Much like the disappointing Fear Street: Prom Queen, Clown in a Cornfield is an adaptation of a popular young adult slasher about a small town with a generational divide. Unlike Prom Queen, Clown in a Cornfield is helmed by a director who is completely at home in this genre: Eli Craig of Tucker and Dale vs Evil fame.
Like his debut, and his underrated sophomore effort, Little Evil, Craig grounds these silly stories in themes of communication. Tucker and Dale is about the assumptions we make about people due to our own cultural and class bias, Little Evil is the strange tale of a stepfather and learning to love the antichrist (thus giving him a positive influence. It’s a hoot), and Clown in a Cornfield is a battle between the kids and parents of a town fuelled by the fact that they won’t listen to or even attempt to understand each other. There are also a lot of clowns dismembering everyone, but this is mostly incidental.
We see this conflict through the eyes of Quinn (Katie Douglas) and her father Glenn (Aaron Abrams) as they move to the small town of Kettle Springs after the death of Quinn’s mother. Both are trying to be there for the other but are clearly not on the same page, Quinn gravitating to the town’s “youths” and Glenn believing every bad word the adults of the town say about them. And, to be honest, the first half-hour or so is a little by-the-book – Craig has to set up the conflicts of the town and its inhabitants – but as soon as those clowns start coming out of that cornfield, it all comes together far more brilliantly than it has any right to.
While Clown in the Cornfield doesn’t break new ground in the slasher sub-genre, Craig puts together some fantastic set pieces, sprinkled with cultural examples of the generation gap (if you don’t know how to use a rotary phone, you’re probably doomed) – with the slasher genre as a whole often focusing on teenagers and The Youth in general, it’s a perfect genre to explore these themes of alienation and generational distance. Throw in the perfect sprinkle of black humour to deftly balance the horror and comedy without letting either get the better of the other, and that last hour is a downright hoot.
Perhaps the movie’s greatest trick is that, when people start dying, I’m annoyed – because there’s hardly a character here who isn’t extremely entertaining in their own right, from Kevin Durand’s swaggering mayor to Cassandra Potenza’s ice-cold amateur moviemaker.
Like his previous movies, Craig balances the generations with their pros and cons, encouraging the audience to take sides before revealing that both do need each other to work. Clown in a Cornfield might be the silliest social studies lesson I’ve ever been given, but, wrapped up in a deft slasher delivery, it’s hard not to sit up and pay attention.
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By Kevin Boyle
Header Image: Rotten Tomatoes
No But Listen 