Like, scary clowns.
There are enough truly iconic scary clowns in our culture that you'd think they'd have cornered the market on scary clowns. Yet people continue to give us new scary clowns.
The latest example -- that I've seen anyway, there may have been others since then -- is Clown in a Cornfield, which I watched on Halloween night.
You'd think this movie had great promise, considering that it was from the same guy who directed the horror comedy classic Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. Then again, that movie came out in 2010, and before Clown, he'd only had one other film in between, 2017's Little Evil, which was not great.
Then there was the potentially promising fact that the title states what it is in an exact enough way to be cheeky and postmodern, kind of like Snakes on a Plane.
Nope. It's just a bad horror movie with people wearing clown masks.
Instead of going off on Clown in a Cornfield specifically -- which I could if I had the energy, or if I thought it was worthy even of my extended scorn -- I'm going to show you how many other examples there are of movies with scary clowns, to indicate the creative bankruptcy of the very idea. A list seems as good a way of going about it as any, though don't read anything into the order.
1) Pennywise the Clown in It and It: Chapter 2. Started as a Stephen King novel, of course, and then became a TV movie in the early 1990s. Now there's also a new TV show.
2) The scary clown in Poltergiest. A classic.
3) Clown, Jon Watts' 2014 film in which a man gets trapped in a clown outfit that turns him into a killer.
4) Speaking of killers, there's Killer Clowns from Outer Space.
5) Art the Clown is the star of the grotesquely violent Terrifier films.
6) Lest we forget, the Joker is essentially an evil clown, even if Batman fans would probably not like to characterize him in such a reductive way.
7) There's Captain Spaulding, Sid Haig's character in House of 1000 Corpses, which he reprised in two other films.
8) The Spawn villain, played by John Leguizamo in a movie I didn't see, is a clown.
That's eight. I guess that means there must be 429 others. Or 428, if you consider Clown in a Cornfield itself to be #437.
And then I asked myself:
Couldn't I find eight other examples of a thing in our culture that had repeated itself in a similar way, yet it doesn't offend me?
Maybe it's just that it feels like there is a specificity to the clown that makes us note the repetitions. The first person who came up with the idea of an evil clown landed on something quite complicated in the ways it scares us.
For one, there is the inherent irony. A clown, as originally conceived, is supposed to bring joy to children in whatever way it can manage. So when you make this joy machine a vessel for murder and mayhem, you are talking about the very dissolution of our trust of things that are supposed to be innocent and make us feel safe. It's a terrifying assault on our basic sense of trust.
But because of the clown's outrageous appearance, it has never felt like a "safe" joy delivery device, like a teddy bear or, I don't know, a kitten. A person who would choose to dress themselves this way has to have a bit of screw loose, don't they? If we're being reductive, the need for attention, which would seem to be a common trait for most clowns, is a very close psychological neighbor to many darker and more desperate impulses. To become a clown is, in a way, to warn the world that there might be something wrong with you.
The irony, though, is what I think makes the clown killer distinctive, and why I think we notice examples of it more than the -- literally this time -- 437 movies about killer sharks.
And that's also why we seem to love killer animatronic characters from pizza restaurants. There have been multiple examples of that, too. Maybe not eight and certainly not 437, but in the past few years alone we've gotten Five Night's at Freddy's (with a sequel to follow this month) and Willy's Wonderland, the Nicolas Cage starrer. I could think of more examples, I'm sure, if I put my mind to it.
Really, anything that could exist to entertain children has been made into a horrible killing machine at one point or another. I mentioned teddy bears a moment ago. There's a killer teddy bear in that movie Imaginary, isn't there? And I'm sure that's hardly the only example of that.
But if we really want to look into why the maker of another prospective killer clown movie shouldn't be too chastened by a post like the one I'm currently writing, we shouldn't forget that the movie business is, first and foremost, a business. And you know what? Movies about deranged clowns make buck.
If we've learned anything about this business, it's that you give people more of what they want, rather than less of it. No disdainful observer pushing his glasses up his nose about how many killer clown movies there have been should dissuade you about greenlighting another and reaping the profits of such a decision. Heck, we might even grant the makers of Clown in a Cornfield with an uncommon desire to differentiate themselves from previous examples.
Here's two ways:
1) This is the first movie where a killer clown has been in a cornfield!
2) This is the first movie where a killer clown has not actually been insane!
It's that second one that sort of holds some sway for me. Unlike, I believe, all the examples I mentioned previously, the clowns in this movie are not notably insane, and I guess here I need to give you a very belated SPOILER WARNING for Clown in a Cornfield.
It turns out there is not just one killer clown, but multiple local citizens wearing killer clown masks, based on the mascot for a corn syrup made in this town, who goes by the name of Frendo. These citizens, who include the mayor and the police chief, have some sort of conspiratorial agenda that I won't bother to get into here.
The point is, they don't just have a screw loose. Yeah, you have to be a little touched in the head if you are resorting to killing people, but they have a mission that is something other than chaos. They're more like the various people who have worn a Ghostface mask in various Scream movies, none technically insane, but all with some sort of master plan for revenge or to achieve a particular outcome.
This also, however, just makes Clown in a Cornfield more cynical. It doesn't even have the courage of any demented convictions. It's just wearing a mask to make money, and it doesn't really matter what's on the mask as long as it will make the money.
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