Flasz On Film

When Eli Craig directed Tucker & Dale vs. Evil in 2010, he was considered a new voice in the genre space with the way it assumed a fresh outlook on the otherwise tattered slasher archetype and a thoroughly tongue-in-cheek attitude towards it. It had its own kind of zing that didn’t carry any condescension or edgy distance as it re-framed a Texas Chainsaw Massacre-like scenario and flipped the script by casting the group of young things stranded in the middle of nowhere as the de facto villains in the story and banked heavily on comedy of errors while doing so.

Coincidentally, Craig’s newest movie, Clown in a Cornfield, revisits this space. Well, perhaps it isn’t entirely coincidental since it seems to be Craig’s flavour to direct and write genre-revisionist pieces that tread the line between horror and comedy by committing to violence and gore and remaining somewhat self-aware and light-hearted. After all, he also directed Little Evil in 2017, a tongue-in-cheek take on The Omen. 

But as the saying goes, “no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” In short, since Tucker & Dale vs. Evil both the parameters of lampooning horror have shifted, and the filmmaker himself got older. In the interim, the Scream franchise and Thanksgiving have given the 90s meta slashers a fresh coat of paint with their self-aware tinge, a mass of eat-the-rich social satires (from Us to Ready or Not, The Menu and others) accumulated in the genre space, while Bodies Bodies Bodies was a Millennial jab at the Gen-Z post-cool nihilism, The Blackening tried to say a few words about racial stereotypes and Cobweb wanted to craft a veritable where’s Waldo of 80s references. And there’s also In a Violent Nature that shelves comedic self-awareness and opts for a full-on topsy-turvy slasher, a Tucker & Dale with its tongue resting where it’s supposed to instead of protruding through the cheek.  
 
In addition, the cultural surroundings have shifted considerably in the intervening fifteen years. Gone are the Obama-era days when the current bloody culture war looked like just a misunderstanding. We are now in Trump Mark 2 land, baby where there’s no room for nuance, or at least so it would seem, and an attempt at cultural commentary might easily sway hard into the territory of old rural MAGA keep-things-the-same gun-toting, bible-thumping yeehaw boomers confronting the young avocado-guzzling TikTok-addicted like-obsessed attention-addled wokerati without ever leaving any room for interpretation as to what the movie is trying to say. Which is where Clown in a Cornfield firmly pitched its tent.  
 
Adapted from a young adult slasher novel written by Adam Cesare in 2020, this movie is an attempt to comment on the culture war between the Zoomers and Boomers. Well, actually… this is something I feel needs clarification from the get-go too because—and the movie on occasion allows the viewer to make this mistake—who the Zoomers frequently mislabel as Boomers are really Gen-Xers, and as far as Gen-Xers are concerned, their beef is with Millennials. Which is bizarre, to say the least.  

In any case, the movie concerns a teenage girl Quinn (Katie Douglas) who moves from the big city into the rural middle-of-nowhere America together with her dad (Aaron Abrams), who accepts an offer to become the town doctor and heal from what seems to be a tragic loss of his wife. Cliché stuff. As it also happens, the town is going through a rough patch after a local Baypen Factory burned down leaving lots of people out of work, disenfranchised and angry. Meanwhile, local teenagers pass the time by making viral YouTube horror clips about Frendo, the clown from the Baypen logo, as a slasher killer. However, the group—who quickly adopt the misfit Quinn into their midst because the movie’s got places to be and there’s very little room for character development and world-building—quickly discovers that a real killer dressed as a clown has begun stalking them.  

Simples. Except here ‘simple’ also means predictable, confused, and tonally anaemic. 

Knowing Eli Craig’s output, even superficially or second-hand, you might imagine that the central concept of Zoomers recording horror movies on their phones and then finding out someone really is out to get them in a town of disgruntled MAGA cornhuskers would involve both a central twist on the slasher template and that it would potentially end up having something interesting to say. And you’d be simultaneously correct and incorrect.  

That is because while Clown in a Cornfield attempts to corral a good handful of ideas and elements of iconography from a multitude of genre sources—from the Children of the Corn series and the mid-2000s productions like House of Wax, Wrong Turn and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remakes to the 2016 creepy clown craze that swept the world for no good reason—it doesn’t add up to anything meaningful. In fact, it’s a veritable festival of ham-fisted clichés and superficial cultural observations dressed as humour. Therefore, it is only natural that the dad is embarrassing his daughter by rapping in the car, just as it is expected that young Zoomer scream queens will be unable to place a 911 call from an abandoned house because they don’t know how to work a phone with an old-school dial. It’s all “you won’t afford a house because you eat avocado and Tide pods” and “you took all our opportunities and you hate us because we’re different, or gay or both.” And I have to be honest, it all sounds as though the people who wrote these characters never left their house to do meaningful research and instead they based their writing on social media output alone, perhaps filtered through the sensationalist gaze of politically-charged press and television.  

The movie simply lacks nuance and once you figure out what’s on offer—and it doesn’t take long for you to be able to accomplish this—the whole thing becomes just a bit tedious. Perhaps if the action was tighter, the kills more gruesome and the comedy more overt, things would have been different, but something also tells me that the filmmakers simply decided to ride the middle of the road. Thus, the movie is not too bloody, not too suspenseful, not too scary and not too smart either. It’s just a bland soup of non-committal gentle-gentle entertainment made by people who think that Zoomers are so hapless they’d die off en masse from eating cleaning products and that Boomers are all swivel-eyed loons who need assistance while withdrawing funds from the ATM. And casting Kevin Durand as the town businessman and making him resemble Elon Musk is just a cherry on the cake.  

Maybe if Clown in a Cornfield was the first ever horror movie you saw in your life, it would make an impression. Perhaps that’s what it’s supposed to be as it is adapted from a YA novel, so maybe the assumption is that the reader (and now the viewer) has not seen literally any horror movies in their lives and therefore, their minds would be blown. But if I have to judge it against the entire body of revisionist satirical horror (and even Eli Craig’s previous movies alone), this is a far cry from the quality I’d expect. It’s just a bingo card of culture-war clichés wrapped in a pop-culture scavenger hunt any half-versed fifteen-year-old could solve.  

As such, I am sad to say that Clown in a Cornfield is poorly written, shoddily assembled and simply tedious, needlessly open-ended and unnecessarily complicated in places where it could have been simpler and leaner. It is honestly a ninety minutes of who gives a shit made for I don’t know who. Or maybe I’m simply failing to see the wood for the trees because a movie so simplistic and on-the-nose and also accessible with its low intensity and barely detectable genre energy is going to make all the Gen-Xers in the audience go “ha-ha, stupid Zoomers” and all the Zoomers go “yeah, Boomers are awful and I can google how to work a dial, thank you very much.” Maybe this is a movie that will heal these cultural divisions, bridge those gaps and extinguish the raging fires of the Great American Cultural Civil War?  

Nah, it won’t. It would have to be a fun movie first. Which it isn’t, unfortunately. Next time, just watch Tucker & Dale again. Or a real clown. Or corn. Anything, really.