Eli Craig’s “Clown In A Cornfield”, based on the fantastic series of young adult slasher novels by Adam Cesare, is just plain trying too hard to be a generational experience. While Cesare’s novel is an earnest, often terrifying, descent into the hidden horrors of small-town values run bloody, Craig’s film is juggling one too many chainsaws, unsure whether it wants to be satirical, topical, or overly reverential and settling for something tepid smack in the middle. I’ve watched this film twice and left each screening frustrated. I WANTED to love “Clown In A Cornfield”, and maybe you will.
The film’s story, as it is with the novel, follows young Quinn Maybrook (Katie Douglas), a Philly expat coerced into living in flyover country with her doctor father following the tragic death of her mother. Quinn is unnerved by the folksy charm of Kettle Springs, a town known for its burned-down corn syrup factory and that factory’s “friendly” clown mascot, a sharp edged Bozo/Gacey abomination called Friendo. Quinn quickly falls in with a group of troublemakers/filmmakers from school who pride themselves on making viral videos, many of which feature the town’s hundred-year-old mascot as a stalking serial killer. While Quinn is bemused by their antics, and more than a little captivated by the son of the town founders and all-around bad boy, Cole (Carson MacCormac), the adults of Kettle Springs see the youths as a menace, a desecration of their values and a dangerous threat to an old time way of living. A bloody reckoning has its crosshairs on the children of Kettle Springs, a century-old terror that stalks the corn fields, just so happens to wear a clown mask, and carries with it a desire to “Make Kettle Springs Great Again”.
Slasher movies are legion, and so are their tropes and tones. Going all the way back to the classical terror of “Peeping Tom” (1960) or the unknown creeper of “Black Christmas” (1974), the slasher killer is a cipher for a filmmaker’s whimsy; a looking glass through which to paint the world red and often articulate some intimate truth about the nature of man. Some are silly, supernatural, and over the top (The “Friday The 13th” Series and “Hatchet”), while others are more human, biting, and brutal (The “Scream” Series or “The Town That Dreaded Sundown”), but the best of the bunch are the ones that find ways to innovate within the confines of the genre; subverting long established tropes for maximum shock. That’s a long runway to explain my foundational issue with “Clown In A Cornfield”. While you’d imagine a simple clown masked killer would retain their humanity, the film’s kills are often pointedly comic and fantastical to the point of breaking the foundational reality it exists within. You buy that Jason Voorhes can snap a person in half with his bare hands. But expecting some guy in a clown suit to do the same strains credulity to an unnatural degree. One kill teased in the trailer, for example, revolves around a high school jock bench pressing in his garage. In short order, a Friendo-faced clown grabs the bar and means to shove it onto the boy’s neck while holding a rusty, jagged saw. Gravity and failing muscles take their course, and the boy’s head is dutifully guillotined away and lands in a cooler of generic brand Midwest beer. All well and good. But as established in the film, Friendo is simply a person; a flesh, blood, and eight hours of sleep needing human. That kind of saw would require the force of Andre The Giant to slip so easily through the jock’s neck and spine. And besides, the blade in question is of the jagged-toothed variety, indicating that if one were to desire a removal of noggin from neck, one would need to do some serious sawing. These are not nitpicks that one should be mulling over during the course of a movie where a clown kills teenagers, but when these incongruities stack up, the film suffers for its inability to stand on its own two comically oversized feet.
“Clown In A Cornfield” doesn’t wear its influences on its sleeve so much as it has them plastered across it’s grease painted face, with several sequences making overt reference to films like “Jaws” and even “Tropic Thunder” with such specifically, and without subversion, that the audience would be forgiven for feeling as if they’ve already seen this movie. Eli Craig has made hay in this space before, directing the delightfully wholesome hillbilly horror comedy “Tucker and Dale vs Evil”(2010) where he actively subverted the well known genre of backwoods hicks picking off teenagers in the woods and created a surprisingly sweet movie about the bonds of friendship. The tone is goofy, bordering on slapstick, and teenagers die in such ridiculous fashion that you never spare them a second thought for laughing. The issue here is that the “Clown In A Cornfield” book series is in no way satirical. Playing on themes that touch on school shootings and the tragedy of being forced to survive in the forgotten corners of small-town America, Cesare’s books care for each of the victims felled by Friendo’s chainsaw or crossbow without a hint of irony or winking at the camera. There’s an honesty, even a compassion, that Cesare is able to conjure through the haze of slasher devastation that Craig’s film only hints at and yet never fully commits to. While teens die by the bushelful, there’s not a one that you are meant to mourn. There’s nothing wrong with a silly slasher, I just know that “Clown In A Cornfield” had the makings of something more.
The generational horror at the center of both the film and the book series is one of the first stories I’ve seen that uses slasher tropes to tackle the yawning divide between Boomers and Gen-Z, alien species who share about as much in common with each other as Friendo does with Ronald McDonald. Without getting into plot specifics, Craig’s film shines when it retains its faithfulness to Cesare’s fully realized world and falters when it tries to put too much mustard on its fastball by adding a layer of almost Purge-like legacy to the town of Kettle Springs which threatens to rip the movie’s logic limb from limb. It might feel digressive to continue harping on the narrative integrity of a movie where teenagers are getting pitchforked to death, yet as I have written (or more accurately, ranted) before, horror films are inherently political and can contain multitudes. “Clown” wants to wear its heart on its polka dotted sleeve, shoving a middle finger into the bulbous red nose of an aging generation whose disregard for the future has proven a blight on their children and society at large. There are plenty of clowns in the streets wanting to hurt kids, they just wear red baseball caps instead of porkpie hats. Cesare’s book understands this and trumpets the horror of this world without compromise or reservation. If only the film were so bold, then we might have had something here. I’m not mad, “Clown In A Cornfield”, I’m just disappointed.
At the end of the day, “Clown In A Cornfield” has all the trappings of a fun time at the movies; it’s got jokes, gore, and the occasional precient message. For many kids, this might be their first slasher, and there are far worse films to be introduced to the genre through. However, if you’re looking for something better, I’d recommend picking up a copy of Adam Cesare’s “Clown In A Cornfield” series at any local bookstore.
You’ll be glad you did.
“Clown In A Cornfield” is playing at Prytania Theatres at Canal Place.
