The pasty face. The red hair. The beep-beep nose. Pennywise the Clown provided nightmare-fuel for kids big and small throughout the '90s after Tim Curry brought him to life in Tommy Lee Wallace's IT mini-series, adapted from Stephen King's 1,138-page tome.

Before Tim Curry, though, it was make-up artist Bart Nixon's job to come up with a clown who would have everybody cowering. From early concept designs to affixing bits of rubber to Curry's face, he's the man behind the monster. Without Bart Nixon, we wouldn't have the Pennywise we all love and fear.

"I was responsible for all the creatures like the werewolf and the marsh and the corpse of his dad on the lake and the big spider at the end," he says of his time working with special effects company Fantasy 2. "We did everything except the creatures in the fortune cookies."

Here, alongside his original character designs, Nixon exclusively tells Digital Spy how he created horror history...

Bart Nixon ABC

THE PENNYWISE LEGACY

"I did The Ring 3 a couple of years ago, working with Rick Baker, and he brought IT up, which was very flattering! Obviously guys like Rick Baker and Stan Winston have got this catalogue of famous characters they've created. It's nice to have one that's mine.

"Pennywise was my design, my sculpture, my application, so it's all my baby. It's great that I've got about a dozen T-shirts with Pennywise on, I've got a pair of Pennywise tennis shoes, people still want to talk to me about it. The make-up, I'm very happy with it, I think it holds up nicely.

"I'll mention it to co-workers and they'll be like, 'Oh that scared the crap outta me!' That's great."

GETTING INVOLVED

"Stephen King was really hot back then. Everything he was writing was getting turned into movies or TV shows, so IT was certainly something I was aware of, but I wasn't a fan of the book in particular. I hadn't read the book.

Bart Mixon, ABC

"My brother was a big King fan and he was like, 'Oh it's cool, IT can be anything!' I borrowed his book, read a couple of paragraphs where it first describes Pennywise, but I worked more from the information that was given to me in the script, rather than going through the book.

"Gene Ward at Fantasy 2 Film Effects brought me in to work on the mini-series. They were a miniature and digital effects company; they did high-speed miniatures. The first thing we did together was Fright Night 2, which was also for Tommy Lee Wallace, so when IT came up a year or two after Fright Night, Tommy was back and Gene called me in.

DESIGNING PENNYWISE

"In broad strokes, the design we ended up going with was basically a clown version of Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera. When I was sculpting it, that was a conscious aesthetic decision on my part, in terms of the shape of the head and the upturned nose and all that stuff.

Bart Mixon ABC

"I wish I had gotten a copy or made notes of my research, but I remember looking at a clown book in the Glendale Library here in California and there was a Russian clown that kind of looked like the Phantom of the Opera.

"A lot of my original ideas, I didn't necessarily get to do them. Visually, I wanted to have two looks for Pennywise – when he's in the kids' story, he's a friendly, happy-looking clown, but then when they came back as grown-ups, they knew he wasn't a clown at that point, they knew he was a monster, so I wanted him to be more of a horrific caricature of a clown. Maybe not a corpse clown, but something more horrible.

Bart Nixon ABC

"I remember talking to Tommy about it and he was concerned about shooting schedule-wise, having to turn Tim over from one look to the next, on the same day, would have been too difficult."

CRAFTING ON CURRY

"Once we had met Tim Curry, I could work from his head shots; I was able to do designs that would fit him. The final sketch of the design, I just drew over Tim's face to make sure everything would fit. I did three sketches, painted them up, photographed them and sent them to the director to get feedback from him.

Bart Nixon ABC

"Then we settled on one sculpture and I broke it down to prosthetics; a chin, a nose and headpiece. We did the make-up test; that's when we refined the paint scheme and Tim Curry had some thoughts on that, he told me his thoughts. It was definitely a collaborative process.

"I was certainly a Tim Curry fan. I'd seen Legend and Rocky Horror. I remember he had a couple of albums out at the time. He wasn't too keen on us playing Rocky Horror music in the trailer, but I had a Tim Curry cassette and he'd love to play that. Madonna's 'Vogue' was out then, so I got some video of him boogying in the trailer to that.

Michael Ochs Archives/Moviepix Getty Images

"I was a little intimidated by him. After Legend, he knew what good prosthetic make-up was, and that was a bit daunting, but he was very friendly, very nice. He wasn't all, 'Shut up and do my make-up!' – thankfully we didn't have cell phones back then, so it wasn't like he was sitting on his phone the whole time.

"When we got into the details of the make-up, he would look at it and offer suggestions, critiques in terms of, 'The eyebrows are a little crooked,' whatever. He was a part of the process. He was a very nice guy, very easy to work with and very comfortable to work with. I've nothing but good memories.

"Actually I bumped into him at Burbank a few months ago now and, not that I expected him to remember who I was, but I went up and he goes, 'Oh, that was wonderful make-up!' He was very complimentary, saying very nice things about the make-up after all these years. It wasn't like, 'Ah, get away from me!' – so that was flattering!"

CHANGING COLOURS

"My initial paint concepts were a little heavier. I had more of a big red mouth, and a red colour that built up from the lips into the cheekbones a little, and then these big blue eye sockets to make it look skullish.

"We tested it with the headpiece, and the nose and the white face, and then Tim had some specific suggestions on some pretty minimal aspects, lips and eye make-up, and then we tested that.

"Three hours was kind of a magic number back then with the application. Just the building of the layers, the white, that wasn't a one-step thing; it took a couple of passes as I wanted a nice pure white. All my colours I wanted very primary, the blue was blue, the red was red.

"They weren't muddy or weird mixes of colours, I wanted everything to be very stark and primary like a live-action cartoon. I should've had a stencil but I didn't, so I had to do all that stuff by hand and that took a little bit of time.

"At one point we were talking about if they'd let us put contact lenses on Tim that would've been a flat blue, not even modelled on an eye, just like a live-action cartoon.

GETTING SWEATY

"The only problems we had, some days it got a little warmer than you thought it would have in Canada and because I used acrylic paint and glue, there's no place for your sweat to go, so we'd get little sweat blisters beneath the rubber where the sweat was literally pushing the paint up off Tim's face.

"You had to blot it; if you weren't careful and you just wiped it, you'd end up wiping a chunk of the make-up off. I remember a film I was on, Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2, where we had similar make-up and the first time I went to do something with the sweat on that, a big chunk of the make-up just slid off.

"So I'd have to get out the powder puff and basically blot it and pop these little sweat blisters, soak up the sweat. It was pretty much the same make-up on Tim every day so there wasn't a lot of continuity of changes to worry about.

BATTERY ACID

"The battery acid stuff, we shot that in post, back in LA at Fantasy 2. The shot of him coming up through the drain in the shower, as well as reacting to the battery acid, we shot that there.

"A testament to what a nice guy Tim was, I'd taken the battery acid prosthetics up to Canada with the intention of us shooting it up there, but we didn't have time to do it, so we shot it in Canada with just the normal look.

Bart Mixon, ABC

"At that point, the thinking was, 'Let's just not even use it, and just do him looking normal,' so when he pulled his hands away it'd just be some slime or whatever.

"Tim was like, 'Oh it's a shame, Bart did such a beautiful job on these prosthetics,' so he agreed that if he could shoot all of that stuff in one day, he would go do the heavier make-up for a couple of scenes, so I'm very grateful to him for that.

"He could easily have said, 'I don't wanna wear that,' and it would've just stayed in the box. So he recognised that I put some effort into it, and it makes sense in that scene that something has happened to him.

WHITE LIGHT

"When they shoot him in the head with the rock, in the script, when the head cracked and broke away, spider hairs were supposed to be sticking out.

ABC

"For me, I thought that was too literal, I didn't think the spider was what it really was either, that was just its last attempt to scare everybody. The dead lights were its truest form, so it was my suggestion that when the head cracks open, the dead light would be shining out of its head, and I was happy that they adopted that.

"Visually that makes it a little more magical and otherworldly. For me, he was never just a big spider or a mummy or a werewolf, the spider was just another illusion. Actually, when it was the light coming out of his head, my brother did the animation for that.

COULROPHOBIA

Bart Nixon ABC

"I was never scared of clowns. I don't remember the clown phobia stuff back then... That was never really a thing for me. John Wayne Gacy, the serial killer who dressed up like a clown, I guess he didn't give clowns very good press.

"I don't think I was ever a big fan of them, but it wasn't because I was afraid of them. I don't recall ever being weirded out by clowns. Hopefully I've contributed to that for other people!"

The new IT opens on September 8.

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