Pennywise is going to make a new friend this September when Bloody Disgusting and Doppelgänger Releasing (the genre label of arthouse distributor Music Box Films) unleash Gags the Clown on horror fans everywhere.

We’re setting the table for a horrific weekend when we release the horror-comedy Gags the Clown in select theaters and VOD platforms beginning September 3, 2019, the same week as New Line Cinema’s It: Chapter 2.

The film takes place eight days since the clown first showed up in Green Bay, WI. Now, over the course of one night, four different groups of people cross paths with the clown everyone calls “Gags” and his true intentions are finally revealed.

Our very own Patrick Bromley reviewed the film out of last year’s World Premiere at the Cinepocalypse Film Festival, celebrating “the streak of incredibly dark humor that runs through it,” while also promising quite the payoff.

The feature film debut for director Adam Krause was inspired by the viral media frenzy and worldwide phenomenon of ‘clown roaming’ sparked by his sixteen-minute short film “Gags” in 2016.

“Not to sound all ‘I started that,’ but I started that,” Krause told Birth Movies Death’s Deirdre Crimmins. “We filmed the short in secret and released photos of the ‘sightings’ because I wanted to convince my town that there was a creepy clown wandering the streets late at night. We released the pictures August 1, 2016, and it blew up. From that point on it went viral very quickly. I announced that it was just a short film eight days later, but that didn’t stop the craze from kicking into high gear.”

Using these actual events as a jumping off point, Gags the Clown unfolds during a single night in Green Bay, Wisconsin when a mysterious clown bearing ominous black balloons appears to terrorize the town. As a local news reporter, played by horror veteran Lauren Ashley Carter (Darling, Pod, Imitation Girl, The Mind’s Eye, Jug Face), scrambles to reveal Gags’ true identity and the police attempt to maintain order in a city that is starting to go clown crazy, a group of high schoolers see Gags’ arrival as an excuse to cause a little copycat trouble themselves. Throwing even more gas on this dumpster-fire night, a far-right podcast host seeking law and order decides to live stream his “clown hunt” on social media as the world watches on in horror.

“Gags the Clown is a scary, creatively shot and often-times humorous look at how the arrival of one mysterious clown can turn a city upside down and inside out…literally,” added Krause.

Entertainment Weekly premiered the above clip from the film and shared this bit from star Lauren Ashley Carter, who is featured as a reporter (pictured below):

“I started reading it, and after the first five pages I thought, ‘Oh, these guys are really clever, this is really smart,’” says Carter. “The way that they do it, it’s a bunch of different POVs, so the format of that found footage changes based on the people. My character’s a newscaster, so all of the found footage is with the news camera. There’s people obviously using their phones and then there are other new reporters and cameras. So, it’s a lot of different kinds of formats and I really like the way that they did it. My character thinks it’s a POS story [Laughs]. But she has to follow it. As they start following it, and as other people stat getting into it, it turns out that this clown is actually malicious and that people that come in contact with him are found dead.”

The deal was brokered by Josh Goldbloom after its premiere at the Cinepocalpyse Film Festival.

After the September 3rd limited theatrical and VOD run, a home entertainment release will follow later in the year. Send in the killer clowns!