Clown in a Cornfield

by Mike McGranaghan

Clown in a Cornfield is a deceptive movie. It assembles a lot of elements that will be familiar to horror buffs. New girl forced to move to a dead-end rural town by her widower father? That would be Quinn Maybrook (Katie Douglas) landing in Kettle Springs, Missouri. A bunch of mischievous high schoolers who befriend her and lead her into trouble? They include Cole (Carson MacCormac), Ronnie (Verity Marks), and Janet (Cassandra Potenza). A good ol’ boy law enforcement officer? Sheriff Dunne (Will Sasso) is at your service.

And of course, the town has a dark history. Frendo, the clown mascot of the burned-down corn syrup factory that was once the backbone of Kettle Springs’ economy, emerges from the local cornfields periodically to murder teenagers. Guess who his newest victims will be?

For the first 45 minutes, the movie plays as an extremely formulaic – if slickly executed – slasher flick. There are gruesome murders aplenty, along with the usual cliches, including the one about who dies first in a picture like this. Director Eli Craig (Tucker and Dale vs. Evil) delivers the standard goods with a fast pace and visual style that can’t entirely undo the fact that we’ve seen all this a million times before.

Then the second 45 minutes kick in, and it becomes clear that Clown in a Cornfield, adapted from Adam Cesare’s novel, has more on its mind than expected. Figuring out who’s behind the murders is pretty easy. The “who” is not as important as the “why,” however. Once we start getting glimpses of the motivation for the slayings, the story takes on a whole new dimension. Without giving anything away, the plot deals with generational issues and the pull they can have on a small, old-fashioned town like Kettle Springs. When you live in a burg that’s frozen in time, do you try to get it back to its glory days or evolve it into something else?

Those themes give the killings an added level of excitement. Friendo isn’t murdering for some faux psychological reason like Jason Voorhees did; he’s doing it out of rage over something that happened before his current victims were even born. With that in place, each subsequent death has meaning behind it. The film delivers the sort of gory mayhem any good slasher requires, but it’s in service of more than cheap thrills.

I don’t mean to make Clown in a Cornfield sound pretentious. No heavy-handed social message is embedded in the story or anything like that. The makers are nevertheless shrewd enough to know that the meticulously designed carnage hits harder when an idea is backing it up. All the slasher conventions are used to lull us in, to give us an ironic sense of comfort before the true madness begins. Right when you think you know exactly where the tale is headed, it makes an abrupt left turn, and that’s precisely what makes it fun.

The young actors give good performances across the board, with Katie Douglas making an outstanding “final girl,” in the finest tradition of that term. Any fan of the slasher subgenre will know the feeling of watching one that ignores plot and characterization while lavishing attention on the kills. Clown in a Cornfield hits the bullseye in the violence department and still manages to deliver a narrative worth caring about.

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