Clown in the Cornfield debuted at the SxSW festival in May and I saw it with some interest, knowing that it was part of a rising genre of “horror for teens,” which I’m here for. A lot of this movie relies on the tension built from not being quite sure which characters you’re meeting in daylight are actually wearing a clown mask at night and the twisty-twists of ever multiplying Friendo clowns is both exciting and silly. The movie, and I’m not spoiling too much here, effectively plays with a sort of Whedon-esque plot point in which the adults of the town are weirdly retrograde and traditional in an almost unbelievably fictive way that the teens in the movie push back against with very little success. The commitment to that bit, in which the adults and teens of this movie effectively inhabit different movies and play by different fictional rules, is at the core of what makes this movie so fun and fresh, even if it’s not entirely clear what the director’s commentary on the generational gap might be.
