He’s worked on many films throughout his career as a makeup effects artist, including A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge and last year’s Bright, but Bart Mixon is perhaps best known in the horror world for his work on IT, the 1990 mini-series.

Mixon created and applied the terrifying Pennywise makeup to Tim Curry, without question one of the most iconic makeups in the entire history of horror.

What does Mixon, having designed the original Pennywise, thinks about the new Pennywise and the new IT? He provides those insights to House of Tortured Souls.

“It was cool,” Mixon said of the new Pennywise design. “I’m certainly fond of mine, but I thought they did a nice job. There were certainly some similarities to my makeup which probably couldn’t be avoided [with] it being a clown, but I thought it was different enough. I don’t envy [Bill] Skarsgård just having to follow Tim Curry. That must be a pretty daunting task for him, but yeah, I thought it was interesting as a makeup. I’m glad they did their own take on it, that they didn’t just copy mine even though I have friends that thought they copied it a little too much. I guess it has the bulbous head like mine, but that’s where the similarities end.”

“Just as a movie, I thought they did a pretty good job,” Mixon continued. “Mine was a TV movie from 1990; theirs is an R-rated feature in 2017, so obviously they can do stuff we weren’t allowed to do. For what I did, I think it was about three hours and five minutes long. By the time they do part two, it will probably come into about four and a half hours to cover the same territory, so I am kind of envious that they got another hour and a half to tell the same story and they are not restricted by the 1990 TV censorship as I was. But I’m really looking forward to part two.”

“Some of the visuals in there I thought were really cool, like the scene with Georgie in the flooded basement and he’s standing in like ankle deep water and Pennywise comes up out of the water, which I thought made a nice supernatural element since obviously the water wasn’t deep enough for him to be completely submerged and yet he was. Or like when he was working Georgie like a hand puppet or when he ripped Georgie’s arm off – which is a scene we could only hint at. In our version, he is missing an arm but you can’t really tell.”