Wrong! In fact, the creepy clown has become such a common
horror figure that it’s hard to imagine there was a time when children laughed
along with the likes of Clarabell, Bozo, and Ronald McDonald. These days it
seems that the easiest way to get distribution for a cheap-o, direct-to-video
(sorry…I mean “direct-to-streaming”) horror movie is to stick a leering, fanged
clown in it. Stitches (2012), Sloppy the Psychotic (2012), Mockingbird (2014), All Hallow’s Eve (2013), and of course, Clown (2014) are just a few of these fun flicks.
Looking farther back to the beginnings of horror, evil
clowns were less plentiful. Clowns were still widely regarded as the ultimate
children’s entertainers despite their deathly pale faces and grotesque smiles
and footwear and occasional aberrations, such as Jean-Gaspard Deburau, a French mime who murdered an under-aged heckler in 1836 and Punch the clown puppet who’d been entertaining gawpers for centuries by slapping Judy over the head with a bit of wood. The killer clown was even a relatively recent creation in terms
of non-cinematic entertainment. Hop-Frog, the title pyromaniac clown of Edgar
Allan Poe’s classic short tale, first appeared in 1849. Ruggero Leoncavallo’s
Pagliacci first wailed in opera houses in 1892. These were extreme rarities
rather than clear genre pioneers. When horror’s most iconic early star, Lon
Chaney, portrayed a clown in 1924’s He
Who Gets Slapped, he was the victim of the piece, getting locked up with a
lion and stabbed with a sword before dying on stage. Not even the introduction
of that most famous homicidal funny man of all, Batman’s arch nemesis The
Joker, in 1940 was enough to ignite a killer-clown craze.
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| The Clown Prince of Crime on his inaugural splash page. |
The thing that really turned things around for the currently
ubiquitous monster was real life. In 1972, John Wayne Gacy of Cook County,
Illinois, began a six-year terror spree in which he raped, tortured, and
murdered 33 boys and young men. Gacy’s other face was that of Pogo the Clown, a
performer at charity events and children’s parties. The nature of Gacy’s crimes
would make him a figure of revulsion under any circumstances, but the fact that
he was also a clown, a character born to make children happy, made his story
extra disturbing. If you couldn’t trust that friend to all little people, whom
could you trust?
So maybe that smile has to be painted on because the mouth
within it is actually sneering. Maybe that suit is so baggy because it is
concealing a straight razor. Maybe that face is so white because it is the face
of death. Maybe the clown is no friend of the young at all. Maybe the clown
looks so monstrous when you really consider its features because it is a monster.
John Wayne Gacy’s horrific crimes made national news, and
the media branded him “The Killer Clown,” but killer clowns still were not
quite poised to take over the horror genre. The next such creature was as much
a murderous doll as a killer clown, wrapping its distorted limbs around a little
boy in Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist
in 1982. This scene is among the film’s most infamous, and it certainly
instilled a fear of clowns in many viewers, yet much of the horror is derived
from the idea of a doll—another trusted friend of the young— coming to life. This
clown does not have the articulation to caper about hilariously before luring a
child into its grip.
The walking, talking killer clown needed to wait four more
years to receive its first full-blooded embodiment. In 1986, horror maestro
Stephen King published his masterpiece, a 1,138 doorstop of terror called It. The tale’s monster is an ancient,
intergalactic evil that preys on children by tapping into the things that
frighten them most. It may appear as a leper, a giant bird, or a Universal monster (and he covers all
those bases by taking the forms of Dracula, Frankenstein Monster, the Wolf Man,
the Mummy, and the Gill Man). His actual state is closer to a creature from one
of those atom-age monster movies: a giant spider. However, It’s form that we
all remember most is that of Pennywise the Dancing Clown. It is in this state
that It communicates with the novel’s young heroes. It is in this state that It
commits its first and most horrific crime when Pennywise pops up inside of a
sewer grate to entice little Georgie Denbrough into an underground wonderland
before tearing the child’s arm from his body, leaving him to bleed to death.
In one stroke, King crystallized the killer clown for horror
fiction. Pennywise is no victim, inanimate doll, or opera singer. He is a
promiser of fun and fantasy like all good, real-life clowns. He is a betrayer
of that promise when he kills the very innocent he is expected to befriend.
In 1990, Tim Curry gave a viewable face to that monster,
becoming the undeniable highlight of an undeniably uneven made-for-TV
adaptation of It. Curry’s is a brilliant
performance, as funny as the antics of any good-old clown, as terrifying as the
attacks of any monster. Probably not coincidentally, a term for the fear of
clowns—coulrophobia (coul is a derivative of the Greek word koulon, which means limb, suggesting the stilts upon which many a clown walks)—was
coined shortly after the It TV movie
aired. The previous year also saw the killer clown working its way into
B-pictures such as the comedy horrors Out
of the Dark (featuring the final role of Divine, who’d played psychotic
killers in clown-like makeup in Pink
Flamingos and Female Trouble) and
Killer Klowns from Outer Space, as
well as the more traditional slasher horror Clownhouse.
Perhaps the explosion of recent clown horror movies is the
result of the kids traumatized by Tim Curry’s Pennywise growing up and making
movies rooted in their own fears. Along with the glut of direct-to-video clown
horrors, there have been higher profile examples of this creature in Rob
Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects as embodied by Sid
Haig’s grotty Captain Spaulding. John Carroll Lynch’s even more terrifying and
more complex Twisty the Clown stalked through TV’s American Horror Story: Freak Show (2014) before turning the trope
on its head with a tear-jerking back story. In the following season, Lynch
would portray the ghost of John Wayne Gacy, tying the trope to its origin
explicitly.
Last month saw the long-anticipated release of the first cinematic
adaptation of It with Bill Skarsgård
in the role of Pennywise the Dancing Clown. To be expected in this age of subtlety-devoid shock-scares and noise, the mythology of King’s novel was sidelined and the vogue for clown fear was at the fore as Pennywise is front and center for most of the movie. Young Richie Tozier is even given a dose of coulrophobia and dumped in a room full of creepy clown statues to pile drive the point home: scary clowns are scary.
More disturbing than these screen depictions are the recent “clown sightings” reported by children claiming that clowns tried to lure them into woods. Such reports are either the results of disturbed adults attempting to get a piece of one of today’s most prevalent fears or the overactive imaginations of children who no longer trust those fun fellows in floppy shoes. Way-hey, kids!
More disturbing than these screen depictions are the recent “clown sightings” reported by children claiming that clowns tried to lure them into woods. Such reports are either the results of disturbed adults attempting to get a piece of one of today’s most prevalent fears or the overactive imaginations of children who no longer trust those fun fellows in floppy shoes. Way-hey, kids!
Essential Viewing
Poltergeist (1982)
Killer Klowns from
Outer Space (1989)
Clownhouse (1989)
Stephen King’s It (1990)
House of 1000 Corpses (2003)
The Devil’s Rejects (2005)
American Horror Story:
Freak Show (2014)
It (2017)
Essential Reading
“Hop-Frog” by Edgar Allan Poe (1849)
“Batman vs. The Joker” by Bill Finger (1940)
It by Stephen King
(1986)
