July 13: Clown in a Cornfield

[kinetic_elaboration]

Just finished Clown in a Cornfield, and I have to say—pleasantly surprised! I came into it with basically no expectations. I liked the look of it and thought at least it would have a good color palette and spooky air but I also thought it might be too gory and also, I don’t know, a mid slasher basically. I think I just need to come into most horror with low expectations because otherwise I will be disappointed; it’s better to set yourself up to be pleasantly surprised, in other words, especially in this genre.

But I thought it was a very good, very solid slasher. It’s just a genre that soooo oversaturated its own market and still has this reputation today of being a crank-it-out sort of movie. Any vaguely scary antagonist will get butts in seats and so that’s literally all you need to provide. And yet it can still be done well.

 

I definitely liked what I thought I would like: the mood, the setting, the vibe, and so on. It looked good. It looked like autumn and decrepit small town America and eerie parade floats and fairy lights in teenager’s bedroom and barn party and all of that. The design of the clown serial killer was very good. I’m not overly scared of clowns but this one was quite eerie.

The characters kept me interested, and I liked being around them. The pacing was good… I don’t think it needed to be longer necessarily and I get that the very nature of the horror movie and especially of the slasher specifically means you’re inevitably going to devote half your run time to the ‘big finale,’ in other words that there has to be as much Big Scary Killing Spree probably in the dark as there is creepy daytime build up. But I do wish there was more creepy daytime build up. In particular, I wish there was more of the characters just being themselves, I think. This was a fairly big cast and while the movie did a good job of differentiating the characters, including the minor ones who were clearly more serial killer fodder than survivors, I would have liked if some of the Scary Finale stuff was shorter and some of the earlier scenes were longer. This is partly my general personal preference and partly a compliment to the characters, I think.

I enjoyed the Gay Twist too. I am but a simple creature in that regard.

As for the theme… Hmmm. I have sort of mixed feelings? I think I’d like to watch it again on that point. I felt somehow both that it was heavy handed and also that it was too opaque and I can’t tell if that washes out to subtlety and complexity or just a muddle. I mean, it’s about intergenerational conflict and specifically the conflict between those, generally older, who want to preserve tradition and keep things the same and those, usually younger, who want to create change. Certainly when the clowns were revealed to be out of touch and bitter old people ranting about the young’uns and their cat videos (?? Lol) it veered into the heavy-handed.

But on the other hand, the divide was not always so clear. I did like how the movie didn’t make the Good People and the Bad People obvious at first: some of the ominous hints seemed to paint the protagonists in a bad light, and they could certainly be annoying—though not so annoying I wanted them dead but that might be a ymmv thing. I mean they clearly weren’t always sympathetic. I think the scene with the teacher at the beginning encapsulates the conflict well. No one is sympathetic here. The teacher was cruel and wielded his authority in a vindictive manner but the kids were cruel as well. Everyone feels beaten down for different reasons and sometimes the same reason—age, class, the dying town they live in—and they’re all lashing out in a flailing, useless way.

The younger generation was definitely hurt by their arrogance. Quinn thinks the wi-fi is more important than food but she doesn’t know how to use a rotary phone and she doesn’t care to learn how to use stick and she doesn’t value her relationship with her dad, who is ultimately a huge resource to her in not getting killed: a bad ass and one of the good guys.

But on the other hand, what the clowns seem to be punishing them most for, and what all generations of clowns have punished people for, is simply existing and wanting to create their own spaces and their own paths. All the clowns want is conformity. Or—is it? Cole’s father was the one who destroyed the factory and brought economic ruin on the town. That wasn’t to preserve its small-town values. That was his own greed. So there is of course hypocrisy too. It’s also notable that each generation of clowns targets the generation below, but of course, they were once the generation below. These clowns were, what, contemporaries of the 90s burnouts? Did they still sympathize with the clowns then? To what extent is this a narrative of becoming what you hated and to what extent is a narrative of false narratives, of creating rationales for a more senseless violence?

Anyway. Another thing I liked a lot was the humor of the film. I think that can be quite tough. Slashers should, especially in 2025, have a sense of humor to them, a self-awareness. The genre has too much baggage not to. And I thought this one kept up the right level of campy sort of humor that felt natural and didn’t overpower the rest of the film or its horror, that didn’t feel forced or like it was trying too hard. I especially liked the squeaky clown shoes. That was pure camp, honestly. The ending, too, the final escape in the clown car, running into the final clown and letting blood shatter the windshield, while everyone gives up on not saying the word ‘fuck’ around adults or on chastising kids for saying it—very cathartic, very funny, very over-the-top, very on point.

I wish the ending, the coda, had had a smidgeon more exposition. Where was Quinn going? I decided at the end she must have been going off to college, since her car was all packed up, but that wasn’t really clear. And honestly 1-2 lines of dialogue could have fixed that. “I don’t need you to drive me” becomes “I don’t need you to drive me to college” or “I didn’t need you to drive me to high school, I don’t need you to drive me to college” or like literally whatever. It was too distracting. But it’s a small complaint.

The only place I zoned out was during some of the clown-reveal/exposition/hunting of Quinn specifically parts. It’s a staple of the genre to have some Big Speeches from the Big Bad(s) so that didn’t bother me too much, and I guess it was kind of inevitable that there would have to be yet more hunting and threatening and killing and so on. It was a little draggy for me but I think that says more about me than anything.

So, yeah, I was very pleased. I would watch it again. I would read the book! But only one. I can’t be reading trilogies about scary clowns; it would take me a year.