Eli Roth isn’t a member of the unofficial “Splat Pack” for nothing. The man who has brought us such controversial horror standouts as Cabin Fever, Hostel, Hostel Part II, Knock Knock, and most recently The Green Inferno, clearly has an affinity for covering his actors in blood from head to toe. His films always provide a stunning array of bloody and malicious acts, but it’s not just that his characters will inevitably be doused in crimson at some point during the story, it’s that once they set out on the path they have chosen, they are forever changed.

Given this point of view, it’s easy to see why Roth would take a liking to Clown, a fake trailer posted online years ago with Roth’s name attached to produce and direct. Upon seeing the trailer, Roth didn’t grow angry that a complete stranger had tacked on his name without permission, but actually, quite the opposite: he loved it. So much, in fact, that Roth called up Jon Watts, the creator of the parody, and asked him if he’d like a hand in getting the full length feature version of his film made.

In Clown, a man named Kent learns at the last minute that the clown who was supposed to attend his son’s seventh birthday party has just cancelled. Kent then sets out to accomplish the same task that loving fathers before him have done: dressing up as the clown himself. Kent doesn’t want to let his son down, so he finds an old wig and costume in the basement of one of the houses he’s showing for his business, puts it on, and surprises all the kiddies at the birthday party with the best show of their little lives. However, when the night ends, and all of the children go home to their parents with their bellies full of birthday cake, Kent finds that he can’t quite remove the suit. He tugs on the sleeves, tries cutting the collar, but he can’t even get the cherry red nose to leave his face, let alone the jester attire to leave his body. Kent starts to panic, but that’s the least of his worries – soon, he’ll find that not only can he not remove his clown costume, but he’s actually transforming into a vicious monster with a huge appetite, and tiny kids are what’s on the menu.

After reading about a plot about a man slowly and painfully turning into a killer clown who eats children in his spare time, it may seem easy to categorize Jon Watts’ Clown as merely an exploitation flick or a gory blood-soaked slasher fest. However, Clown seeks a different, more psychological angle, which plays the story as a tragic tale of a curse bestowed upon an undeserving man who must live out the rest of his days as a monster; a shadow of his former self – more along the lines of the grotesque yet beautifully catastrophic Cronenberg remake The Fly.

“Cabin Fever obviously was very much about, it was as much a possession film as it was kind of a Cronenberg film, and those It Came From Within, Rabid, that Cronenberg body horror always fascinated me, and Jon Watts too. I mean, his biggest influence on Clown was Cronenberg’s The Fly, where you’re watching this person turn into this thing, and they’re documenting him turning into a fly, and eventually he becomes the monster, and Geena Davis becomes the protagonist, which is what happens in Clown with Andy Prowes and Laura Allen. The wife becomes the protagonist to protect the child, there’s no other way. You know our bodies, we have our bodies, and we think that’s who we are, and our bodies can turn on us, and it’s terrifying. I had an episode when I was twelve years old, one day I couldn’t move my hips. I got a rare infection called toxic synovitis, which I was told affects one in a million kids under the age of eighteen, so this is like a one in a hundred chance of getting this, and I got it, and I just couldn’t walk for about two or three weeks. I sat there and read Fangoria and watched horror movies. It was terrifying. Then, when I was seventeen, I got Mono, and Giardia, this parasite when I was in Russia, I drank milk and got this parasite and that took a year to get out of me. Then, I had an infection in my face, a flesh eating infection, and I was shaving my face off when I was nineteen.”

Roth elaborates —

“There’s was this feeling that, you know, you can go to the gym, take your vitamins, I don’t smoke, no drinking, no drugs, I’m really very healthy, but you can get this one bug in you (snaps fingers) and it can wipe you out like that. That’s terrifying. Our bodies are all we really have, and once you lose control of that, that’s a very human thing. The sad part is, eventually, we are all victims of body horror. Nobody escapes body horror, it’s going to happen, your body just breaks down over time, it just does, it’s just part of having a body. It’s like, if you cut an apple in half and you keep checking the skin every five minutes, the longer it’s exposed to oxygen, it’s going to turn brown and bugs will start to appear. That’s our bodies. So you know I think life is this game of avoiding, it’s like you’re avoiding one horrible pothole after another. You’re just trying to like float between awful incidences, an incidence that happened to you or a loved one, and eventually, we’re all going to get it somehow. So, I think that’s why body horror fascinates, it’s that eventually we’re all going to have to face it, whether we want to or not”.

Clown will be released On Demand and in theaters on June 17th, 2016.