Clown In A Cornfield

Bluesky

If you’ve got this far, well done. Most people will decide whether or not they want to see this film based on the title alone. They’ll expect screaming teenagers, violence and gore, and in that they’ll be correct. They’ll likely also expect it to be cheap and poorly made, failing to notice that it screened as part of SXSW 2025, and that’s a shame. If you reject Clown In A Cornfield because of that notion, you’ll be missing out.

The opening scenes, it’s true, are par for the course – handsomely shot but otherwise familiar from half a century of similar works. We see a party in a barn, everyone drinking heavily, a teenage girl playing with a box from which a tiny clown springs out. Moments later, she’s running off into the corn with a boy, there to encounter a much larger clown who has murderous intentions. Before long, however, we skip forward to the present day, and when we do so it’s not only the costumes and props that change, but the sensibilities shaping the narrative.

Here (now) we meet Quinn (Katie Douglas), a teenager who is trying to move on after the death of her mother and whose doctor father (Aaron Abrams) has decided that they need a taste of the quiet life. It’s coming up for Founder’s Day, the most exciting event on the annual agenda in this particular backwater. The place doesn’t seem to have much going on for young people, but the plus side of this is that Quinn finds herself treated like a celebrity, an exciting stranger whom everybody wants to pretend. Sure, she’s not exactly thrilled when looming redneck Rust (Vincent Muller) turns up unexpectedly on her doorstep offering to walk her to school – he looks like the kind of person she might want protection from - but she’s happy to hang out with popular girls Ronnie (Verity Marks) and Janet (Cassandra Potenza), and very happy to catch the eye of local heart-throb Cole (Carson MacCormac).

In the 21st Century, attitudes to murder are not what they once were. The high school kids don’t seem to know much about the real bloody history of their town, but they are aware of its one-time success as the manufacturing centre for a series of products featuring Frendo the Clown. Their response to the poor prospects the place now offers has been to seek opportunities online by using Frendo as the villain in a series of amateur films with unwitting victims. It’s a cute device, setting us up to doubt what we see before the real violence starts, echoing the wider experience of growing up in a society full of misinformation. There are a number of other moments like this later, some of which are there to entertain older viewers at the teenagers’ expense, but they never seem mean Curiously for a slasher movie, Clown in A Cornfield has a lot of heart, and not just of the bloody variety.

Once the real violence starts, director Eli Craig immediately ups the ante, blurring genres in the process. There are lengthy, frenetic action sequences broken by pauses to take in the landscape, with its combination of isolation and natural tendency to obscure threats. We don’t spend too long in the corn itself – a lesson has clearly been learned from 2022’s Escape The Field – and there’s enough variety to keep things interesting. The real energy of the film, however, comes from the character relationships, which are handled with a little twist that doesn’t so much add depth in itself as make room for fresh ways of exploring familiar archetypes. This brings a freshness to the film and lets its young stars shine.

Far from being just another by-the-numbers horror flick, this is a smartly handled, engaging piece of work which understands its target audience well and makes the effort to deliver.