‘Clown in a Cornfield’ Review: An Old-Fashioned Slasher

Within the three many years because the youngsters in Scream sat round explaining the foundations of slasher motion pictures, the style has been deconstructed to the purpose the place it might really feel like there isn’t a complete lot left to subvert or satirize. And whereas some filmmakers are nonetheless discovering contemporary methods to reinvent it—most just lately JT Mollner’s Unusual Darling and Chris Nash’s In a Violent Nature—there’s additionally a lot to be mentioned for not getting too cute about these items. Eli Craig’s Clown in a Cornfield works exactly as a result of it performs issues straight, providing a nod and a wink to the style’s guidelines whereas adhering to them in order to ship a easy, satisfying slasher.

Based mostly on Adam Cesare’s 2020 young-adult horror novel, the movie begins with Quinn (Katie Douglas) and her father, Dr. Maybrook (Aaron Abrams), transferring to Kettle Springs, Missouri. She rapidly falls in with a group of native youngsters led by Cole (Carson MacCormac) whose affinity for elaborate pranks has made them a enormous hit on-line and public enemy primary in their city. Their present undertaking is a sequence of mockumentary movies in which they seek out the city’s mascot, Frendo the Clown, with every video ending in a ugly homicide, full with some spectacular DIY sensible results. Naturally, it isn’t lengthy earlier than the true Frendo reveals up, and instantly the blood that’s spraying in all places isn’t product of corn syrup.

Quinn and her associates make for a likeable group of sacrificial lambs. They do all of the issues that we anticipate teenagers in a slasher film to do—buying and selling jokes and sharing painful secrets and techniques earlier than a crackling hearth earlier than then wandering off alone at an inopportune time—and so they do all of it in a method that really feels genuine. MacCormac is a notably good little bit of casting, not just for his charming efficiency however as a result of he bears a notable resemblance to Scream star Skeet Ulrich, who was forged in Wes Craven’s movie in half as a result of he regarded like Johnny Depp, who broke out in Craven’s 1984 horror basic A Nightmare on Elm Avenue. It’s a refined technique to acknowledge the lineage of movies that Clown in a Cornfield is proudly becoming itself into.

Apart from the occasional meta gag, the one place in which Craig’s movie decides to be meaningfully subversive is the way in which it resolves a subplot involving Cole and a hulking, socially awkward boy named Rust (Vincent Muller), who walks Quinn to high school on the morning after she arrives in city. The ensuing twist is wise, candy, and genuinely sudden.

After all, Clown in a Cornfield’s important precedence is serving up ugly clown homicide. The kills listed below are artistic, making use of all the things from cattle prods to bench presses, and the movie has an especially agency grasp on the tone of its violence. The goriest incidents are performed like devilish sight gags, evoking each horror and hilarity in a single jolting second. One scene, in which Quinn and her associates attempt to keep quiet whereas hiding in the titular cornfield, incorporates probably the most good bits of visible humor to ever grace a horror film.

At one level in the movie, Sheriff Dunne (Will Sasso) turns into the most recent in a lengthy line of grownup authority figures to chew out Quinn and her associates over their lack of respect for the city’s traditions. “That’s the issue together with your era,” he says. “You all assume you’re a lot cleverer than us.” Clown in a Cornfield by no means makes that mistake.