Remember the rash of disturbing clown sightings that appeared all across America a few years ago? Meet Wrinkles. He was arguably the catalyst for all the creepy clown sighting hysteria during that time. In new documentary Wrinkles the Clown, director Michael Beach Nichols has brought to life the bizarre story of the real life clown who started appearing randomly all over Southwest Florida before hiring himself out to people who wish to frighten children.
Surprisingly, Wrinkles is not your ordinary creepy clown. At the time he was a creepy clown for HIRE and reachable via his Google Voice number. If you had a child that needed disciplinary action, Wrinkles was an option. He appeared in a creepy YouTube video, crawling up from underneath a sleeping child’s bed in the middle of the night and walking over to the nannie cam – followed by a cut to static. This video became an instant viral sensation on YouTube…
To date, Wrinkles’ Google voice account has over 2 Million voicemails from people. Most are from kids and contain violent and disturbing messages. Documentary director Nichols was granted access to the voicemails and contacted the parents of some of the children so permission and arrangements could be made to feature the messages or interviews with their children for this documentary.
Appearing on Episode 71 of The Boo Crew Podcast, Wrinkles the Clown Director Michael Beach Nichols had this to say about the nature of the voicemail messages.
“I think overall the majority of the voicemails were pretty violent and pretty sexual – a lot of very sort of pranky calls, where you know obviously you can be anonymous and you don’t know who you’re speaking with and so people just sort of like felt that freedom to sort of just go wild. But yeah I think that was the most disheartening aspect of it was to just listen to these pretty obscene calls and they were usually from children. That was something that was also you know kind of shocking to hear these like 12 year olds just leave these profanely violent messages for Wrinkles. And then Every so often there would be a parent using the phone number sort of the way it was meant to be used – which was to use Wrinkles as a disciplinary tool. But what we found were a lot of parents were calling the voicemail and pretending that they were speaking to Wrinkles while their child was in the background just completely believing that their parent was talking to Wrinkles and just screaming and crying just in total anguish because they were so scared that this clown was going to show up at their house.”
On packaging the lore of Wrinkles the Clown and incorporating the voicemail messages along with interviews to bring this story to life Nichols said, “We wanted to take the ideas that kids have and keep the film firmly rooted in documentary but then visually create these little vignettes that would basically represent their imaginations whether those were sort of horror scenarios like the one little girl that talks about Wrinkles killing kids and using their blood to paint artwork all over walls. Also to other kids that would just talk about wanting to play with Wrinkles and have them paint their face and things like that. Everything in the film is completely rooted to either a voicemail that a kid left or several kids left or an interview we did with the kid.”
For the fascinating interview with Michael Beach Nichols, check out Episode 71 of The Boo Crew Podcast. Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.
Wrinkles the Clown is available Friday October 4, 2019 in theaters and video on demand.
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