodic slumber
isn't just about allowing the herd to regrow, but also
to prevent human populations of dairy from adapting to its cycle.
Uh or and of course to prevent at least cultural
anti predator adaptations. You know, certainly it's not really enough

(28:55):
time for any kind of evolved biological adaptation, but there
could be that could theoretically be enough time for people
to develop new strategies, new ways of living, or you know,
or just leaving and you know, go over to Castle Rock.
They seem to have a lot easier. Yeah. I don't
know though, I think we'll get into this later, But
it seems like there's something else going on with the

(29:16):
either the biology of it or the ecosystem of dairy
that is keeping people there, and they seem to have
just clouded over the idea that there's this monstrous predator
in their midst. One more note about the hibernation. It
should point out that hibernation among carnivores is largely the
domain of reptiles and anthropods, and in these cases it's

(29:36):
it's about annual avoidance of cold or temperatures. Now we
might point to the fact that it seems to come
out in the summer. I mean, certainly the movie takes
place in the summer. Uh, But then it disappears for
so many years that it doesn't seem to really be
dependent upon temperature if I remember correctly. The timeline I

(29:56):
think is supposed to be something like the first attack,
which is Orgy, is in like October, and then months
pass and then summer starts up and that's when it
really heats up. Yeah. So this is another case where
the biology and the fantasy don't really line up that well,
and we're kind of swinging that science cudgel at ghosts again.

(30:17):
So the thing that I think a lot of and
I noticed there's a video online about this that a
lot of other you know, science communicators are trying to
tackle with the science of it, is the shape shifting aspect,
because there's lots of as we've discussed with many of
our weird creatures on the show, animals that are able
to change their shape to survive and hunt. Yeah. Yeah,
everybody loves a good shape shifting monster, right. Uh. The

(30:40):
thing is true, shape shifting is difficult to come by
in the natural world, and certainly if you look at
it and it has this, you know, the additional here
of psychic and hallucination aided versions of itself, it becomes
even more impossible. Now, evolution certainly produces various versions of mimicry,
and yet does use this as was the initial as

(31:02):
with the initial Pennywise scene, you know, taking the form
of something to attract prey. But we're talking about a
gradual process and not something that can be really mixed
up in real time. However, the version we see in
the book and film is a deceptive feat reminiscent of
the mimic octopus, which can contort its body, size, color,
and texture to mimic such diverse species as lionfish, sea snakes,

(31:26):
sting rays, sea an enemies, and jellyfish, and and also
like yet, the mimic octopus also assumes the behavior and
movement of its target in addition to its mirror appearance.
So this provides one of I think the finest examples
of shape shifting in nature, at least in so far
as it matches up with our our, our fantastic notions
of shape shifting. Yeah, there's a lot of interesting stuff,

(31:49):
especially in this new version of the film with the
shape shifting in like how it uses the shape shifting to,
for instance, um move differently or squeeze through spaces and
things like that. You can get a lot of that
in the old movie, for instance, because there was sort
of this idea that it had more of a established

(32:09):
form that was hiding down in the sewers and that
everything else were just hallucinations. But in the film version,
I get the impression that it's more like it's a
shape shifting thing that's capable of creating your worst fear
through its shape shifting by psychically scanning you. Yeah, but
then again it kind of breaks down when you start
looking scene to scene because certainly there are some key

(32:31):
shape shifting scenes in the movie where it all feels
very biological and organic, But then you know it's also
like crawling out of a projector screen. That's right, Yeah,
and there's no there's no like rational way that that
works within the laws of our universe. Yeah. That definitely
struck me as being more along the lines of like
a hallucination. Yeah. Alright, So one more thing I want

(32:53):
to touch on here, and that is the dead lights,
the dead lights showing up, especially in the film. You
see it in the scene it opens its my mouth
real wide and you see these these three pinpoints of
of hellish light that transfix the prey. And you know,
this is another area where we have to be careful
chasing magic with that, with that, with that cudgel of science,

(33:16):
but especially as we see in the movie, it uses
these things to subdue a victim or drive them mad.
And here in the natural world, we certainly have creatures
with biolumin essence, and some of them do use their
dazzling lights offensively against prey. Now, not all of them
directly apply here, but considered the famed angler fish, which

(33:37):
is just an endlessly fascinating and monstrous creature. The female's
dorsal spine protrudes out over its mouth like a fishing
pole with a fleshy luminous thanks to a symbotic bacteria
lure that attracts prey into swallowing distance. And then we
return to the cephalopods because the cuttle fish has been
known to manipulate its chromataphors that's the little UH elements

(34:01):
and its skin that you know, can manipulate color and
and all. It can use these to dazzle the intended
prey long enough to snatch it up, essentially hypnotizing it
or confusing it with a pulsating psychedelic display. And they're
they're particularly adapted just because their skin possess Their skin
posesses up to two hundred chromatophores per square millimeter, allowing

(34:23):
for complex mating displays, but also this sort of predatory behavior. Man,
I love a good cuddlefish video. There's nothing like watching
a cuddlefish video on YouTube or something like that. Like,
they are endlessly fascinating anytime I've ever seen them in
an aquarium. They just Actually the Chattanooga Aquarium was where
I first saw one, and uh, I this actually inspired me.

(34:46):
Like a decade ago, one of the first comics I
ever wrote included a submarine that was modeled after a
cuddle fish, and it included, uh, they like added this
this fake skin with chromatophors into it so they it
could blend in with its surroundings. Yeah. Yeah, we we
should really come back and do uh do a new
episode on cuttle fish. We have I think we have
an older episode on them, but there's They're always there.

(35:10):
They get a lot of scientific at tensions, so I'm
sure there's new areas we could touch on, and they're
just always deserving of study. Absolutely, So let's take another
break and when we get back, we're going to get
into its diet, which seems to be composed of fear. Alright,
we're back. Yeah. So I actually was talking to my

(35:31):
friend Dave Streepy about all this because he's he's a
huge Stephen King fan. He also reread the book this
year and he's seen the movie a couple of times.
I was asking him, like, well, what's the deal? Refresh
my memory about about it? And it's diet And it
does seem to be a situation where it consumes fear
or possibly consumes some flesh that's been seasoned by fear,

(35:56):
or it only feeds on fear and only but it
but it consumes flash because that's what monsters do, that's
what children expect a monster to do. Yeah. Yeah, it's
not entirely clear, but I think you've hit on the
possibilities here, and I think that maybe what's going on
here is related to fear conditioning as we know it

(36:17):
in the psychological discipline. So I'm gonna see if we
can connect it here now. If you're unfamiliar, fear conditioning
is a simple form of associative learning. This is where
an animal learns to associate the presence of something that's
a neutral, conditioned stimulus and something like a light or
maybe a tone, with the presence of a motivationally significant

(36:37):
stimulus that is unconditioned, such as being electrocuted. This is
usually what they do is they electrocute a mouse, uh,
and they play a sound or they flash a light
at it beforehand, so that eventually this creates the classic
Pavlovian behaviorism style psychology, in which the fear memories are

(36:58):
consolidated over time aims such that they can be induced
by presenting the conditioned stimulus on its own, so that
every time you flash the light or you play the sound,
then the mouse or the rat is scared of that,
and that you don't even have to electrocute it anymore. Well,
you know, speaking about going to the movie theaters, I
wonder to what extent the popcorn and coke is like that,

(37:22):
because I see people get the giant coke, the giant
popcorn and they go into the theater to watch, you know,
something like Alien Covenant, and I'm like, why are you
planning to eat and drink during this film? Um? Do
you even want that overpriced popcorn and coke? Or is
this just conditioning? Is this just a matter of this
is what I expect, This is part of the experience.
Oh yeah for me, like every time I get there,

(37:43):
I just immediately start salivating sugar. Yeah, I think it's
just a sugar fix um, which is probably related to
my experience of going into a dark room. So all right,
We know that Pennywise thrives on fear, so it's possible
that the citizens of Dairy are experience dancing their own
form of fear conditioning that then subsequently leads to mass

(38:05):
psychogenic behavior. And we're gonna unpack the mass psychogenic behavior later.
But over the centuries, Pennywise has conditioned them to both
experience fear that subsequently feeds it and to also freeze
in response to it, so they don't end up running
away or migrating leaving. Yeah, I think that that's that's
pretty solid. Not only critique would be how does how

(38:29):
does its periods of inactivity affect that? Yeah, that's what
I can't figure out either. And I'm trying to also
understand what is the neutral stimuli that signals this to
the people of Dairy, Right, there's no light, there's no tone.
Is it these balloons that suddenly start popping up everywhere
on the sewer grades or is it? Uh? Is it
giving off some kind of pheromone throughout the entire city?

(38:51):
That maybe that's why it lives in the sewer system.
It's got access to all of the the grates that
go up into people's homes. I'm not sure, but that
is an interesting idea that there could be some additional
biological component here. Now, remember, fear is our human defensive
motivational system, and we evolved this way to protect ourselves

(39:13):
from threats in our environment. We can measure fear as
a complex constellation of behavioral and physiological responses. And we
also know that fear conditioning itself is linked to the
neurobiology of both learning and memory, So this is important.
Is it possible that the system of fear in dairy

(39:34):
is what prevents its residence from remembering or even learning
about Pennywise in the first place, Like there's some kind
of weird reverse fear conditioning going on here that makes
it so they can't remember it. And then, in fact,
fear conditioning is an ideal way for us to study
how memory works in general, because a basic fear inducing

(39:55):
event can determine the way our brains actually shape memories. Oh,
if you go back and you look at the neural
pathways through which a situation causes a creature to learn
about fear, scientists actually hope that they can then figure
out what the general mechanism of memory formation is. So
hopefully by doing this they can better treat malfunctions and

(40:16):
our ability to control fear. So for example, treatment of anxiety,
phobias and panic attacks. Now I think with dairy residents,
especially with the adults. So one psychological reality that comes
to mind is a possible explanation is that of normalcy bias.
And there are plenty of examples of humans who simply
don't react appropriately to a sudden threat or even freeze

(40:38):
up and are unable to act at all, or they
freak out completely. I always go back to the Aliens
example for this, So so think think too that the
scene and Aliens where everything's gone hey wire. The Aliens
have massacured, uh, the Marines. If this were a game
of X Calm, you have gotten up poor rating and
lost like all your crew. But mostly uh so you

(41:00):
have Private Hudson and his whole thing is we're you,
We're all gonna die man game over right. He's just
hysterically running around. Yeah. Now, Lieutenant Gorman, I don't know
if you remember him. I do. He's ostensibly supposed to
be as the leader. Yeah, and he just panics and
freezes up like he just can't he can't act. And
then we have Hicks and Ripley, and they take the lead.

(41:20):
They know how to act, They think rationally in the
face of danger. Right, this is when Ripley like basically
pushes Gorman out of the way and drives that that
awesome tank thing in there and saves whoever is left. Yeah.
The interesting thing is that this, uh, this, this kind
of matches up with the various ways that people react
to disasters. I was reading an article this is actually

(41:40):
an I O nine by a writer esther English article.
Oh yeah, I like reading her stuff a lot, and
she put she pointed out in her article that seventy
of people in a disaster exhibit this, uh, you know,
unusual Lotti da behator about ten to fiftcent freak out.
You know, they go Private Hudson on everything, and then

(42:01):
the other ten to they go the Ripley Hicks direction
and they actually get stuff done. So in other words, uh,
you know, they get the hell out of dodge. So
the question people ask them is what's going on with that?
Uh that seventy percent, you know why wind is seventy
percent of people faced with, say, you know, a massacre
by alien monsters or potentially um, you know, the steady um.

(42:27):
You know, massacre of children by an extra dimensional shape shifter.
And then the idea here is that you have to
look at it two different ways. So seventy percent of
people freezing and just kind of becoming doll people in
the shape of face of danger, it could be a
good thing because it means that that people who are
in that state, they're gonna be docile. They can be
directed through the chaos by others, so they can they

(42:49):
can set there. Yeah, they're not really helping a lot,
but they'll listen when Ripley says, hey, you need to
go drive that tank. Interesting, I never thought about it
that way before. I mean, you can certainly have it's
you know, a burning building scenario for example. There's a
downside because it means they need to be let out,
that they might otherwise stick around too long and suffer
for it. Well, Gorman certainly does end up lasting for

(43:10):
quite a while until he ends up finally getting taken out. Yeah,
well he has I think a moment of redemption he does.
The downside here, of course, is that those that that
that frees up, that that are unable to really grasp
what's happening. Uh, they retard the progress of the ten
to fifteen percent of people who are acting appropriate. Now,

(43:32):
I'm not sure how he's slowing the rest of us down. Yeah, yeah,
even though they're the ones who need to be saved.
I'm not sure exactly how this would would break down
for the population of Dairy, But I think one of
the one of the interesting things here is that since
it is praying exclusively on children and adolescence, it's praying

(43:52):
on individuals who have less of a say in what
the culture is doing, what what the society of the
town is doing. They're less a part of the decision
making process, and they're going to have a harder time
finding acceptance and belief when they tell their story to adults.
So it doesn't it almost doesn't matter that you have

(44:14):
that that ten to fifteen percent ideal. I guess the
Losers Club from the movie and the books, they're the
ten They're gonna stand up, but they can they can't
do as much about it because they are cut off
from the adult world. And you get the impression in
all three versions of it that, regardless of what's going

(44:35):
on with Pennywise, there's something wrong with this town in
terms of adults just turning away from horrific acts. Right. Like, so,
for instance, that scene that you see in the trailer,
and this I believe was also in the mini series
and is definitely in the book, is whenever they're the
Losers club kids are getting harassed by the bullies, the

(44:56):
adults just tend to turn the other way and go
back indoors or or though like there's a scene where
like they're driving by and they just look kind of
casually and then just keep going like they very rarely
stop and try to break it up. Yeah, and then
in the in the same way that especially the book
explores racism, homophobia, and other issues. It's it's very much

(45:17):
a story. It's very much a work that says, hey,
what what were some of the horrible things about the
world that we grew up in? What was wrong with it?
What didn't work? Uh, you know from on a social
and cultural level. I mean in a way that's the whole.
It's kind of symbolized with Pennywise, right, the symbol of
childhood innocence that's corrupted by a darker force. Yeah, I

(45:38):
think you just hit the nail on the head of
like the strongest theme in the book that works so well,
you know, why why we keep coming back to this
one Stephen King's story over and over again. Now, one
thing scientists have learned by experimenting on rats is let's
think about the brain for a second. Here, Okay, the
auditory cortex part of the brain isn't necessary if you

(46:00):
want to fear condition a rat using audio. They've actually
placed lesions on these rats brains, specifically in the auditory
thalamus and the auditory midbrain, and they found that these
lesions eliminated a rats susceptibility to conditioning. This is weird
because we know that the nerve fibers of the auditory

(46:22):
thalamus extend into the auditory cortex. They looked, the scientists
and they found that fibers are also reaching out to
several subcortical locations in the brain. Okay, and the major
area where these are all located and that is affected
by fear is the amygdala. And this has been considered

(46:43):
the most important brain region when it comes to various
forms of emotional behavior. So, if we're talking about fear
here and and pennywise, either eating fear or creating fear conditioning,
the amygdala seems to be where we want to look.
They found that the central nucleus inside of the amygdala
is the pivotal component of all of our fear conditioning circuitry,

(47:07):
and this is because it provides connections to the various
brain stem areas that are involved in controlling our spectrum
of responses to fear. So the amygdala, and specifically it's
lateral nucleus, is the sensory system interface when it comes
to fear conditioning. By following this research, the scientists who

(47:28):
have been looking at this and they've actually been able
to map the entire stimulus response pathway in the brain
from you know, basically whether that light goes on or
there's a tone or you get electrocuted, to how it
travels through the brain and essentially triggers your fierce response. Now,
one thing I think that's worth thinking about here is

(47:49):
that the book, in the films, I think they tend
to work with sort of a non scientific idea of
what fear is and how the mind works. But if
we're to believe that it is psychic and perhaps also telekinetic,
then perhaps it has the ability to manipulate this portion
of the brain through some form of electromagnetic stimulation that
could totally be it and then let's look. Let's drill

(48:10):
down on the molecular level. It seems that emotional memories
are established for us and stored through the amino acid
transmitter glutamate. Okay, this is important. It's present in our
cells and the ones that reach the lateral nucleus I
was just referring to, and it's transmission is implicated in
our memory formation. So likewise, some researchers have been able

(48:34):
to totally block fear conditioning in animals by blocking the
receptors they have for glutamate inside the amygdala. So this
may explain what Pennywise is actually eating when it comes
to fear, now, outside of any kind of uh I
guess like transcendental idea of it eating the actual emotion

(48:55):
in the air. Right, we know that when we experience
fear there is neuro endocrime changes that include the rise
of plasma prolactin, adreno, cortico tropin, corticosterone, and catacola mines.
Maybe it's the increase in these chemical levels that are
either satiating it or somehow attracting it. Right, So, like

(49:19):
it is able to smell that fear somehow for lack
of a better term. Well, one thing that comes to
mind is that you could have a situation where, you know,
it's a magical organism, so maybe it doesn't really need
to eat in the way that the actual real world
organisms do. But you could also have a situation where, yeah,
it lives off of bacteria or you know, something in

(49:39):
the waste waters of the dairy sewer, but it still
needs a few key components that are only found in
human brain chemistry, and this out of keeping with the
natural world, because you do have certain organisms where some
of their prey decisions are based on the very specific
chemical needs. Yeah. Right, So then if that's true, what
is pen Wise actually eating. Is it eating the amygdala?

(50:02):
Is it eating the glutamate? We actually see it chewing
on arms and all these kinds of things, right, But
that seems that it's actually more for the purpose of
generating fear based stimuli. It doesn't look like it's actually
eating the arms. It's just kind of chewing on them
to freak everybody out. Yeah, it's just doing what children expect,
I'm monstered to do. Now you brought up other animals.

(50:24):
Does Pennywise eat other animals other than human beings? I
mean other animals experienced fear. It occurs nearly every animal group.
You've got fruit flies, snails, birds, lizards, fish, rabbits, rats, monkeys,
and of course people, all of them exhibit fear. Is
it also scarfing down snails inside that sewer? No, I
don't think so, because there's a whole bit where it's

(50:46):
set there and waited until humans were available. Yeah. Uh.
And then the mechanisms that fear operates are different in
other creatures. But it seems at least that the pathways
in mammals and possibly all vertebrates are very similar. So
there's something specifically going on with humans. It seems in
this something that we're creating that's different from the other

(51:09):
mammals around dairy, that it could be scaring and picking off.
So then all right, we've we've got all this. We
seem to understand how it's eating, or what it's eating,
at least, how it's creating fear. But what's up with
the freezing? Why are the people in dairy just kind
of you know, not acting. So fear conditioning, even if

(51:29):
the motivationally significant stimulus isn't present, actually can lead to immobility,
high blood pressure, and a faster heartbeat. So the actual
freezing up seems to be the symptom the citizens of
Dairy are exhibiting. But why is that. Well, it's an
adaptation that allows them to decrease the probability of detection

(51:53):
while also conserving energy. So somewhere deep in the back
of these adults minds, they know there's something dangerous going
on and they're desperately trying not to be detected by it. Well,
this this comes back to normaltly buy us a little
bit and the topic of psychogenic death. Um we haven't.
We have an older episode that that covers that's off
the link to that on a landing page for this
episode of Stuff to Buy your Mind dot Com. But yeah,

(52:15):
this gets into the area of say like a possum
playing dead animals freezing up when threatened, and also going
back to the amygdala and glutamate receptors. Remember that's all
related to learning and memory, and there's a huge aspect
in this story in that the kids who know about
it forget about it, and the adults can't seem to

(52:37):
form memories about it. So it seems like somehow there's
something about brain formation going on here that allows the
children to remember it. But maybe they're amygdalas aren't fully
formed yet or something like that, and that is why
they're able to be more conscious of the pennywise creature
rather than the adults they're regardless of The amygdala isn't

(52:57):
the only learning center of the brain, and it's an
important component, but the entire network of the brain is necessary.
I don't want to mislead our listeners by thinking, like, oh,
the amygdala is like the one way that we learn
or form memories. That this would basically be like saying
like a car engine is the only part of a
car that's necessary in order to drive somewhere. So we're

(53:18):
all grown ups here, I mean, we know that all
this talk of an extra dimensional organism that takes the
form of a clown and kills our children is just
completely unbelievable. As such, let's present a few alternate theories
as to why a town like Dairy could seem to
go bad and or just have this shared experience of
this awful interloper. I remember when I was younger and

(53:42):
I was having a hard time in school, like getting
bullied and stuff like that, saying to my mom because
I had read it saying there's something about this town.
There's something it's like a Stephen King book. There's something
wrong with the people. There's something bad about them. I
wonder if there's something in the water. Yeah, this is
we're thinking about. We're gonna get into possible things in

(54:03):
the water here, because all right, if we're gonna analyze
what's going on with Dairy, we have to we have
to sort of identify it as something that can be,
you know, more easily studied. So we might surmise that
Dairy suffers from just a high crime rate. Certainly have
all these murders, disappearances, etcetera. And the interesting thing here

(54:24):
is that the crime is often grouped under the category
of a wicked problem, which we've discussed about, a problem
that is maybe not that easy to identify and then
difficult to treat. Any any kind of large scale treatment
changes the problem. It does certainly seem like in the
narrative that even outside of Pennywise roaming around and hunting
all these children, that Dairy is a pretty violent place

(54:46):
to live. Yeah. Now, you might take, for instance, the
high crime rate of New York City during the seventies
and eighties and and the subsequent lowering of that crime level. Uh,
and certainly key individuals and institutions were more than willing
to take credit for that drop. But you you're you're
left with a lot of different theories as to why
we have this uh, this surgeon crime and then this

(55:07):
decrease into crime, this this inverted you uh scenario. And
you'll find theories relating to gun control, policing, prison sentencing,
access to legal abortions, etcetera. But one of the possible causes,
and one which I think is most interesting for discussion here,
is pollution based and I think we might be able
to apply it to dairy if we tweak it a

(55:28):
little bit. So, Yeah, this guy, Carl Smith, the professor
of Public Economics and Government of the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, and he defines crime as an epidemic.
And he says, all right, if it is an epidemic,
then you have to break down the spread of epidemics
to determine their cause. So he says, all right, first question,
does it spread along communication lines? If so, then it's informational.

(55:51):
Does it spread along transportation lines, If so, then it's microbial.
If it's everywhere at once, then it's probably a molecule. Now,
horror action presents plenty of examples of these. Uh. You know,
you can think of the curse of the Ring in
the Mouth of Madness. These are straight up you know,
informational uh, curses, informational contagions. Yeah, the medic in a way. Yeah.

(56:14):
And that doesn't seem to be the case in Deary,
right because the kids only later realize that they're seeing
the same clown. So it's not like this idea that
you tell the story of Penny Wise and it spreads.
Now transportation lines, well, every disease or zombie horror movie
gets into this and uh, and here in dairy, if
it were transportation based. Uh. And if we limit just

(56:36):
our study to the dairy area, then you could make
a case for the water sewage system transporting it around. Yeah.
And this is this comes up over and over again
in all versions of it. This is where they end
up finding the town maps and layering them on top
of how the sewage system works, and where it all
pops out. Yeah, and uh, I guess the only criticism
there would be, well, hey, is is there really a

(56:56):
safe place in dairy? Like certainly if you're close to
that sewage line, and certain certain key locations you're in
more danger. But I never got the sense that they
were safe neighborhoods. No, I don't think so, because if
you think about it, regardless of like how big the
openings are to to the sewer system, if you live

(57:16):
in any kind of abode that is connected to the
sewage system, it has access to you, right like Beverly
is able to hear it through just the hole in
her sink. Ye. Now, all of this non dairy stuff
that I've been discussing here about about the spread of
some sort of an epidemic. This comes from a two
thousand sixteen Mother Jones article titled lad America's Real Criminal

(57:37):
Element by Kevin drum And he profiles the work of
Rick Nevin, who who made the argument that gasoline lad
may explain as much as of the rise and fall
violent crime over the past half century. So Nevin here
he'd worked on he'd worked for initiatives to to get
lead paint out of homes uh due to the connection

(57:58):
between lead exposure and small children and later life complications
like lower i Q, hyperactivity, behavioral problems, and learning disabilities.
So that The idea here is that lead emissions from
tailpipes rose steadily from the early forties through the early seventies,
nearly quadrupling. Then as unleaded gasoline began to replace leaded gasoline,

(58:19):
emissions plummeted, all in an upside down you pattern that
lines up with the rate of violence. Yeah, so he
points out quote when differences of atmospheric lead density between
big and small cities largely when went away, so did
the differences in murder rates. Now, the exact culprit here
would be tetra ethyl lead. But for this to work

(58:39):
as adery theory, I think we'd need a continuous or
at least fluctuating high level of of that lead in
the local environment. Now, Deary was an iron working town
where we're told, and I believe there's a textile industry
there as well, so you could probably make some sort
of case for a localized high level of atmospheric lead density.

(59:02):
So this could possibly be why just Dairy's just like
a mean town, even outside of the fact that there's
an extraterrestrial shape shifting clown monster. Yeah. Yeah, and you
know you can I guess you can sort of tease
apart what the relationship between it's inherent vileness and the
presence of this creature would happen to be. UM. Now,
I wouldn't explain hallucinations of clowns obviously. For that you

(59:25):
might look to UH to ergot poisoning, which we've we
discussed in our LSD episodes and also in an older
episode that Joe and I did, the Psychedelic Nightmare of Ergotism,
and I'll leave everyone to check out that episode for
a full explanation of of that. But we're talking ergot
We're talking about one of the organic precursors of LST

(59:48):
that acts as a parasite of grasses, including rye. So
if you have contaminated rye and enough of it makes
it into the local food supply, a town can experience
the symptoms UH, certain symptoms that a rather nightmarish and
horrific UH. In gangrenous argotism, we're talking black and appealing flesh,
and in convulsive argantism you're talking like a nervous dyssunction,

(01:00:11):
a feeling of the spiders are crawling on your body, seizures, hallucinations, mania,
and psychosis, and accounts of this kind of poisoning go
back as far as at least six BC in Assyria
and continue on up to around n So, okay, those
are some pretty good hypotheses for external stimulants that are

(01:00:33):
causing this, right pollution, Maybe ergat what about something internal?
What if it's psychological? So let's look at what's termed
as mass psychogenic or mass sociogenic illness. This term is
used in epidemiology to refer to the rapid spread of

(01:00:53):
illness signs and symptoms affecting members of a cohesive group
originating from a nervous to disturbance involving excitation, loss, or
alteration of function, whereby physical complaints that are exhibited unconsciously
have no corresponding organic set of causes. Now, this is
thought to be related to conversion disorder, where symptoms like

(01:01:17):
for instance, blindness, paralysis, and other neurological symptoms are caused
by psychological conflicts, not physiological stimuli. So this could be
used in the context of the actual credible threat that's
provoking the anxiety. Is pennywise right. For instance, it goes
along the lines that sometimes people get psychologically freaked out

(01:01:38):
when they smell a noxious odor if they fear that
they're going to be under some kind of chemical attack anyways.
So what's interesting is that most physicians are less knowledgeable
about this uh than they are in terms of like
individual cases of hysteria. The actual like epidemic hysteria hasn't
really become common knowledge in our medical fields yet. So

(01:02:01):
this is despite over the fact that there are two
hundred published accounts of mass responses to situations that involved
either suspected poisonings or other events, and unfortunately the impact
of such events is either under reported or underappreciated. So again,
this could potentially explain what's going on in dairy why
because it's difficult to recognize actual outbreaks of sociogenic illness

(01:02:26):
because they're so diverse in nature. In fact, if you
take a historical overview and you look at all of them,
it tells us that the features of mass sociogenic illnesses
tend to mirror popular social and cultural preoccupations that are
defined by distinct eras for instance, alien abduction as we've
we've recently talked about on the show. Or they could

(01:02:49):
also reflect our unique social beliefs about the nature of
the world. So maybe this is why Pennywise takes the
form of a Clown right now, in the original novel
this is all uh taking place in the fifties, right,
and then again in the eighties, and the new films
taking place in the eighties. Both of those I think
fall pretty well within the era of the clown. Yeah
I meanes was when I was watching Bozo the Clown

(01:03:12):
on TV pretty regularly. Yeah me too. Now, mass psychogenic
illnesses can actually be complex when stress gets built up
and becomes chronic in an entire population. For instance, in
regions where people live in constant fear of chemical weapons
or maybe witchcraft, or you get these mass psychogenic events

(01:03:34):
that can affect hundreds or even thousands of people at
a time. And it can also be linked to physical
illnesses that are muscular ticks, twitching, and shaking. Here's a
quick example. In eight hundred children in Jordan believed that
they had suffered from some kind of side effect of
a tetanus, diphtheria toxoid vaccine that was administered in their school.

(01:03:57):
Hundred and twenty two of them were admitted to a
hospital at all, but the vast majority of these symptoms
were actually psychological and not physical. So let's look at
Pennywise as an example, perhaps the towns people of Dairy
are experiencing a mass sociogenic illness and that they have
lost the functional ability to care when harm is being

(01:04:19):
done to their children. Their mass nervous system, if you
want to call it, that appears to somehow be inhibited,
and no one else outside of Dairy even recognizes this, right, Like,
there's gonna be towns around Dairy, But because these outbreaks
are so difficult to pin down, they don't recognize that
there's anything wrong going on. So what's the credible threat

(01:04:41):
though that's provoking their anxiety into apathy? Is it pennywise
or is it pennywise getting by on their response to
something else that's distinct to that era. Maybe it's the
high crime rate that you were talking about earlier because
of lead poisoning or something else. Subsequently, this anxiety can't
be managed clinically because of how difficult it is to

(01:05:02):
just identify the stimulus that's introducing it so you can
then reduce it. It could potentially come down to those
violent events that occur every twenty seven years, like we
mentioned earlier. Right, you've got the black Spot burning down,
the Bradley Gang rob robberies, the mass murders at the
Dairy settlement when it was originally founded. All of these
could have acted as triggering events that are causally related

(01:05:25):
to the maladay, invoking anxiety and stress in the population
and causing a temporary emotional detachment. So if all of
this is sociogenic in origin, there may be other symptoms
as well. For instance, I wonder if the people in
Dairy are experiencing nausea or dizziness, or headaches or weakness,
because these all seem to go along with such events.

(01:05:46):
We do see a lot of lethargic adults, that is true. Yeah,
and there is a big pharmacy. Uh so. Yeah. I
think the pennywise narrative actually works better in this nineteen
eighties setting than it does in then eighteen fifties. Specifically
because the child abuse kidnapping panic that was going on
in the nineteen eighties it was super prevalent in that decade,

(01:06:08):
So that would seem to be a predisposing factor that
produces the sociogenic illness in the first place. Based on
the historical shifts, you know, whether you've got these surges
of violence going on every twenty seven years, and then
you've got the fear and uncertainties that are preoccupying the
citizens of Dairy to begin with, wouldn't it be crazy if,

(01:06:30):
like everything that's happening in Castle Rock is just one
percent legit. Everything is happening in Jerusalem's a lot legit,
and even like the you know, the little bald doctors,
Crimson King, all of that real. But it just causes
everyone in Deary to have this uh, this mass um
hallucination of none of them. Yeah, nothing is actually going

(01:06:53):
on in Dairy, whether whether we're talking about it or
any of the other Stephen King novels that take place there.
Oh no, I say, everything else is happening in dear
is happening, but it's just causing. It's causing everyone to imagine, Pennywise,
that's an interesting explanation, I won't I wonder what Uncle
Stevie would say to that. Yeah, you know what it
does raise raise an interesting question, you know, because so

(01:07:15):
much of our consideration of perceptions of the supernatural and um,
you know, alternate century experiences. It's it's a situation where
the fantastic becomes real due to real world stimuli. So
if you have a world in which you have all
of this real world stimuli that makes us see crazy
things anyway and feel think crazy things anyway. If you

(01:07:36):
had something that was actually supernatural and real, what would
that do to the to the fraudulent cases? Yeah, exactly. Yeah,
we have lots of examples. I'm not gonna drill through
all of them here, but there's four or five examples
in our notes here of cases that are very similar
to this. You've got a cotton mill in Lancashire, England

(01:07:59):
and seven where people were hysterical thinking that there was
a disease that was contaminating cotton. In forty pupils at
the Outwood Academy and Ripping, England had to be treated
for dizzyness and nausea because they had a mass psychogenic illness.
You had another instance in nineteen nine in Belgium, twenty

(01:08:19):
six children from one school developed nausea, headache, fatigue, palpitations,
all this stuff. They thought it was because of bottled
Coca cola. It went so far Coca Cola themselves thought
they might be responsible for the outbreak and they blamed
it on bad carbon dioxide and possibly a fungicide that
was applied to the transport palettes that the coke was on.

(01:08:40):
Turned out all of it was psychological. And then my
favorite example, and I wish maybe we should just do
a whole episode on this because I have a ton
of notes on this is the Pokemon panic example from seven.
A lot of people remember this when there was that
that phase where in Japan it was reported that like
six hundred and eighteen child views were all experiencing these

(01:09:02):
symptoms of nausea, shortness of breath, dizziness, headaches, etcetera. They
thought there was like some kind of mass epileptic event
going on because they were all watching Pokemon, and it
turned out again they're pretty sure this was all psychological. Yeah,
you know that. Two of my favorite examples are our
spring Hill Jack from nineteenth century London and the Mad

(01:09:23):
Gasser of Mattun of Mattoon, Illinois, Int. Five and in
in that case, it was the idea that there was
a mysterious stranger going around gassing people with a gas gun.
What if every town has a Pennywise in it, but
you have to suffer a mass psychogenic event for Pennywise

(01:09:43):
to be able to basically run around and do what
it does. And so you've got the mad Gasser in
this one town. You've got a clown in another town.
You've got spring Hill Jack in another town. We just
really need to keep it together. It's a franchise, and
mostly most small towns out there have at least one
statue of a clown at their local McDonald's restaurants. Okay, well,

(01:10:06):
I think we've done a pretty exhaustive look at what
could be going on, not just with penny Wise, but
with the citizens of Dairy who just seemed to be
strangely unaware of what's going on with their children getting
eaten by a clown. Yeah. So, hey, if you have
thoughts you'd like to share about the book, the miniseries,

(01:10:27):
the motion picture, and of course our analysis here today,
you can get in touch with us a number of
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(01:10:49):
but also with other insightful fans of the show. And Hey,
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(01:11:11):
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(01:11:37):
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