“Send in the Clowns,” They Said. They Didn’t Mean This.
Jon Watts’ Clown is a movie that begins with a fake trailer prank and somehow ends as a feature-length cry for help. Originally made as a joke trailer that credited Eli Roth as the director without his knowledge, Roth thought, “Hey, why not?” and decided to actually produce it. Somewhere between the prank and the premiere, nobody remembered to write a good movie.
The result is a film that dares to ask: “What if clowns weren’t funny?”—a question the world already answered decades ago with It, Killer Klowns from Outer Space, and, you know, actual clowns.
If you’ve ever thought “I wish Mrs. Doubtfire but cursed demon flesh suit” was a movie, congratulations, this nightmare in greasepaint is for you.
The Plot: The Devil Wears Polka Dots
Our hero—or victim—is Kent McCoy (Andy Powers), a realtor and walking khaki advertisement. When his kid’s birthday clown cancels, Kent finds an old costume in a basement and puts it on, because apparently “stranger danger” doesn’t apply to fabric soaked in malevolence. The costume sticks to him like a bad tattoo, the wig becomes his hair, the nose fuses to his face, and before long he’s the world’s saddest Funko Pop.
When he tries to remove it, he bleeds. When he tries to ignore it, it whispers “Feed me children.” To be fair, it’s the most interesting conversation in the movie.
Eventually, he tracks down Herbert Karlsson (Peter Stormare), who delivers the exposition like a man who’s been trapped in every B-movie since 1995. Karlsson explains that the costume is made of demon flesh and that the only way to stop the transformation is either suicide or decapitation. You know, regular dry-cleaning options.
Kent tries to kill himself but fails every time—hanging, shooting, etc.—because the demon won’t let him die. At this point, I too began to sympathize with the demon.
The Horror: Body Paint and Body Horror
Now, to be fair, Clown isn’t all bad. There are some genuinely unsettling visuals: skin fusing with polyester, rainbow hair sprouting from scalps, and teeth becoming weaponized. The special effects team clearly had fun, and by “fun” I mean “trauma.” The problem is, the movie never decides whether it’s a tragic body-horror drama or a demonic slasher with dad jokes.
We get long, moody scenes of Kent crying in mirrors—somewhere between The Fly and an Avon commercial—followed by cartoonish gore where he chomps on kids like a diseased Ronald McDonald. The tone bounces around like a balloon animal in a blender.
At one point, Kent hides out in an abandoned house and accidentally eats a child. That’s right—he eats a child. The scene is so grotesquely silly it borders on slapstick. Imagine Dexter directed by Bozo.
The Supporting Cast: Send Help
Laura Allen plays Meg, Kent’s wife, whose character arc is essentially “scream, cry, repeat.” Her emotional range runs from “concerned spouse” to “concerned spouse but with blood on her.” You know she’s suffering because the lighting turns blue every time she enters a room.
Peter Stormare’s Karlsson is easily the film’s highlight, mostly because Stormare looks like he wandered in from another movie entirely. He mutters about Nordic demons with the gravitas of a man who once shared screen time with the Coen brothers and now can’t believe his life has come to this.
And then there’s Eli Roth himself, credited as “Frowny the Clown.” He appears briefly, possibly just to make sure audiences know who to blame.
The kid actors, to their credit, do their best to appear terrified of a man whose costume looks like a rejected Cirque du Soleil prop. One poor child’s big emotional scene involves being eaten alive in a Chuck E. Cheese ball pit. I hope his parents invested that trauma money wisely.
The Demon: Pennywise, But Make It Discount
The Clöyne demon—yes, spelled with an unnecessary “ö” because evil fonts are scary—is an ancient Nordic child-eater who got lost somewhere between folklore and Hot Topic. The movie insists it’s a serious mythological creature, but it looks like a possessed birthday entertainer who missed his Xanax.
The Clöyne’s hunger is for “five children, one for every month of winter,” which makes it the only monster in history with a seasonal diet plan. The logic of this mythology changes constantly. Sometimes the suit is a parasite, sometimes a curse, sometimes a gateway to clown hell. None of it makes sense, but it does make you wonder if the demon ever freelanced for the circus.
The Tone: Horror, Tragedy, or Circus Training Video?
Jon Watts—who would go on to direct Spider-Man: Homecoming, proving that everyone deserves a second chance—approaches Clown like it’s Shakespeare in greasepaint. The camera lingers lovingly on Kent’s anguish as if this story about a demonic birthday performer is secretly a commentary on suburban identity.
But every time the movie builds tension, something absurd happens. Kent, mid-meltdown, eats a child’s severed arm like a Slim Jim. A playground massacre is scored with ominous music so over-the-top it feels like parody. Even the demon’s “growls” sound suspiciously like a vacuum cleaner trying to start.
The movie clearly wants to be tragic—like The Fly but with a squeaky nose—but ends up as a bizarre hybrid of Goosebumps and The Exorcist on clown steroids.
The Ending: A Punchline Without a Joke
By the final act, Kent has gone full Pennywise. He’s killing children at a Chuck E. Cheese (because nothing says horror like animatronic mice), and his wife Meg has a moral crisis about maybe sacrificing one child to save their own.
Then comes the showdown: Meg chainsaws her husband/demon while crying dramatically, like a Hallmark movie for Satanists. She decapitates him to save their son, and the movie closes with a shot of the clown suit sealed in an evidence locker—because apparently the police are now keeping cursed artifacts next to parking citations.
You half expect the end credits to roll over a PSA: “Remember, kids, always dry-clean your clown suits.”
The Humor: Accidental, Unintentional, and Constant
It’s possible that Clown is secretly a comedy. The dialogue alone suggests it. At one point, Peter Stormare solemnly says, “The suit is not a suit. It is the skin of a demon.” Another character replies, “So… you’re saying it’s vintage?”
Every attempt at seriousness collapses under the weight of its own absurdity. You can’t stage a heartfelt suicide attempt while your protagonist is wearing rainbow suspenders and floppy shoes. You just can’t.
The film’s tagline might as well have been: “He wanted to make kids laugh. Now he’s making them appetizers.”
The Real Horror: Wasting Good Talent
The saddest part of Clown isn’t the gore—it’s that there’s a genuinely interesting idea buried under the balloon animals. A cursed clown suit as body horror could have been brilliant, like a demonic Venom with a red nose. But instead, Watts and Roth treat it with the self-seriousness of a theology dissertation written in crayon.
The movie also thinks that “child-eating” automatically equals “scary,” but by the third victim, it’s just gross and repetitive. The gore is effective, but without heart (pun fully intended), it’s just confetti.
The Final Act of Mercy
In the end, Clown isn’t terrifying—it’s tragic in the wrong way. It’s the story of a movie that wanted to be a horror classic but got lost somewhere between a joke trailer and an Eli Roth tax write-off.
The costume fuses to the actor’s skin. The movie fuses to your regret.
★☆☆☆☆ (1 out of 5)
A movie about a man trapped in a clown suit that feels like being trapped inside a bad movie about a man trapped in a clown suit. The real demon isn’t the Clöyne—it’s the 100 minutes you’ll never get back.
