Titles are a funny thing. Adapted from a 2020 novel of the same name, Eli Craig’s horror-comedy Clown in a Cornfield takes the same tact as recent genre films Death of a Unicorn and Cocaine Bear in using its title to dispel any mystery of what it might be about, while also signaling a somewhat flippant disposition. In four words on the poster, the film announces to the world precisely what it is, while also broadcasting that it’s in on the joke in a way that feels increasingly desperate for attention (to borrow a sentiment from Mean Girls, “I’m not a regular slasher movie, I’m a cool slasher movie”). Ostensibly, the film is your basic, lowest common denominator masked-killer film where hormonal an/or disaffected teens are sliced up en route to our final girl unmasking the assailant and emerging hardened and better prepared for a sequel. On merit alone, it’s hard to conceive of the film securing a premiere at SXSW and a distribution deal with Shudder if it went by a name that wasn’t steeped in a trendy, ironic detachment. But we’re living in a post-Snakes on a Plane world, where a film foregrounding its cruddiness becomes a marketing tool unto itself. Heed the dinner bell and come scarf down your post-modernist slop.
Which isn’t to say Clown in a Cornfield is entirely cynical or that it isn’t attempting to speak to “how we live now” through the prism of horror. Craig is best known for directing 2010’s Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, which took the novel premise of presenting a “hillbilly massacre” film from the perspective of two, sweet-natured good old boys who run afoul of a group of preppy teens in the woods whose prejudices lead to them menacing the title characters. One can almost detect a similarly subversive bent to Clown in a Cornfield. The problem is that the film is caught in the no man’s land between knowingly janky and actually clever; it doesn’t upend clichés or moldy tropes, but, rather, merely presents them with an archness that plays as snickering or, worse, above it all. Calling attention to lazy conventions is nice, but avoiding them altogether is preferable.
After a prologue set in the early ’90s, which serves no real purpose beyond inexplicably restaging the opening scenes of Jaws in a cornfield, we’re introduced to our main characters: former ER doctor Glenn (Aaron Abrams) and his sullen 17-year-old daughter Quinn (Katie Douglas). After Quinn’s mother accidentally overdosed — a hot button topic the film indifferently drops into the narrative and refuses to grapple with — Glenn packs up his daughter and relocates the two of them, somewhat arbitrarily, from Philadelphia to Kettle Springs, Missouri. It’s the sort of one-stoplight, perpetually gray, economically depressed town where even the nice houses look like they haven’t been painted in decades. A mysterious fire a year earlier burned down the Baypen Corn Syrup factory, which was the town’s primary employer, and while nobody can prove it, it’s widely suspected that the fire was caused by teenage ne’er-do-wells like Cole (Carson MacCormac) and his friends, who entertain themselves by filming prank videos and posting them to the Internet. Bored and resentful of her dad for uprooting them to flyover country so that he can play small-town doctor and hide from his sadness, Quinn immediately falls in with the “bad crowd” despite stern warnings from the smiling-through-his-authoritarianism Sheriff Dunne (Will Sasso) and the hulking teenager/self-professed redneck, Rust (Vincent Muller). Quinn eventually gets rolled into the production of Cole and company’s Internet videos, which largely focus on staging gruesome-looking fake murders perpetrated by Frendo, the clown mascot of Baypen and a local urban legend who has been blamed for unsolved murders dating back decades. It’s all fun and games for Cole and the gang (albeit with some time spent cooling their heels in detention and the town jail’s holding cell) until, one by one, the group of friends starts getting picked off by an actual killer in a clown mask who, true to the film’s title, can often be found emerging from the sprawling cornfields that encircle the town.
Of course, with cell phone coverage in town being spotty it’s not entirely clear that their friends have begun to disappear so much as they won’t return texts. And it’s here that one can sense Craig trying to wed the oft-recycled tenets of teen horror films — sneaking out of the house while being grounded, a raging party on the outskirts of town that the adults are entirely oblivious about, etc. — to something specific to Gen Z. While there’s no shortage of potential suspects, including Cole’s dad Mayor Hill (Kevin Durand), who as the the ceremonial figurehead of Kettle Springs is preoccupied with the annual Founder’s Day going off without a hitch, the overriding theme of Clown in a Cornfield is how much the town elders can’t stand the kids today — what with their Internet videos, cruel pranks, and all around disrespectful attitudes; and that’s not to mention all that red meat for the culture war like being LGBTQ+ or superficially acknowledging climate change. It all amounts to some pretty thin gruel, so much so that it would be easy to overlook if the film didn’t keep returning to it. Without giving away all of its surprises, it’s fair to say Clown in a Cornfield is primarily concerned with the generational divide and flyover country animus at, if not specifically coastal elites, than certainly their attitudes permeating the kind of small-town life that’s overly romanticized by one of the two major political parties (in a tacit acknowledgement that American towns like Kettle Springs are a lot less common than they used to be, the film was shot entirely in Winnipeg).
If one chooses to be kind, one could attribute Clown in a Cornfield‘s lack of internal logic or the self-destructive philosophy of the adult characters as a statement on irrationally lashing out at our neighbors and relatives and how cultural grievances alienate parents from their offspring (in a film that feels noticeably underpopulated, Glenn appears to be the only adult who’s putting in an effort to connect with their child). But that requires the sort of stretching rarely seen outside of a taffy shop, and it does nothing to obscure the problem that, as a horror film, Clown in a Cornfield is middling, bordering on outright mediocre. Scares are overwhelmingly of the “masked killer suddenly appearing where a character had just looked seconds earlier” variety — rather difficult to do without detection when dressed head to giant foot like a clown — usually precipitated by the victims discovering a small jack-in-the-box that they engage with, without fail. With its greasy spoon diners, burnt-out industrial spaces, and masked murderers harkening back to the city’s founding, the film recalls, most recently, Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving, albeit without the snarky, comedic excess of going full overkill. It’s a lot of panicked kids running chestfirst into pitchforks, machetes, and hunting knives, which has long been a mainstay of the genre, regardless of what decade it is. Most disappointingly, Clown in a Cornfield is bereft of actual commentary on how today’s teenagers are either especially adept or ill-prepared to survive a horror film. Instead, we get but a single scene of teens frantically trying to call 9-1-1 and being utterly flummoxed by a rotary phone, as well as a romantic union that puts the queer overtones of horror archetypes right on the surface (“makes the subtext text” is a great way to describe the film in general). However, on the whole, it’s hard not to feel the characters have become significantly less skeptical and more resourceful than the kids in the first wave of Scream films, and those arrived nearly 30 years ago.
But then that’s a reflection of the film’s overarching shoddiness and Craig’s unwillingness to genuinely engage with his own premise. For example, the fact that cell phone coverage is only an impediment when the characters desperately need to call for help or track down their friends; less so when they’re posting impromptu prank videos that rack up thousands of views in a matter of minutes. Most of the teenage characters’ supposedly grievous transgressions amount to garden variety adolescent rebellion of the sort their parents were no doubt guilty of themselves — talking back to authority figures and underage drinking; Cole even pays for the booze he “stole” from the convenience store. It’s hard not to think that a more curious film might confront that hypocrisy and how everything new and scary is really a matter of perspective and emotional distance. Instead, we get sitcomic gags about Glenn teaching Quinn how to drive a stick shift while simultaneously being menaced by a chainsaw-wielding clown. And then there’s just basic coherency issues, like the film losing track of a rather consequential character whose late exit is never resolved or even addressed beyond some set dressing (presumably answers await should a franchise be in the offing). The extent to which the film is “thoughtful” is in direct proportion to what resistance that poses to splattery gags and glancing attacks on small-minded townsfolk clinging to an idealized past. There’s no denying Clown in a Cornfield does exactly what it says on the tin, but once you pop that sucker open, it’s pretty clear whatever was inside went rancid a long time ago.
DIRECTOR: Eli Craig; CAST: Katie Douglas, Aaron Abrams, Carson MacCormac, Kevin Durand; DISTRIBUTOR: RLJE Films/Shudder; IN THEATERS: May 9; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 36 min.
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