Editorials
The Clown Act in Gory Irish Slasher ‘Stitches’ Is to Die For [Horrors Elsewhere]
Horrors Elsewhere is a recurring column that spotlights a variety of movies from all around the globe, particularly those not from the United States. Fears may not be universal, but one thing is for sure — a scream is understood, always and everywhere.
Children’s birthdays hardly ever go as planned, but as one character states in the movie Stitches, “not every party ends with a dead clown.” An inept entertainer, this horror comedy’s namesake, suffers a setback on the job; the clown bites the dust during Tommy’s tenth birthday. To be more specific, the antics of six kids lead to Stitches (Ross Noble) tripping and falling face first on a knife. Six years later, the reanimated clown takes revenge on Tommy and his friends.
Not too long after that unfortunate birthday, ten-year-old Tommy (Ryan Burke) visits Stitches’ grave and spots a group of clowns performing a bizarre ritual with eggs in a nearby crypt. This eerie scene is inspired by a real-life practice where clowns daub their facial likeness onto ceramic eggs to informally copyright their image. In the movie, the painted eggs are the clowns’ source of power. McMahon found the actual process so fascinating, he tweaked it to explain Stitches’ resurrection and fuel his mission — a clown can never rest in peace if they die before finishing a party. As irreverent as Stitches is overall, director Connor McMahon takes a serious approach to the unique mythos that sets this film apart from other clown horrors.
Noble was cast without the director’s knowledge of his past; the enthusiastic comedian started out as a clown before moving to stand-up. So the movie became not only proof of McMahon’s growth as a director, but it was also a full-circle moment for Noble. The comic’s fiendish character delivers one-liners like Freddy Krueger and kills with Jason Voorhees’ precision. What Stitches lacks in texture and complexity, he makes up for in superb deadpan delivery and a total physical commitment to the gags. The murderous clown never reaches the heights of his homicidal peers only because the real star of the movie is a series of over-the-top deaths.
Well aware of It’s popularity and impact, McMahon felt his movie would be different because it was overtly humorous and driven by farcical butchery. From the get-go, the director is lancing Stitches’ face with a knife before having the clown splatter young Tommy with copious amounts of blood from his gash. Viewers have to wait a good forty minutes before someone else up and dies, but their patience is rewarded; the kill sequences only get gorier and more imaginative. The executions are as outlandish as they are creative — a head is kicked off, a skull is hollowed out with an ice cream scooper while another is skewered with an umbrella, and finally, someone’s noddle explodes like an overinflated balloon. As grisly and serious as that all sounds on paper, McMahon realized the best way to make the killings appear funny is to show them in their entirety. Humor has a way of healing after the violence destroys.
When deciding on the antagonist for his second movie, McMahon ultimately went with a clown. He had already set out to do a comedy after giving up writing a more serious script, and a clown’s routine facilitated the silly slayings he had in mind. What also helped was the clown’s modern, ill-famed reputation. From the mischievous and slapstick-wielding harlequins of commedia dell’arte, to the reviled and profane jesters of medieval times, clowns have a history of playing the villain long before pop culture declared them to be evil incarnate. Their overall popularity has diminished over the years, but clowns still appear in the spotlight, albeit not always a flattering one. Affable bozos and jokers alike received the unwilling transformation from harmless goof to malevolent trickster by the ’80s; they went from juggling balls to going straight for the jugular. Stephen King played a large role in the clown’s sinister makeover, yet these garish figures have always had a gift for getting under people’s skin. Bad Clowns author Benjamin Radford points out how clowns “were never ‘good’ to begin with.” He notes in his book: “If you take a broader look at the history of the clown, they have always been an ambiguous figure. Sometimes they’re laughing at themselves, sometimes they’re laughing at you — sometimes they’re the victim, sometimes you’re the victim.” In a certain sense, the creepy clown archetype of today is accurate when examining these colorful characters’ origins.
Although McMahon does not personally find them to be scary, he understands the sway of a creepy clown these days. After all, horror has the power to stoke deep fears as well as nurture them, and clowns are a great example of the genre toying with human psychology and turning a subversion into widespread anxiety. Science says the uneasiness people feel toward clowns has a lot to do with their inscrutability; being unable to decipher their true feelings or visage can lead to confusion and apprehension. Of course, there are also the bad, formative memories that account for other aversions to clowns. Here, Tommy (Tommy Knight) and the six other kids at his birthday party — Kate (Gemma-Leah Devereux), Vinny (Shane Murray Corcoran), Bulger (Thommas Kane Byrne), Richie (Eoghan McQuinn), Sarah (Roisin Barron), and Paul (Hugh Mulhern) — cope with their shared trauma through various yet familiar methods. Bulger finds relief in food, Vinny and Richie indulge in drugs, Sarah and Paul bully, and Tommy cowers if he even detects the presence or resemblance of a clown. Luckily, misery loves company; Kate offers cold comfort when she says they all “turned out odd” after witnessing Stitches’ death firsthand.
McMahon’s second film is covered in the sticky DNA of American slashers and adolescent comedies; one-dimensional youths are unapologetically horny and unpleasant, then slaughtered without remorse or reflection. The humor removes the chance for tension but adds merit elsewhere. Add on the impressive special effects and gratifyingly gory set pieces, and Stitches is a mash note to inane teen horror everywhere.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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