“God, Dad, please no more ‘80s rap,” Quinn (Katie Douglas) pleads with her father Glenn (Aaron Abrams) as the two make their way into Kettle Springs, Missouri in “Clown in a Cornfield,” nearly bumping up the population a full percentage point once they settle in. The small town may not hold all that much promise for the 17-year-old Quinn, who can count on the fact it’s only a matter of time before she’ll probably leave for college anyway, but what she finds quaint is her father holding onto the past, looking ridiculous as he attempts to keep up with Kool and the Gang and noting that “the ‘80s are as far from me as the ‘40s are for you.”
With a title like “Clown in a Cornfield,” there isn’t going to be a lot of pretense to the proceedings and director Eli Craig wastes no time staging a brutal slaughter at the Bayou Brand Corn Syrup Factory in the film’s opening scene to assure horror audiences they’re in the right place, but his adaptation of Adam Cesare’s young adult novel, co-written with Carter Blanchard, finds the truly grotesque in the idea of Boomers who put the future at risk by refusing to relinquish their ideas about the past. Although this could be considered an animating idea for any teens in peril narrative for time eternal, it’s rarely been laid out as expressly as it is here where Quinn gets a side eye from a local waitress in her fifties as soon as she arrives in town while her father gets the royal treatment. Pretty much everyone under 21 is treated with contempt in Kettle Springs where Quinn is quickly accepted by her classmates when all they have is one another and show rebellion in the form of a YouTube Channel where they take the town’s mascot of a clown named Frendo and stage scenes that wouldn’t be out of place in a “Terrifier” film, using plenty of the town’s greatest export for fake blood.
Inevitably, real blood is shed just as a real killer clown emerges from the cornfield to start hunting down the teens one by one and Craig, who has been staging amusingly inventive kills since his debut “Tucker and Dale Versus Evil,” sets ups “Final Destination”-esque rhythm where a promotional tchotchke for the corn syrup factory — a clown jack-in-the-box — ominously promises an elaborate murder if it’s anywhere in the vicinity. The film is the rare one to be strongest in its second act where the director is able to let loose with both all the skill and truly deranged ideas about chainsaw and cattle-prod wielding clowns he has as the teens are terrorized, only moderately interested in who’s underneath all the makeup when survival is the main concern.
“Clown in a Cornfield” was produced by Temple Hill, which would seem to put their stamp on the film as much as Craig when it plays like a mashup of past credits ranging from adaptations of “Twilight” and the John Green novels and “Smile,” going surprisingly hard with the horror amidst its more typical angsty teen drama, primarily in the relationships between Quinn and her father as well as with Cole (Carson MacCormac), a classmate who is the de facto leader of the resistance by virtue of being the great-grandson of the corn syrup factory founder whose family continues to run Kettle Springs to this day and longs to get out of their shadow. The tonal whiplash might irritate those more comfortable being in one realm or the other when the film is quite earnest about what world it’s in at any given time and it takes about 45 minutes for the action to really get going. However, the idea of disruption resonates more broadly as the teens seek to upend the status quo, abandoning the safety of what they know to look for something better and Craig commendably searches for that as well, delivering a counterintuitive treat where the familiar is mainly around as a place of no return and the fun is finding out where to go next.
“Clown in a Cornfield” will screen again at SXSW on March 12th at 2:30 pm at the Hyatt Regency.