Clown in a Cornfield
Clown in a Cornfield features a moment that crystallizes everything wrong with this well-meaning but muddled horror film. Two teenagers, running for their lives, hear a phone. They rush upstairs and, to their horror, discover it’s a rotary dial. “Where are the buttons?” they moan in bewilderment. It’s a clever subversion of the classic “dead phone line” trope and a pointed commentary on generational disconnect. But like so many elements in this adaptation of Adam Cesare’s young-adult novel, it arrives too late to save a film that can’t decide what it wants to be.
The story follows Quinn, a high school senior who moves with her father to a small Missouri town where the local adults seem to have declared war on their children. Soon enough, a killer dressed as Frendo the Clown (the town’s mascot, because apparently some towns still think clowns make good mascots) starts picking off the local teens. It’s a promising setup that director Eli Craig, who gave us the delightfully twisted Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, never fully capitalizes on.
The film spends its first hour setting up what feels like a CW drama series pilot. Quinn falls in with the local popular crowd, complete with a potential love triangle, angsty conversations about small-town life, and a barn rave that feels sanitized for network television. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this approach—John Hughes built a career on taking teenagers seriously—but Clown in a Cornfield never earns its dramatic weight. The young characters remain stuck in a limbo between childhood and adulthood, demanding respect while displaying little reason they deserve it.
When the killing starts, Craig finally shows flashes of the filmmaker who made Tucker and Dale. There’s genuine wit in how he plays with horror conventions, like a teen’s meta-realization that she’s destined to be the next victim. But these moments of inspiration feel grafted onto a film that’s otherwise content to color within the lines of both teen drama and slasher conventions.
The cast of young actors all deliver competent performances, but none possesses that ineffable quality that makes us truly invest in their survival. They’re trapped playing archetypes: the jock, the musician, the princess, the oligarch’s son. Even Quinn, our protagonist, never develops beyond being the new girl in town with a tragic backstory—her mother’s overdose death—a plot point the film raises and then puzzlingly abandons.
The R rating feels almost accidental. Despite some serviceable kill scenes that should satisfy genre fans, the film maintains a peculiarly chaste atmosphere that betrays its YA origins. There’s some underage drinking, but otherwise these teens feel sanitized for prime time, which creates a cognitive dissonance with the film’s darker elements.
As for the adults, they’re either cartoonishly antagonistic or completely underdeveloped. A local business magnate who bears a striking resemblance to Elon Musk suggests satirical ambitions the film never pursues. Like many elements in Clown in a Cornfield, it feels like a potentially interesting idea left to wither in the field.
What we’re left with is a middling film that’s too tame for hardcore horror fans, too violent for the YA crowd, and not smart enough to transcend either genre. When it works, usually in its latter half, it offers glimpses of the sharper, more subversive film it could have been. But these moments are too few and far between to recommend the overall experience.