A mad killer decked out in full clown costume stalks teens through a rural midwestern town in Clown in a Cornfield, which debuted at the SXSW Film Festival back in March and is now playing in Prague cinemas. This new slasher film with a strong dash of comedy from director Eli Craig boasts both standout scenes of bloody horror and laugh-out-loud moments, but never quite manages the masterful balance the director achieved in his earlier classic, 2007’s Tucker and Dale vs. Evil.
Clown in a Cornfield stars Katie Douglas as high school senior Quinn Maybrook, who moves from the big city on the east coast to rural Kettle Springs, Missouri so her single dad Glenn (Aaron Abrams) can take over as the local doctor. But almost immediately on her arrival, she notices something off about the town’s adult population, including Mayor Arthur Hill (Kevin Durand) and Sheriff Dunne (Will Sasso), who seem just a bit too harsh on the local teens who film viral YouTube videos about one of the town’s local legends: a murderous clown named Frendo.
Frendo was the mascot of the town’s old Baypen Corn Syrup factory, which mysteriously burned down some time back in an incident blamed on the YouTubers, who include the mayor’s son Cole (Carson MacCormac) and pals Tucker (Ayo Solanke), Matt (Alexandre Martin Deakin), Janet (Cassandra Potenza), and Ronnie (Verity Marks). They swear they had nothing to do with the fire… but they did sneak into the old factory to film a video right before the blaze hit.
But lest we think that something might actually be up with this sketchy teen group Katie begins to fall in with, director Craig wastes little time establishing Clown in a Cornfield‘s horror cred: a bravura single-take sequence early on that features one of these characters stalked through his home by the killer clown. It’s a tense and terrific horror sequence that would make Dario Argento proud… and, unfortunately, the last of its kind in the movie, which begins to skew more heavily towards comedy around the halfway mark.
Not that the comedy doesn’t work: the film’s climax features multiple laugh-out-loud gags, many of which play on these characters’ inability to interface with old technology. That car could make for a getaway vehicle—but it’s a stick shift that no one knows how to drive. But there’s a phone in the rural farmhouse, they could call the cops—if only it weren’t a rotary dial that they helplessly poke and prod at as the killer approaches.
These kinds of jokes explicitly evoke the kind of ribald comedy that made Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (and films like Edgar Wright‘s Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz) so much fun, but there are not enough of them to sustain the film’s second act, which largely abandons the kind of scare tactics displayed earlier in the movie. There’s a Scream-like mystery element to figuring out who is behind the mask, but the audience is way ahead of the narrative on this one.
Still, director Craig gets a lot of mileage out of the setup, and his brand of comedy-horror works better than something like Fear Street: Prom Queen, which has the same kind of wink-wink self-awareness, but lacks the explicit gags. There’s plenty of fun to be had here, even if the movie doesn’t quite live up to its titular clown-in-a-cornfield promise—don’t go in expecting the kind of raptors-in-a-field tension that Steven Spielberg delivered in The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
While Clown in a Cornfield doesn’t quite juggle scares and satire as deftly as Craig’s earlier work, it still delivers a lively mix of gore and guffaws that horror-comedy fans will appreciate. There are standout sequences, clever genre nods, and a killer with just enough menace to make the laughs land harder. It may not redefine the slasher formula—but it proves that even in the age of smartphones and self-driving cars, a clown with a pitchfork can still harvest a hell of a body count.
