Clowns, much like dolls or mannequins, evoke a sense of unease in everyone who witnesses them. Namely, the blank expressions or overtly joyful appearances feel like they are compensating for underlying sinister motivations in a way that’s hard to avoid. Add to that the fact that there have been real-life serial killers who had jobs as clowns or the unsettling visage of IT‘s Pennywise or Terrifier‘s Art the Clown and it’s easy to understand a phobia about these characters being a very real thing.
Another very real reason people are afraid of clowns is that, back in 2016, there was a bizarre series of sightings of clowns in unexpected places. Even though these appearances didn’t result in grave crimes, the sightings alone were enough to disturb anyone who experienced them.
The new documentary Clown Panic explores the strange sightings, both in how they started and ended with no real warning. In an exclusive clip from the documentary, which you can see below, one individual who had a close encounter with a clown explains exactly why they hate them.
When children in a small South Carolina community report seeing clowns hiding in the woods in 2016, few believe them. But as sightings spread across the country, panic escalates into school lockdowns, police investigations and a nationwide media frenzy. Featuring chilling archive footage, viral internet videos and revealing interviews with witnesses, law enforcement, clowns, and cultural commentators, Clown Panic examines the collision of fear, social media and modern America at a moment of deep national anxiety. Darkly funny, unsettling and unexpectedly emotional, the film uncovers how a bizarre urban legend spiraled into a global moral panic that has echoes that resonate today.
Director Ed Perkins shared with Bloody Disgusting of the movie, “There’s something fascinating about clowns because they’re supposed to make us laugh, yet for so many people, they inspire genuine fear. What struck me about the events of 2016 was how quickly that fear spilled out of the world of horror and into everyday life. Suddenly, something that felt like it belonged in a scary movie was being treated as a very real threat. With Clown Panic, we wanted to explore how something so seemingly absurd could take hold across an entire country, and what that tells us about the way fear spreads.”
“The story behind Clown Panic was plain weird on one level, but also very revealing about human psychology and politics. It’s the story of how something quite small can develop into a full-blown moral panic. It’s not a new phenomenon; it goes back through the McCarthy era ‘reds under the bed’ and all the way to the Salem witch trials and beyond,” producer Jonathan Chinn added. “But what made this perhaps the first modern era moral panic was the use of social media in particular, and the circular way it interacted with local news to really blow up into something big – not just in the US but globally. In the US, it took place around the same time as the Trump-Clinton election campaign, the North Korea nuclear crisis, race riots, and of course following the huge success of Stephen King’s It. All these things came together and when society starts to freak out, it tends to find a scapegoat. In this case, it was a group you would never have expected: clowns.”
Clown Panic premieres on Hulu on October 12.