Once you’re done mopping up your own vomit and have checked out of the ER after watching Terrifier 2, you might, if you’re a masochist, be interested in checking out more clown horror movies. The subgenre, which has existed in some form for nearly a century but had a boom in the late 2010s (we can thank the It remake for that) taps into all of our childhood horrors. A fear of clowns is known as coulrophobia, and for many who’ve spent birthday parties dodging the balloon-blowing performers, the idea of them turning murderous is the stuff of real nightmares.
Which is precisely why movies like It and Terrifier are so scary: they take a real-life entity, one intrinsically linked with innocence, and make them wretched and violent instead. So if Terrifier’s gut-churning sequel has whet your appetite, here are seven more clown-based horror films that will haunt your dreams.
Wrinkles the Clown (2019)
In 2015, a YouTube video of a clown hiding under a young girl’s bed went viral, making the Florida-based “children’s entertainer” behind it both into a local celebrity and figure of folklore. He capitalised on the clip’s success, making more viral clips and charging parents a fee to turn up at their houses and freak their naughty children out. This documentary follows the clown, named Wrinkles, and gets under the skin of the man behind him.
All Hallow’s Eve (2013)
Before Terrifier became a gross-out global sensation, director Damien Leone had explored the terrifying Art the Clown’s antics in previous projects. His feature-length debut came in 2013’s All Hallow’s Eve. In it, a babysitter returns home with the kids she’s looking after on Halloween, only to find one of them has received a terrifying video tape. When she sits down to watch it, she’s met with a series of clips of a mute clown. But through watching them, the babysitter starts to realise that the clown is coming ever closer to her and the children.
The Man Who Laughs (1928)
It might be billed as a romantic drama, but 1928 movie The Man Who Laughs, according to legendary film critic Roger Ebert, is “so steeped in expressionist gloom that it plays like a horror film”. It tells the story of a clown who was disfigured by a disgruntled king as a child, and his return to life as a royal jester and star of a “freak show”. But the tale is mostly centred on the way its protagonist — a loner and an outcast — falls for a beautiful young woman. Fun fact: the toothy grin of this film’s protagonist inspired the Joker character in the Batman movies.
Clown (2014)
Produced by gore fanatic and star of The Idol, Eli Roth, this 2014 supernatural horror movie was a minor box office success, perhaps arriving a little too early for the clown renaissance era. Its plot is interesting though: while most movies of its ilk settle on a scary, bloodthirsty clown chasing down innocent victims for scares, Clown did something different. It follows a father who, when let down by a rented clown for his son’s birthday party, instead decides to don an old clown outfit he finds in his basement. But the costume welds to his skin, and he’s possessed by its malevolent power.
It (1990)
Arguably the clown story that made us all at least a little freaked out by them, this supernatural miniseries — based on the book by Stephen King — birthed the character of Pennywise, a staple of 90s kids nightmares. Played in this version by Tim Curry, the show captured a ragtag team of kids in 60s American suburbia reuniting 30 years later to try and take down a child-killing clown. Drains were never the same again.
100 Tears (2007)
Made on a micro-budget of $75,000, 100 Tears is a cult favourite of horror fans that follows a disgruntled clown named Gurdy as he inflicts violent revenge on those who’ve accused him of crimes he never committed. But that first burst of rage turns into full blown tyranny, and when a pair of tabloid journalists try to track him down, they too get drawn into his violent rage.
Hell House LLC (2015)
Clowns play a minor part in this found footage horror, but their presence is so significant that Slashfilm said the movie “actually makes clowns worse, somehow”. Hell House LLC, styled like a documentary, is set at a new haunted house attraction that, on opening night, becomes the site of the death of 15 patrons and members of staff. It’s in the basement where the clowns have their moment, though: three blood-soaked clown mannequins, to be exact, their strange sentience threatening to fuck with the people trying to survive.