Clown in a Cornfield (2025)

Score: 2.5 / 5

Teenaged Quinn Maybrook (Katie Douglas) relocates to rural Missouri with her father Glenn (Aaron Abrams, Hannibal), the new town doctor. Their relationship is strained after the premature death of Quinn's mother, and Kettle Springs is no place to cultivate much love. The town celebrates its heritage proudly in the form of its mascot, Frendo the Clown, a commercial creation for the Baypen Corn Syrup factory, seemingly the raison d'etre for the town's existence. But there is a stark generational divide, and the town's older citizens clearly resent Gen Z and its attitudes and disrespect of history, money, and power. Founder's Day is approaching, and there will be blood to pay as the town celebrates.

Based on a 2020 young adult novel, Clown in a Cornfield is a simple, rote exercise in teen slashers. Indeed, as a slasher, the film fails to add anything of substance to its subgenre. Apart from its admittedly effective setting -- most of the film takes place in and around large corn fields and barns at night -- and the homicidal clowns themselves, the story treads over so many familiar tropes that it often reminded me of other, more original stories I'd rather rewatch, like Dark Harvest or Children of the Corn. Though this title notably flips the script by (SPOILER ALERT) making the older generation the cult of murderers, it's so obvious from the early moments that I kept waiting for something more exciting to occur. Even AHS: Cult handled killer clowns better than this, and clowns aren't something I've historically found frightening (apart from the clown sightings in 2016). 

To discuss the film is to spoil it, so I hope you've already seen it, if you have any interest. Essentially, by the halfway point, as the high schoolers party in a remote farmhouse, they are assaulted en masse by a posse of clowns emerging from the twilight stalks. A bloodbath ensues: despite a satisfyingly high body count, most of the actual kills in this movie are comparably tame, even neutered, presumably for a younger audience. The characters are all archetypal to a fault, from sarcastic and foul-mouthed Quinn with her incessant one-liners and excessive f-bombs to her love interest Cole (Carson MacCormac, Shazam! and Fury of the Gods), a sweet and popular privileged boy who maintains an arm's length distance. The Black boy is killed first, then the weightlifting meathead; eventually the blonde mean girl gets pitchforked and it's all very predictable and expected. 

By the time it's revealed that the clowns are the older residents -- including the kids' awful teacher, the shopkeeper, the diner waitress -- I was hoping for more and finally got it. Sort of. There's some keen commentary here on generational division, respect for heritage, and critique of capitalistic power. The syrup factory, which essentially created and sustains Kettle Springs, burned down, and these kids are becoming famous on the internet (65k followers, if my notes are correct) for capitalizing on "killer clown" short videos. Staging their own fame, the kids are viewed by their elders as undesirables, eschewing tradition and forsaking legacy, and so the elders apparently periodically band together to slaughter their own children. Does it make sense? No. But this is the substance of so much YA material, and it does offer a nugget of fascinating insight into the fracturing political rot of small towns these days.

The climax occurs when Cole's father, the mayor (Kevin Durand, Abigail, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, The Strain, recently), unmasks himself as the ringleader of the killers and attempts to hang his own son. Not enough psychological attention is provided to his character to justify filicide, though it is strongly suggested to be due to Cole's identity as gay. That's the other big reveal -- gosh, there's a lot of twists in this remarkably simple narrative -- and we learn that Cole (despite being a teenager) had a tumultuous relationship with his ex, quite literally the "boy next door" to Quinn, named Rust. Thankfully, Quinn and her father and the two young men survive the night and the clowns are all dead, though the mayor escapes in time to allow for a sequel.

If you like young adult horror, this should fit the bill for some light entertainment. What Clown in a Cornfield (the title should be plural, irritatingly) lacks in gore it makes up for in premise, which opens the door for compelling discussion around rural politics and economics; too bad its screenplay doesn't offer more substance to chew in that regard. Its characters are unlikable but gutsy -- excepting its lovesick gay teens, who are a bit too charming -- so the eventual survivors do earn our affections; pretty much everyone else dies. The adults are bad (It comes to mind as another referent here), the fields are dangerous, and the action is chaotic in a rather satisfying way, at least until the film decides to overexplain its own motives. And there is something to be said for a story that knows its target audience and caters to it: the kids, regardless of their attitudes, have to fend for themselves because the previous generation sold them out and can't bear the impending retribution.