Giving Thanks

And the horror history of killer clowns

I’ve been trying and failing to write an introductory message for this month’s newsletter several times. It’s hard to think of anything satisfactory to say about a holiday (commemorating an era of genocide) while there’s death and war playing nonstop on all media channels (more genocide) and we’re a year away from what might end up being the most important election of our lifetime (and it’s not looking great).

This has been year, y’know? And that’s before all the personal stuff with my life, losing my dad, trying to help my mom adjust, the financial strain of inflation, the existential threat of AI…

It’s a lot. And I suspect I’m not the only one feeling this way right now.

But you know what? Unsavory origins aside, Thanksgiving has a point. It’s good to be grateful sometimes.

And this year, as cheesy as this is about to sound, I am truly grateful for you. Each and every one of you who has subbed and opened this email or found this substack out in the wild or clicked over from social media…you’ve given me the gift of attention and consideration and a little nod of camaraderie against a frequently cold world, and that’s worth everything.

Community in general is something I am exceedingly grateful this year, from the crowd over at my horror writing discord server The Bleeding Pen, to the folks rebuilding some sense of social media home on Bluesky, to the small presses keeping horror diverse, to the crew at WritersCONNx for creating opportunities for authors to help one another, to the indie bookstores and book box companies finding unique ways to give space to underserved voices…we’re all in it together, and that’s immeasurably important.

So, thanks.

Now enough with the sentimentality. Let’s talk about clowns.

Coulrophobia isn’t something you’ll find in any formal diagnostic manual, but one glance at a Spirit Halloween store should be enough to confirm that, for many, clowns are the stuff of nightmares. Everywhere you look, there’s a painted face leering around the corner, wild-eyed and clutching a knife.

But it wasn’t always this way. It’s almost impossible to believe these days, but for a time clowns were truly, unironically beloved. In fact, there was a time when clowns performed sacred religious duties.

So what the hell happened?

An Abbreviated History of Clowning

Before we get too deep into this, maybe we’d better define our terms. What exactly is a clown?

Wikipedia provides this handy definition:

"A clown is a person who performs comedy and arts in a state of open-mindedness using physical comedy, typically while wearing distinct makeup or costuming and reversing folkway-norms."

That’s a pretty broad definition, and I need you to keep it in mind as we explore this topic — clowning is a lot older, and a lot broader, than whatever red-nosed image you might have in mind.

In the context of “people who dress distinctively and behave in ways that run counter to cultural norms,” clowns are very, very old. We have hieroglyphic evidence of this type of clown in Egypt’s Fifth Dynasty in 2400 B.C.E.

At that time, their clowns also acted as priests and held sacred duties…but they were also kept around to make the Pharaoh laugh. These early performers were commonly dwarfs or pygmies, which Egyptians viewed as being blessed and held in high regard (although, probably, as slaves or human pets). There’s a lot to be said here about the sacredness of deformity and slave traditions, but let’s put a pin in that for now.

In Western civilization, there’s a long tradition of clown as “wise fool” type. They show up in Greek and Roman theater and, of course, in Shakespeare, who might have been the first to use the name. For a couple thousand years, the archetype was of a rustic or peasant acting as comic relief in a story about important people, evoking laughter by mocking and pantomiming the serious actors (and, sometimes, throwing nuts at the audience).

A bit later, we’d see the court jester gain prominence, providing entertainment at royal activities by cracking jokes, primarily at the expense of the king.

In non-Western civilization, we’d see some similar roles being played. There’s record of clowns in China operating similar to court jesters, ridiculing the emperor. And throughout North America, several different indigenous tribes had sacred clown figures, from the kachina of the Pueblo people to the Heyoka of the Lakota and Dakota tribes — a figure who does everything in reverse, and one who was often played by a winkte, or a male-bodied person with feminine clothing and mannerisms.

By the end of the 18th century and moving into the 19th, clowns rose in popularity as performers, showing up in entertainment venues on their own right and, later, serving as comic relief and attraction at the ever-popular circus. We came up with different genres of clowns, from whiteface to red-face to hobos and harlequins and mimes and created rules for what messages each could convey and how each should embody its persona and its sacred duty at inspiring laughter.

As their popularity as performers waned (in a world that had also started losing interest in vaudeville and circuses, where mass market entertainment was on the rise) clowns continued to find work amusing children. Bozo the Clown was so popular in the 1960s that McDonald’s aped his look for their mascot, and tickets to live Bozo shows were sold out years in advance. Clowns visited hospitals and tried to heal through comedy. Clown schools taught people both physical acting skills but also the psychology and philosophy of clowning.

We used to love clowns. We really did.

Speaking Truth to Power

Just as the trickster archetype shows up in world mythology, so to does the need for someone to elicit laughter by opposing cultural norms. Clowns are the embodiment of social paradox. They are figures of low class or standing (peasants, fools, dwarfs, gender-nonconformists) who hold social power. They are allowed to say what the average person cannot (good luck roasting the king at court if you’re not the jester) and they use humor to reveal sadness, flaws, social injustice, and so forth.

They also reinforce behaviors by showing you how to do them incorrectly. The purpose of clowns is frequently to laugh at their misfortune. Using physical humor and over-the-top costuming, clowns invite our derision. “It’s safe to make fun of me,” they seem to say. “I’m a safe target of your laughter and scorn. But while you laugh at me, know you’re also laughing at yourself.”

In a way, clowning is also queering. It’s holding up a funhouse mirror to the world and asking it to see itself in distortion. It’s resistance to norms and binaries and a celebration of life on the margin.

These days, we’ve lost our court jesters but we have comedy news broadcasts that serve a similar purpose. We have drag queens, who simultaneously poke fun at gender while celebrating its expression and revel in its fashion. Just as circus clowns once served as crowd-pleasing entertainment between death-defying acts, we have suited sports mascots doing the same thing…and by extension, furries and cosplayers, who learn to bring a concept to life through physical acting. Maybe kids don’t get visited by clowns in the hospital anymore, but they might get Spiderman, and is that such a different thing?

What I’m getting at here is that the sacred art of clowning has survived, in pockets and pieces, even as the formal aesthetics of clowns have been corrupted into…something else.

When the Laughter Stops

As the embodiment of paradox, clowns have always had a more troubled history than we might expect. Remember…they can ridicule the king, but they’re also at the king’s mercy. The beloved pygmies in Ancient Egypt were still plucked from their homeland by a conquering empirical force. And even when they’re inviting us to laugh at ourselves, clowns do so by asking us to ridicule them.

It’s a tough gig.

In the early 1800s, Joseph Grimaldi was the most popular performer in England. He invented modern whiteface clown design and pioneered new techniques of comedy and pantomime, and for a time his family enjoyed wealth and status. But clowning is hard, physical labor that took a toll on his body, and he was forced into retirement. A series of bad business ventures drained his accounts, and he died a penniless alcoholic whose memoirs would later be written and embellished by Charles Dickens (which is a great way to ensure your story is remembered as a tragedy for lifetimes to come).

History’s first killer clown may have been Jean-Gaspard Deburau, who in 1836 struck and killed a boy who was taunting him about his character, Pierrot (a sad clown archetype who had already by this time become a folk hero and symbol of the disenfranchised). But for the most famous killer clown, you’ll need to flash forward more than a century to John Wayne Gacy, who murdered at least 33 young men between 1967 and 1978, and sexually assaulted many others.

Until his crimes were uncovered, Gacy seemed by all accounts to be an upright, friendly, helpful member of his community. He owned a franchise business, participated in local politics, and, oh yes, dressed as a clown to perform at children’s birthday parties. (This was the 1960s, remember, Bozo the Clown was still cool).

When he was caught, the media had a heyday with the clown angle, even though his clowning was mostly incidental to his murder — he wasn’t killing kids at parties, after all, and his preferred victims were well beyond the target clown audience age. But being a clown made a perfect metaphor for everything else: here was someone who seemed jovial and friendly and harmless, who was in fact deeply disturbed. Here was someone hiding in plain sight, duplicity hidden behind a mask.

Of course the media would run wild with the story. All the mythic components were already there, ripe for the taking.

What Lurks Behind the Painted Smile

We’ve talked already about the history of clowns and their cultural and philosophical significance, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge them aesthetically as well. There are practical and thematic reasons why clowns can be nightmare fuel.

So let’s address the obvious thing: the makeup.

In a time of stage performances of live entertainment, clown makeup makes sense. It’s loud and garish and over the top, but it has to be — you’re conveying a character to an audience who might be at the very top of the stands. In an era of more intimate storytelling, the loudness and garishness of clown makeup become even more extreme — and by extension, unsettling.

Comedy and horror already walk two sides of a razor-thin wire. Both are about subverting expectation, suspense and surprise, transgressing boundaries, etc. Clowns are all about exaggerating the human form, making features more extreme, and the same is true of horror monster design. All you really need to flip the switch from one to the other is some hint of malice — sharp, jagged teeth hiding behind that wide smile, for instance.

It also helps that makeup is cheap. It serves the same function as a mask in terms of hiding the identity beneath, but it’s more expressive and easier to apply. If you’re filming a low-budget horror movie and can’t afford prosthetics to create a monster, you could just slap on some clown makeup and false teeth. Boom.

And, as we’ve already discussed, clowns embody a paradox. There is internal tension running through them to their very core, with the poetic resonance just waiting to be plucked out and expounded upon. Is there any single image that more accurately captures the human condition than a real tear behind a happy painted smile?

There’s another element that plays into this, too, which is clowning’s association with children. We have a tendency, at least since the 1980s with its Stranger Danger and Satanic Panic moral terrors, to be inherently distrustful of those who work around children, particularly men. We tend to assume that they are sexual predators, or at the very least that they’re worn-down, exhausted performers who secretly hate the little shits — see Krusty the Clown from The Simpsons or the film Death to Smoochy or, of course, the recent FNAF franchise to see this play out in different variations.

I think clowning as an artform has fallen out of fashion due to changes in our society and media preferences. Some of their sacred duties have fallen to other types of performers, as we’ve discussed — the drag queens and fursuiters and comedians, etc. And as their popularity waned, only the aesthetics remain…aesthetics which, devoid of context and often twisted to poetic purpose, can so easily become unsettling.

So why are we afraid of clowns?

Because we’ve been told for a long, long time that we should be.

A Brief Horror History of Clowns

As it turns out, killer clown media is a lot older than you might think.

The 1892 opera Pagliacci is about a clown from the Grimaldi style of clowning, murders his cheating wife and her lover during a performance. It has all the hallmarks of a delicious melodrama. Here is a story about performers, performed by others, which hinges in part on the duplicity of acting — the main character clown plays a fool on stage, but he’s sharp enough at home to know when he’s being made a fool of, if you catch my meaning.

With their focus on physical comedy, clowns were a perfect choice for the silent film era, and Charlie Chaplin is a great example of a clown who found great success in that medium.

But film also allowed for more serious and melodramatic stories to be told, which is how we end up with things like He Who Gets Slapped (1924), where Lon Chaney plays a humiliated, cuckolded, disgraced scientist who turns to clowning and relives his humiliation night after night while hatching a bloody revenge plot. You can watch it free on YouTube, because the public domain is awesome.

A few years later we get The Man Who Laughs (1928), based on a Victor Hugo novel. This one is kind of half-clown, half-phantom-of-the-opera, but it involves a boy whose face is disfigured into a permanent smile that hides his murderous hunger for revenge. The iconic design from this film would later be inspiration for a certain Batman villain we all know and love. Catch the film on YouTube if you’re curious to see it all play out.

That same year, Lon Chaney once again donned some clown makeup for Laugh Clown Laugh (1928), where a man prone to uncontrollable laughter teams up with a man prone to uncontrollable weeping as a dynamic clown duo that goes sour when both fall in love with the same girl. You can guess where that’s headed. I couldn’t find the full movie of this one online, but you can get a taste of it.

After the silent film era, clowns fell out of the horror limelight for a while. But they made an appearance in a BIG way with Stephen King’s IT (1986), where Pennywise the Clown is the front of a terrifying cosmic entity who feeds on fear. With Gacy near-at-hand in the public memory and the nation in the grip of that stranger danger era, the imagery is all-too-compelling. A few years later the story would be filmed as a made-for-TV miniseries, with a performance immortalized by Tim Curry in the murder-clown role.

Just as essential but less broadly acclaimed is the 1988 Killer Klowns from Outer Space which delivers exactly what it says on the tin. This may be the first time anyone introduced the “what if clowns aren’t wearing makeup at all, what if they’re a species that’s just Like That” trope. A few decades later, that would become a rich vein of surrealist comedy and horror on Tumblr, which I guess makes the Klown creators true visionaries. We see a similar-but-different approach to the space-clown motif in Xtro (1982), which comes with an added dose of ovipositor, so that’s cool?

On the other side of the equation, we’ve got 1989’s Clownhouse, where a trio of mental patients dress as clowns to traumatize some kids. (This was directed by convicted child rapist Victor Salva, though, who was actively abusing his star, so it may be best if this one stays in obscurity).

There’s also 1991’s Shakes the Clown, where an alcoholic clown is framed for murder in a black comedy that serves as a spiritual successor to Death to Smoochy. Not a horror movie, per se, but worth a mention on this list.

For whatever reason (I suspect budget and shlock), killer clown movies lend themselves to franchises. There’s a dozen Camp Blood movies, a direct-to-video series that’s basically “Friday the 13th, but clown.” There’s Killjoy, with a half-dozen installments of “demonic clown summoned to do a vengeance” (Wishmaster with clowns, I guess). And of course we cannot avoid Terrifier, the most serious(?) of the clown franchises, which features Art the Clown sawing up hapless victims for…whatever reason he does that.

Outside of franchises, the last couple decades have yielded some rather inventive clown horrors, from 2012’s Stitches, where a clown comes back from the dead for some good ol’ fashioned vengeance, and Clown (2014), where a cursed costume turns a guy into a clown…physically.

As we get further from clowning as a standard kind of performance art, clowns in fiction get further from, well, reality. Unless of course you’re doing a period piece, like the decidedly dark The Last Circus (2010), which is a return to form quite like that 1892 opera — a sad clown and a happy clown pine for the same woman, with disastrous results.

And maybe that’s the real moral of the story, after a couple centuries: Never date a clown. But if you do, don’t cheat on them. That never seems to work out well for anyone.

Until next time, monsters.