Evil Clowns and Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988)

When I was a child, I used to be taken to parades all the time. Okay, that might be a little bit of an exaggeration. It’s not like there were parades every weekend or something. But there was at least one in each season of the year. I would get taken to each of them to see the floats roll on by. There would be candy tossed to children. Back in the day (maybe twenty or twenty-five years ago), there would be peanuts tossed around, too. That probably couldn’t happen now because of allergies.

Every parade has its bunch of characters that stroll down the street. The Christmas parade has Santa in a sleigh to finish it off. There’s always a high school marching band and an old fire truck. Around here, there are a bunch of old guys called the Shriners that ride around in little cars while a bigger boat on wheels rolls on, shooting bubbles out into the air. And, of course, there are the clowns.

The frequency of clowns at parades and public outings has slowed down quite a bit in recent years. People have begun to fear clowns in a way that wasn’t as apparent when the boomers of today were growing up. Even when I was a child twenty years ago, there wasn’t the same apprehension about clowns as there is now. A clown fear culture has recently sprung up that made clowns more a poster child for horror than for wholesome, family fun.

A large part of this fear in western culture has to do with John Wayne Gacy. He was a serial killer who murdered at least 33 young men in the 1970s. Nobody knew he was doing this while he was doing it. They thought he was an upstanding citizen of their community. He led clubs and dressed like a clown for the kids. When he was caught and imprisoned, he began painting pictures of his clown character. Since he became known for his serial killing, he has been associated with killer clowns. There is no way that’s not a major factor contributing to the collective fear of clowns.

Then there was the scare a few years ago where clowns were popping up in forests and on the side of roads. They weren’t doing too much. Just standing there and staring at people. It was enough to create a cultural spook. People were fearing for their lives that a clown was going to walk out of the woods and stare at them. They though the clowns were murderers, working together to kill a mass population. It doesn’t seem like that was the case and the whole situation is behind us now.

However, the fear of clowns is ever present. It permeated through the culture thanks to those two real world situations. The fear was so apparent that it has been used in different stories, both in written form and visual form, to scare new generations of people. If something is scary, horror will pick up on that and run with it. People who watch and read horror want to be scared. Utilizing themes and imagery that naturally scares them will help elevate the fear in the work.

The generation before me got Stephen King’s novel It and the movie Poltergeist. It was about a group of children who fought off a demonic clown that wasn’t really a clown. They had to reband together twenty something years later to fight the clown again. It became one of Stephen King’s classics and would go on to be made into a television mini-series in 1990 and a two movie franchise in the past few years. Poltergeist wasn’t about clowns, but it did use a clown toy in one scene to scare the bajeebers out of one of the children in the family, as well as the audience watching it.

Those two works brought the fear of clowns to the children growing up in the 1980s. They weren’t the only clown projects to come out during that decade, though. There were a few others, including Killer Klowns from Outer Space. The 1988 film was a schlocky B-movie featuring alien clowns coming to a town and entrapping people in a cotton candy type of substance. A couple who had wandered into the spaceship tried to warn the town, but nobody believed them. They teamed up with a police officer and attempted to fight back against the extra-terrestrial clowns.

Killer Klowns from Outer Space brought some frightening clown imagery to audiences. It wasn’t through what the clowns were doing. That was a basic B-movie story of the monsters trying to harvest humans for sustenance of some sort. What was frightening was the look of the clowns, themselves. Clearly, they weren’t people with painted faces. They were exaggerated rubber masks that looked like they had been painted a year ago and then half melted. To see one of them laugh is to see all of the nightmares in the world right before your eyes. That was where Killer Klowns from Outer Space excelled at the scares.

Moving forward, the people who grew up in the 1990s got the mini-series of It to put the fear of clowns into them. Tim Curry played Pennywise the clown and spent the nearly four hour total runtime tormenting the kids and their grown up, adult counterparts. It was the one 1990s scary clown story to really stick with people. Audiences were so affected by it that even when the new movies came out, they would revisit the miniseries and discuss what was scary in it. I know that as a kid, it affected me. I wasn’t super scared of clowns, but there were still some things in the movie that frightened me.

The only other memorable clown in a movie from the 1990s was the villain of Air Bud. He was a failed clown who only cared about money. He abused his dog to try and get the dog to do tricks. When the dog ran away, he didn’t care. Until the dog started becoming famous. Then he decided to take the dog back, even though the dog now had a family. He was the bad guy because he was going to steal the dog away from the main kid and probably abuse it some more. That sticks with kids who watch Air Bud when they’re young.

The 2000s really saw a resurgence of the scary clown motif. Insane Clown Posse had become a thing. They wrestled. They made music. They were in movies. Slipknot became more popular and slightly more mainstream. One of their members dressed as a creepy clown. Low budget clown movies were making a comeback. There was a movie made about John Wayne Gacy. Clowns were becoming as much of a horror staple as vampires, werewolves, mummies, and all those other monsters.

Then we slipped into the current decade and the clown stuff exploded. The low budget movies were still out there. But the evil clowns in movies thing came to a peak when the whole clowns being everywhere scare happened. Rob Zombie released a film called 31, which involved clowns kidnapping people. That was around the same time that the first new It film was released, which once again pitted kids against an evil demonic creature of sorts that posed as a clown. A couple years before that, there was an American Horror Story season set at a freak show, which featured a creepy looking clown. Scary clowns were back in a big way.

This year saw the sequel to It come out, in which the children were now adults and had to return to fight off Pennywise one last time. Then came Joker. It was a movie showing a man’s descent into madness. He was a clown by profession and wanted to be a comedian. As he spiraled downward, his violent tendencies, his personality, and his clown alter ego all began to merge into one chaotic beast. Evil clown season was here again.

Clowns have been a frightening part of cinema and storytelling in general for decades. Every generation has seemed to have their own version of a spooky clown to haunt their nightmares. Whether they were real life clowns like John Wayne Gacy, novel clowns like Pennywise, or film clowns like the Killer Klowns from Outer Space, they’ve permeated culture with their scary aspects. Clowns are no longer the friendly figures they once were. They’re now a dark presence that strikes fear into the hearts of anyone who sees them.

Parades are a thing of my past. I don’t go to see them anymore. I don’t know if they still have clowns goofing off during the parades that roll through the city. There could be a few clowns. But I’m sure they’re looked at differently now than they were when I was a child. The fear that people have makes me think they aren’t as popular at parades. That could be why I remember the old guys in the cars more than any clowns. That’s just they way culture is. People are weird. They’ll turn out to be afraid of anything.

Now let’s get some notes in here:

• John Vernon was in Killer Klowns from Outer Space. His voice was featured in Delgo (week 148).
• Killer Klowns from Outer Space featured Charles Chiodo, who would go on to appear in Theodore Rex (week 223).
• Finally, Grant Cramer popped up in Killer Klowns from Outer Space. You might remember him from New Year’s Evil (week 318).
• Have you seen Killer Klowns from Outer Space? Did you enjoy it? How do you feel about clowns and clown movies? Let me know on Twitter, or you can drop a comment in the comment section.
• The comments and Twitter are also places where you can find me to tell me about movies I might not know of. That way, I’ll be able to schedule them into the Sunday “Bad” Movies and check them out. Keep me informed.
• There’s an Instagram account for the Sunday “Bad” Movies where you can see some stuff about the movies I’ve watched for the blog. Check it out.
• October is coming to a close, and as such, the horror marathon is ending. That doesn’t mean there won’t be horror any other time of the year. It just means that it’s not all in a row anymore. Next week is something different. It’s a movie called The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human, and I hope you’ll join me for another post when I release it. See you then.