A drunken night of teenage debauchery ends with a couple sneaking off from their wild rager to get freaky out in a remote farmland pasture (as you do). They stumble out, horny as all hell, as the boy lags behind, no longer hearing the enthused calling of his would-be conquest; out of nowhere, a deadly clown pops out with a pitchfork and paints the cornfield with his blood. Cue the title card: “Clown in a Cornfield.”
This is just about the level of bluntness you’re in for with Eli Craig’s latest secluded slasher, and while the director’s resume—namely, his work on “Tucker and Dale vs. Evil”—would incline you towards an expectation of comedy sprinkled among the kills, you may be surprised to find how much social commentary lies at the core of this Adam Cesare adaptation.
That said, “Clown in a Cornfield” makes no pretenses about aiming high with the detail of its societal observations. The film is happy enough to spell it all out for you, and hopes you’re happy enough with its lukewarm thrills to be impressed with its willingness to say anything at all, no matter how late to the barnyard party it truly is.
Our first scene after this opening kill introduces us to Quinn Maybrook (Katie Douglas) and her father (Aaron Abrams) driving into the remote midwestern town of Kettle Springs. Quinn’s father has just taken on a job as the local doctor, and her acclimation to these new isolated surroundings proves challenging for a 17-year-old adjusting to single-parent life in a new town. It doesn’t take long, however, for Quinn to make some friends with the local troublemakers, and even less time for her to realize how easy it is for this crew to get on the bad side of the local adults.
This isn’t so much an inherent inclination towards sinful behavior, though there’s no shortage of classic “swipe booze from the local convenience store and prank the stuffy teacher” antics on display here, so much as it is the adults themselves who require so little to be pushed over the edge. But pretty soon, Quinn and her friends find a much bigger problem in the wake of the town’s annual Founder’s Day Festival—a problem that comes in the form of a killer clown who begins to stalk and systematically dispose of the town’s rowdy youth.
It should take even less time for audiences to put two and two together and figure out who (or what) is behind that inherently creepy clown mask (wouldn’t you know it: clowns scare people!), but just as easy to spot, from this premise, is Craig’s overlying commentary on generational friction. It’s an idea that lies at the foundation of “Clown in a Cornfield,” as the youngsters of today grow to be frustrated with the quickness of the old guard to simply stand on their necks and wax poetic about claiming responsibility for everything that goes wrong in their lives (often due to the negligence and inaction of those very elders).
So fundamental to the film is this idea, in fact, that there will come a point in the climax—and the remainder of this paragraph likely constitutes minor spoiler territory, so be warned—when a character will nearly turn right to the camera and tell us how much the boomers have irreversibly fucked up the planet for those who inherit it, and simply blame us for our reticence to fall in line. And at this point, the audience will cheer and commend Craig and Cesare for their biting, worthwhile commentary in a moment when such statements are bravely needed, and so few and far between.
I am, of course, imagining a scenario in which “Clown in a Cornfield” was released circa 2016, because that seems to be the only time in which this message and execution might hold any sort of novelty and deeper value. Obviously, these frustrations remain to this day—as a continued worldwide slide towards destructive conservatism would show—but for a film so directly confronting the reticence to move with the times, Cesare’s story seems fundamentally stranded in the previous decade itself; from low-tempo, moody needle-drops to a persistent obsession with going viral on YouTube, you’d think this film had been sitting on the back-burner for a full decade… until you learn Cesare published the book upon which it’s based in [checks notes] 2020?
You can feasibly (and reasonably) read through all that and say, “Who cares; how are the scares?” And on occasion, this dismissal would be met with reward, as “Clown in a Cornfield” makes sporadic use of its slasher bearings for a smattering of nasty, corn syrup-fueled massacres. Between the infrequent sicko deaths and the sunburnt orange skylines of a rural sunset, though, Eli Craig leaves you only with dry, stock characters reciting dry, stock dialogue amid an ocean of dry corn stalks. In truth, a film titled “Clown in a Cornfield” would likely benefit from being proudly mindless, but we just have to settle for a film that seems to think it’s pretty smart.
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