‘Clown in a Cornfield’ Review

‘Clown in a Cornfield’, the latest from director Eli Craig, is nominally a horror comedy, which is bold given that it is neither scary nor funny. After his breakout debut of ‘Tucker & Dale vs. Evil’, Eli Craig is on his third film, all mining similar genre territory, and all delivering increasingly diminishing returns.

Based on a 2020 novel, ‘Clown in a Cornfield’ follows Quinn Maybrook (Katie Douglas) as she moves to the small midwestern town of Kettle Springs, along with her doctor father (Aaron Abrams), to start fresh after the sudden death of her mother. Kettle Springs is a town where everybody knows everybody, filled with quirky local traditions and history, including Frendo, the creepy clown mascot of the local Baypen Corn Syrup factory. During her first day at school, Quinn falls in with the local popular kids and troublemakers, spearheaded by Cole Hill (Carson MacCormac), the son of the mayor and local town royalty. This group spends their time making Youtube slasher shorts featuring Frendo the clown, occasionally breaking into local businesses to do so and, in one case in the recent past, potentially starting a fire that burned down the local factory, putting many locals out of work and earning the ire of virtually everybody else in the town.

So when somebody starts donning the Frendo costume to start killing, they have the perfect group of teenagers to target.

The recipe is here for a straightforward, traditional slasher, but Eli Craig attempts to modernize the genre without actually subverting any expectations. Quinn, the protagonist, is hard to root for, as are all her friends. It seems the writer expected that because Quinn’s mom died, viewers would blindly cheer along Quinn as a classic final girl. But instead we see a character who lashes out repeatedly at her dad, insists that she has no intention of making friends, that she’s an outsider, but then immediately becomes best friends with all of the popular, unlikable kids with very little effort.

Having the teenagers be unlikable is not necessarily an issue for a slasher; some of the best horror films succeed by getting the viewer to root for the killer to deliver some form of violent justice to the privileged, hatable “heroes”. But as unlikable as the teens are in this film, the killer isn’t somebody to root for either. It takes so long to set up the actual killings, that at some point in the theater I rolled my finger to myself, urging the movie to get on with it. The killer has no real personality, the kills are neither surprising nor creative, so there’s no joy in the mayhem as there should be to deliver on unlikable protagonists.

‘Tucker & Dale vs. Evil’ was a fun, unique blend of horror and comedy that successfully subverted tropes from the slasher genre. Other than a continuing interest in popular kid in-groups vs hillbilly out-groups, it seems Eli Craig’s biggest takeaway from that film was to instead follow the one dimensional, self absorbed young people as heroes. None of the characters are likable, the kills and scares are so telegraphed as to be boring, and the humor doesn’t land. When I say it’s not funny, it’s not that individual jokes are made and fall flat, it’s that I couldn’t even tell what was supposed to be funny and what serious. Oh, and if you think you might have missed some of the themes about intergenerational conflict, don’t worry, there will be a monologue in the third act that lets you know in all caps what this movie is really about.

Perhaps the best thing I can say for this movie is it doesn’t overstay it’s welcome, at just over 90 minutes. But for a film hoping to straddle the line of horror and comedy, ‘Clown in a Cornfield’ would have been better off delivering a generic slasher than the tonal mishmash we have here that tries to have it both ways but succeeds at neither.

Clown in a Cornfield
Rated R for bloody horror violence, language throughout, and teen drinking.
Running Time: 1 hour and 36 minutes

Director Eli Craig
Writers Carter Blanchard, Eli Craig
Stars Katie Douglas, Aaron Abrams, Carson MacCormac, Kevin Durand, Will Sasso
Rating R
Running Time 96 Minutes
Genres Comedy, Horror