Clown in a Cornfield
Writer: Carter Blanchard, Eli Craig; based on the novel by Adam Cesare
Director: Eli Craig
Cast: Katie Douglas, Aaron Abrams, Carson MacCormac, Kevin Durand, Will Sasso
We're in the midst of what feels like a new boom for slasher movies, whether we're talking about the Terrifier films, the Scream legacy sequels, or recent hits like Heart Eyes — and that's just on the film side of things. In the book world, several major horror authors have added to the new wave of the slasher, from Stephen Graham Jones to Brian McAuley to, of course, Adam Cesare.
With his 2020 novel Clown in a Cornfield, Cesare cemented himself as one of the slasher's finest modern practitioners, delivering an acclaimed teen slasher story that both delivers on the promise of its title and explores all the complex nooks and crannies of its chosen time and place. It's an absolute banger of a book, and fortunately for Clown fans new and old, the film adaptation from Tucker and Dale vs. Evil's Eli Craig makes good on all of its cinematic potential.
The clown of the title is Frendo, mascot of a now-defunct corn syrup producer in the small town of Kettle Springs, Missouri. Once upon a time, Frendo was the avatar of all things good and prosperous around Kettle Springs. While the town still considers him a beloved mascot, things have gone downhill. It's in the midst of this fading piece of Americana that we meet Quinn Maybrook (Katie Douglas), who absolutely does not want to be in Kettle Springs. Quinn's only there because her father Glenn (Aaron Abrams) took a job as the new town doctor, hoping for a fresh start after the death of Quinn's mother back home in Philly.
As the pair does their best to settle in, Quinn manages to make a few friends, including the handsome Cole (Carson MacCormac), the popular Janet (Cassandra Potenza), and the loner country boy Rust (Vincent Muller). She also quickly learns about Frendo, the found footage horror shorts her new friends make using clown masks, and the growing generational resentment between the young people of Kettle Springs and the old guard, led by the town's mayor (Kevin Durand). It's a lot to take in, and that's before Quinn and her friends realize that someone in a Frendo mask is out to kill people.
There's a dazzling economy to the way that Craig, along with his co-writer Carter Blanchard, lays all of this out, and the tight script is helped along immensely by a young cast crackling with life. Douglas, as the natural star of the show, plays Quinn as a girl who had to grow up too fast but still retains those teenage instincts to misbehave, to skirt the rules, to have fun despite the specter of death looming over her family. She's magnetic, and if you know anything about Cesare's novels (yes, there are sequels), you'll find both a familiar character and someone you'd happily follow through multiple films.
Douglas and her castmates buy the film a lot of goodwill, delivering believable performances steeped in the kind of constantly on-guard stance that so many teenagers carry with them now, and together they create a kind of coiled spring of dramatic tension that's unleashed when Craig finally turns Frendo loose on the townsfolk.
When you're a slasher newbie, you want to see kills you can believe. When you're a slasher devotee, you want to see kills you can't predict, and Clown in a Cornfield delivers on both fronts. The violence is brutal, swift, and bone-crunchingly real, adding visceral depth to this saga of an evil clown terrorizing the populace. But what really makes the film work is how much Craig is willing to play within the space that Cesare created through his books. The same characters, structure, and payoff of Cesare's novel are all still here, but Craig adds a layer of unpredictability through both the way he deploys his kills and, wonderfully, through an added sense of over-the-top humor that feels right at home in this narrative.
Just as he did in Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, Craig fixates on the fine line between the horrific and the absurd, and drills into the audience with every piece of production design, every music cue, every drop of blood, that it's just plain bonkers to watch believable teen characters going through something like this. It's someone in a clown mask raining death and destruction down on a small town, and even in a world gone mad, that's pretty insane, right?
Cesare's novel has the luxury of stretching all of this out, really exploring all the corners of the town's lore and what it means that Frendo is on the rampage, but for Craig, it all has to happen in about 90 minutes. So he dials up the absurdity just a little, just enough that characters sometimes have to stop and reflect on just how insane their circumstances are, and how far they might have to go to survive one bloody night in Kettle Springs. At first glance, the jokes seem like something that might take you out of the movie, but in Clown in a Cornfield, they feel right at home, right down to a gag with a rotary phone that I'm still laughing about.
Whether you're new to the slasher genre, still getting into it after reading Cesare's novel, or a veteran of masked maniacs on the big-screen, Clown in a Cornfield is a movie for you. A perfect horror gateway for young viewers, a great slasher, and a hell of a fun time at the movies. If you want slasher movie bliss, this one's got it all.
If you haven't already, consider supporting worker-owned media by subscribing to Pop Heist. We are ad-free and operating outside the algorithm, so all dollars go directly to paying the staff members and writers who make articles like this one possible.
