Clown in a Cornfield blends classic slasher tropes with solid acting, writing and social commentary

With so many horror movies reaching for “elevated horror,” it’s refreshing to see a film like Clown in a Cornfield draw on classic slasher film tropes. After opening in the early 1990s, at a barn party suddenly interrupted by a killer clown, the movie mainly takes place in the present day as 17-year-old Quinn (Katie Douglas) moves from Philadelphia to a small town with her doctor father, Dr. Maybrook (Aaron Abrams). Despite early fears that she won’t make any friends, Quinn falls in with the cool crowd, a group of troublemaking teens who create horror prank videos featuring the town’s mascot, a clown named Frendo.

Clown in a Cornfield features many clichés and struggles at times to pull itself away from the visual conventions of the genre, but ultimately falls back on an unusually strong screenplay. Based on the book of the same name by Adam Cesare, the screenplay has a lot of juice. It carefully plays with audience expectations while quietly subverting them. The dialogue is strong and the thematic foundation feels both extremely relevant and playful.

Part of the success of the writing is how it deals with technology. While filmmakers are getting better at integrating tech into horror, few handle it so directly as here. More than just a part of the landscape of living in the 2020s, technology becomes an extension of characters’ identities. Rather than being overtly critical, the approach towards young people’s use of technology is paralleled towards previous generations’ similarly finding meaning and forging identity through machines in other ways — be it a stick shift in a car or factory work. The human condition is not treated as something explicitly organic, but intimately tied to the tools we use to work or play.

Much of the tension of the film is intergenerational. The young people are painted as dangerous outliers and the old people cling bitterly to tradition. Through the eyes of Quinn and her father, the context of this tension remains somewhat mysterious and unknowable. We are forced to rely on a series of unreliable narrators who plead their innocence or accuse other parties of wrongdoing. Are the kids alright? Or are they all burgeoning psychopaths? The way this storyline unfolds in the final act elevates the film to something more than a dumb slasher as it reflects on a current bitterness in contemporary society born of the cruelty and violence emblematic of the MAGA era. 

Unfortunately, the film is often more interesting than it is genuinely scary or compelling. The filmmaking only occasionally manages to meet the writing, but it still makes for an overall pleasurable experience. The cast is strong. Canadian character actors Kevin Durand and Aaron Abrams lend the film a solid backbone, and it’s always a pleasure to see Mad TV icon Will Sasso go full character. The lead actress, Katie Douglas (also Canadian) is a remarkable presence, channeling caustic teen rebellion with a more emotionally grounded search for purpose. She has an extremely easy-to-like screen presence that grounds the film’s more absurd moments, without losing touch with its comedy.

As far as its attempt to be a full-on horror film, it’s not especially successful, but it’s also so consistently watchable that it doesn’t really matter. For its flaws, it’s still a horror film I prefer over some recent fan favourites like Longlegs, In a Violent Nature or The Substance. It has a commercial edge but reaches for something that feels very real and honest. ■

Clown in a Cornfield is now playing in Montreal theatres.

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