Today’s movie is a testament to the power of having no expectations entering a movie theater. I hadn’t really heard much about Eli Craig’s Clown in a Cornfield. This movie wasn’t really on my radar at all until a friend who I’ve been dragging to horror movies lately asked if I’d heard about it, after her targeted ads on Instagram told her about it. I kind of laughed at the generic sounding title, and looked the movie up and was surprised to find it had a weirdly high Rotten Tomatoes score, and had screened at several genre festivals, most notably this year’s SXSW festival. So, on a Friday afternoon where I had no plans after work, I decided to check out Clown in a Cornfield, and I was pleasantly surprised. It’s a gory and quippy throwback slasher that surprisingly has something to say about the world around it. And that lack of expectations may have made all the difference.

Quinn (Katie Douglas) and her father (Aaron Abrams) moved to the town of Kettle Springs, Missouri, some time after the unexpected death of her mother. The town’s hostile sheriff (Will Sasso) advises her against making friends with the town cool kids – Cole (Carson MacCormac), Janet (Cassandra Potenza), Ronnie (Verity Marks), Matt (Alexandre Martin Deakin) and Tucker (Ayo Solanke), but she doesn’t listen. She is soon told about the town’s legendary clown mascot Frendo, and there’s a serial killer in a Frendo mask lurking in the nearby cornfields one night, and all hell breaks loose.

It’s clear from the first several scenes that the viewer is in adept hands for this particular genre. This is co-writer/director Eli Craig’s third film, and he’s got a great understanding for tone and pacing in this kind of film. Had I gone into this knowing this film came from the director of Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, I think I would have maybe walked in with some over-inflated expectations. For the majority, Clown in a Cornfield plays like an old-fashioned teens-in-peril slasher. It never makes anyone too likable, so it doesn’t hurt emotionally when these people get what they have coming to them. And when we get to the explanation of what’s really going on here, it actually works. It isn’t over-explained and doesn’t feel hacky, but feels like the kind of thing that absolutely could be happening right now. And I was very satisfied with the characters who make it to the end of this film. The people I liked survived, so I left in a good mood.

Katie Douglas is a Canadian actress best known for the Netflix series Ginny & Georgia, which I have not seen, so she was new to me. She’s great here, and could have a real future in the horror genre if she wants one. Carson MacCormac, an actor I had not seen before, is also really good as Cole, a character who ended up being more than I initially pinned him for, and I very much enjoyed his character arc. Everybody else here is essentially doing everything the script is asking of them satisfactorily, but those actors specifically stood out to me. 

I don’t have a lot to remark on regarding the cinematography, costume design or production design, but everything is pretty well done. It does kind of feel like Clown in a Cornfield could exist simultaneously in 1987 and today. It’s got such a delicious throwback quality to it, but finds ways to comment on the present day world around it in ways I found compelling. There was a point where a character has a monologue about how the older generation is screwing everything up for the younger generations and I wanted to stand up and cheer. This was close to the same level as that America Ferrera monologue in Barbie. If I were looking for negatives here, I would say the kills could be a little gorier and gnarlier, but in my head I was comparing this to the similar recent film Hell of a Summer, which did a far less impressive job with the kills, so I’ll take what I can get.

I mention the power of expectations or the lack thereof, because I’d looked at a friend’s thoughts on this film, and his reaction was less enthusiastic than mine. He had read the book this was based on – a 2020 novel of the same name by Adam Cesare – and found it didn’t live up to the source material. But I don’t read a lot of horror fiction and I didn’t know this was based on anything. As a film you walk in blind to, you might be as impressed as I did, but if you have built up expectations of exactly what you want this film to be, maybe you’ll be less than enthused. For me though, Clown in a Cornfield was a total winner, and I wouldn’t mind this becoming its own franchise. It’s an entertaining and well-crafted, well-paced, amusing, gory and surprisingly incisive good time.