Not all horror movies are going to be crowd pleasers. Pet Sematary, Who Can Kill a Child, The Boy, The Devil’s Backbone, It – the reason why all of these movies are so uncomfortable is because they all deal with a very taboo subject, one that can be considered forbidden territory, even in a horror movie: killing kids. It’s not easy presenting an audience with such a harsh subject matter, but it does undoubtedly make for a memorable film.
“I mean, that’s the beauty of doing a movie at the million-dollar budget level is you can take those kind of chances. I think if we were doing this as a studio film they would’ve never let us get away with killing those kids, and honestly, that was the hold up in the release, was people were like ‘You kill too many kids, it’s too disturbing’. We showed it to test audiences and people freaked out. Like, it wasn’t like people left the movie feeling good and high-fiving, people were like, ‘That was incredibly disturbing’. So, there’s comes a question of, ‘Is this a movie that mainstream audiences are going to like?’ And who knows? Who’s to say? There’s so many movies like, I’ve done a number of films for a million and a half dollars, whether it’s The Sacrament, or The Last Exorcism and some of them are wide mainstream hits and other ones take time to find their audience, but my job as the producer is to keep pushing it forward, and keep pushing the release. You know, we never compromised the movie, and Dimension is releasing it to their credit, so I’m very thankful that it got out there. It actually came out in Italy already and it’s a big hit, and different cultures have different tolerance levels for certain things, but we’re making a movie that’s like a Grimm’s Fairy Tale and if you’re going be true to that, I think what’s disturbing is when there’s a clown around children. That’s inherently what’s uncomfortable about clowns, is, you think about John Wayne Gacy, you think of like what someone could use that for. What if it was an evil clown and you’re trusting your child around it? And kids naturally trust clowns, so if a clown’s going after a bunch of college kids there’s something about it that doesn’t seem as scary or feel as real. With kids, really as soon as you say an evil clown and children, I get uncomfortable. I get scared, and when you’re making a movie like this, I think that’s the fun is pushing the genre forward, it’s taking chances and doing something that’s edgy. The goal isn’t to make a movie that necessarily has the biggest opening weekend, you want to make a movie that twenty years from now, people are still watching and talking about”.
In the film, a man named Kent puts on a dusty old clown suit that he finds in the basement to surprise his son for his seventh birthday party. To his delight, Kent’s son Jack is elated when he sees his father donning the jester attire and rainbow colored hair, and all of Jack’s little friends seem just as excited. However, later, when Kent tries to remove the makeup and big red nose before bed, he finds that no matter how hard he tries, the outfit just won’t come off. The spandex seems stuck to his skin, the wig becomes his real hair, and the nose is so painfully attached to his face that when he tries to pull the bright red beak off, bits of skin tear along with the rubber prop, as if it were a part of him.
It’s not long before Kent starts craving children. His stomach growls violently, he never seems to stay full, and, to his horror, he’s starting to salivate when he gets a whiff of a child’s aroma floating on the breeze. Kent knows what he must do, he can feel the hunger gnawing at his insides, and he can imagine how delicious such a small human must be. One night, as he felt the change taking hold of him and turning him from a human into a monster, he slips up and bites the finger of a little boy who’s lost in the woods. Kent is finding it hard to live with himself, but he has to admit that the blood in his mouth tastes as sweet as any steak he can remember with real clarity. He wants more, and the more he morphs into this evil bloodthirsty being, the more he longs to feast on the bones of children, and the less he feels bad about it.
It’s not hard to see why some people might have a problem with a story about a killer clown eating small children to survive, but Watts and Roth weren’t necessarily trying to conjure up a plot that was meant to be disconcerting. The source of Watts’ motivation doesn’t lie in crass exploitation films, but rather in literature, specifically the Grimms Fairy Tales.
“We looked at Grimms Fairy Tales as a kind of inspiration, but really thinking, what is this creature, where does it come from, what is it based on, where does the word clown come from?” Roth Reflects, “Jon and Chris came up with this fantastic mythology of the ‘Cloyn’ and the eating of children, and one child for each of the five months of winter, and that’s what it needs to free you from the suit, and it took a long time to get there and to crack that, it just felt right. The great thing is now people have been reading it thinking that it’s a real mythology, and for all intents and purposes, it is real now, because we’ve created this movie and we created that mythology”.
Clown can seen in theaters and On Demand starting June 17th, 2016.