Review: CLOWN IN A CORNFIELD

Quinn moves into a small town with her widowed father. First day of school, a tall and awkward boy turns up at the doorstep offering to walk her to school. She quickly falls in with the bad crowd. This all happens after a prologue scene which reveals the type of crazy killer and his prey. It's set at the end of the '90s. Cut to NOW (big red letters) and Quinn. So, all the bad kids will get together and have to fight off a psycho clown who emerges from the cornfield. There's your title.

It's a title designed to cause both knowing groans and curiosity in its potential audience. It must have something if it's going to be so obvious with its name and trailer. Like in the old Sara Lee ads, you take the irony and roll it and roll it and roll it again. The exercise is not whether they will go for irony or self-reflexivity, those have been baked in for decades, but what they will serve up by way of surprise.

So, will this one choose the self-aware irony of the post Scream '90s, the deadpan violence of the '80s classics, and will it try for a contemporary angle to justify itself? If it is well enough made with strong kill scenes it doesn't need to deliver much beyond taut suspense and come in around the ninety minute mark.

First, technology: it's a two pronged issue. The setting cuts the mobile signal off or at least makes it unreliable. The teens post their own horror themed videos featuring the local legend, Frendo the Clown which are a mix of found footage and urban exploration shorts, blended enough to satisfy anyone out irony-ing anyone else with notions of self-aware fiction presenting as pov reality. The found footage thrill remains and is decades beyond being called a fad. That it is part of conventional slashers like this is also pre-trodden. If anything, this aspect, which leads to the first discovery of the real threat, is played down.

Downplayed too, are the stereotypes of slasher that form the gang. The alpha chick and her minion are not as hard-arsed as they would have been forty years ago. The secret of the alpha boy is not a startling revelation but rather played for charm. Why are these characters we like so much as caricatures working so easily in this latest instance? Even the recent gung-ho Thanksgiving toned all of this down. Robert Eggers' Nosferatu restored the uber vampire's ugliness and made his sexuality icky rather than disarming. The teen slasher, once the haven of social savagery has been de-bitched by over use. This might make for more realistic group dynamics by softening the conflict but it might also allows the relief of going back to the source well for our antiquated morality kicks. We can laugh at and with the bad stuff when it's from 1983.

I'm not being cynical, here. The remaining thing that this contemporary teen slasher must do to earn its popcorn is to pull a big struggling rabbit out of the hat. It does and it does at the exact point when the main suspect is exonerated. Then it goes full tilt at the shifted power base and this movie crunches into gear (a veiled spoiler that I couldn't resist). Clown in a Cornfield is telling us in letters as big as the NOW announcement at the start, that it comes not to bury the slasher but to fit right into the mutated plug and socket joint that it found in the 2020s.

If the self-aware dialogue and deadpan understatements feel a little soft they aren't unwelcome or laboured. The generational conflict is much better served. It would feel laboured in a previous America (and an Australia we recently avoided) but feels a lot more poignant. Overall the decision to smooth out the edges of the satire was wise as the remaining peaks can still deliver the message from under the lighter surface. Along with Thanksgiving, Freaky, In a Violent Nature and Terrifier, Clown in a Cornfield offers its own time-informed take on this most unforgiving of sub-genres.