"Clown in a Cornfield" review: Too much clowning around, not enough nuance
They say horrors are the easiest kind of film to make, but the hardest to make well. I happen to believe in this expression of conventional wisdom. Horrors don’t necessarily require a huge budget or particularly emotive actors. The inclusion of these elements can definitely enhance a horror film, but they’re not strictly compulsory.
Of course, horrors are not in any way exempt from being evaluated like any other film. I believe with the utmost conviction that, regardless of the genre to which a film belongs, when you seek to aim for something higher than your base subject matter — when you want to say something about the human condition, about society, or about your own life — you need to go about it in the right way.
The unique qualities of the genre, I believe, make particularly precarious the task of impressing upon a horror film a certain message. If the message is indeed imparted to good effect, the film might have the potential to become a transcendent piece of art. But if the message is conveyed poorly, the film may come across as pompous, or even self-important. Some horrors do this beautifully, like “Eraserhead” and “The Substance”. Others fail spectacularly, like “Unfriended” and “A Serbian Film”. Unfortunately, Eli Craig’s “Clown in a Cornfield” serves as an example of a horror film which does not understand how to efficiently integrate a message into a story.
Based on the Adam Cesare novel of the same name, the film begins as a high-school girl named Quinn (Katie Douglas) moves to a small town in Missouri called Kettle Springs along with her doctor father, Glenn (Aaron Abrams). Quinn, still recovering from the death of her mother, is sullen and aloof, and does not approve of the relocation which has been thrust upon her. During her first day of school in this new environment, she, along with a few of her new classmates, is given detention by an officious teacher. While in detention, she befriends her fellow rebels — Janet (Cassandra Potenza), Ronnie (Verity Marks), Tucker (Ayo Solanke), Matt (Alexandre Martin Deakin), and the so-called “town oligarch” Cole (Carson MacCormac). Cole, the son of the town’s mayor, immediately catches Quinn’s eye. She goes on to learn that these students are not only troublemakers, but also video artists. They make clown murder videos for publication on YouTube.
Something unsavory lurks in this small town, however: Quinn’s friends begin to be mysteriously picked off by someone dressed as Frendo, the town’s clown mascot. At first, Quinn and her surviving friends don’t think anything to be amiss. When Tucker and Matt go silent after having been murdered, the others think that they’re preoccupied with something else. It’s only at Cole’s teens-only party, held at night after the main festivities of Founder’s Day — which are run by Cole’s mayor father Arthur (Kevin Durand) — that Quinn and the rest truly realize the gravity of their situation. This person dressed as Frendo seeks to kill the living teens, but when the man is shot dead, more adults wearing the same getup emerge from the adjacent cornfield, eager to finish the job. Can the teens escape the bloodthirsty wrath of the Frendoes?
What lies at the core of this film is a rather puzzling stylistic and thematic contradiction. On one hand, the kills are over-the-top and cartoonish, obviously meant to extract from the audience as many laughs as scares. This film definitely makes a stab (pardon the pun) at “Little Shop of Horrors”-esque horror-comedy, though many of the attempts at humor fail to land.
On the other hand, the true thematic purpose of the film is something more grounded and serious. The message, which can be easily identified early on by the observant viewer, concerns the relationship between old and new. The young people say, “We’re the future!”, while the old people seem to harbor boundless admiration for their town’s traditions. The film is convinced that it’s saying something important — Cole delivers an unbearably cliché soapbox speech which leaves no room for doubt regarding where this film stands — but the message is written and propagated with the nuance characteristic of a random person on social media, and with a dramatic weight (or lack thereof) to match it.
There is no substance or depth to this film’s main theme. In a way, it almost comes across as spiteful, as if the film seeks mainly to denigrate older people rather than to truly place emphasis on the importance of the younger generation. The political undercurrents being so apparent that even a complete casual could pick them up, I feel that an approach like this could only serve to widen the current divide rather than to narrow it. The message is made even less effective by the aforementioned comedic elements of the film, resulting in a tonal inconsistency which renders the moral, if one could even call it that, completely farcical.
Not that this is the only problem with the film, either. Nothing contained therein has any compelling essence to it. The insipid nature of the entirety of the film left me craving something — anything! — to take away from it. But that something never came; only dull dialogue and ineffective scares. And when this film isn’t insipid, it’s inane. This applies just as much to the characters as it does to the central theme or to the writing. For example, in a scene which takes place outside the barn in which Cole is throwing his party, this first person who dresses up as Frendo throws Matt’s decapitated head at Quinn, Janet and Ronnie. Convinced that this is an elaborate prank (they do make YouTube videos which feature people acting out being murdered by clowns, after all), Janet and Ronnie begin to play with it, even as it sheds blood. Is anyone really that stupid?
This film evoked within me such a pervasive sense of apathy that I find that I really don’t have anything more to say about it. I guess I was already predisposed to dislike a film like this, as the slasher isn’t my favorite horror subgenre. I prefer psychological and surreal horrors due to their greater general ability to disturb. Violence and gore in movies never really frightens me, and many slashers use these elements as a crutch rather than as a vehicle through which to intensify a preexisting air of unease. That said, some good slashers do exist — I like the original “Halloween” and “Scream” films. “Clown in a Cornfield”, however, is not one of those good slashers. Feel free to skip this one.