Adam Cesare’s smash-hit horror novel Clown in a Cornfield (2020) makes the leap from page to screen this week, bringing to life one of the most talked about villains in the recent horror fiction scene: Frendo The Clown. I haven’t read the book myself, but literally everyone around has been singing its praises for years now and good luck finding a “Best Young Adult Horror Books To Read This Summer” list that doesn’t include it somewhere. Directed by Eli Craig (Tucker & Dale vs. Evil), who also co-wrote the adaptation, Clown in a Cornfield (2025) is a genre-bending, grease paint splattered slasher that breaks rules, bashes brains and delivers one hell of a gory harvest for Horror fans.
Looking for a new start after the death of her mother, a teenage Quinn (Katie Douglas, Level 16) relocates to the small town of Kettle Springs with her father Dr. Glenn Maybrook (Aaron Abrams, Young People Fucking). While her father is busy establishing himself as the town’s new primary physician, Quinn makes friends with a group of YouTubers that let her in on the town’s haunted backstory. You see, the local economy was booming back when the Baypen Corn Syrup Factory was in full swing but like so many industries across the country, the bottom fell out when the factory closed. And adding insult to injury (rubbing sugar in the wound?), an arsonist burned the factory down which tore the town apart making it a grim, grey husk of its former prosperous & idyllic self.
Now the juicy stuff: The mascot of the Baypen Corn Syrup Factory was Frendo The Clown, a definitely not terrifying goofy character that no one would ever consider a cruel specter of death…except our young YouTube creators! The group has been working tirelessly to morph the once loveable Frendo into a fiendish and sadistic killing machine through a series of videos that would make CryptTV blush.
The teens have been using the industrial decay of the area for shooting locations, showcasing Frendo as a new Horror Movie Mega Star. And never ones to miss an opportunity for an authentic performance, the group use Quinn as an unsuspecting participant, filming her horrified reaction to the staged deaths of her friends. These sequences add an almost Found Footage angle to the whole affair, but leaves Quinn VERY unprepared when a real Frendo killer begins hacking and sashing his way through the student body right in front of her.
When Clown in a Cornfield is allowed to get wild and let out the mayhem, it really cooks. Unsurprisingly, director Eli Craig knows how to shoot a great murder sequence and when the story kicks into high gear, it’s an absolute bloodbath (including a high school corn field party massacre that give Freddy vs. Jason a real run for its money). Very much in line with the small-town slasher tropes that Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving was riffing on as well, Clown in a Cornfield is very “old guard vs the new brood”. You know, like Footloose but with a lot of blood and guts.
And just like Thanksgiving it all leads toward a climactic showdown where the big bad gives a lengthy speech justifying why these poor teens deserve to die. That’s rarely my favorite part of Slasher flicks, and the same is true here, but Clown in a Cornfield is loaded with gruesome ideas for new kills, a pretty solid young cast, and capitalizes on its setting for some really rad sequences.
“A genre-bending, grease paint splattered slasher that breaks rules, bashes brains and delivers one hell of a gory harvest…“
There are only two things you want to see in a Killer Clown movie, and neither of those things are Oscar-worthy dialogue and transcendent emotional truth. Ya want creepy clowns and crowd-pleasing kill sequences! And lots of both, pretty pretty please. Clown in a Cornfield, I’m pleased to share, totally understood the assignment (even if it couldn’t escape the gravitational pull of overworked tropes) and gives Horror Fans exactly what they’re looking for. I can’t speak to its faithfulness to the source material but if it’s anything like the movie, I can’t wait to finally tear through the p[ages of that buck wild book this summer, laughing at dead teens while sipping on sugary drinks (hopefully next a killer-free cornfield in my own small town).
Eli Craig’s adaptation of Adam Cesare’s Clown in a Cornfield hits theatres May 9! Let us know what you thought of this new age slasher (ad how it compares to the original novel) over in the official Nightmare on Film Street Discord! Social Media is A Cesspool. Discord Is Where All The Cool Creeps Are.
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