can't sleep clowns will eat me

In which we step into the Big Top...

When I was a teenager in the late-90s I ran around with a few breeds of dirtbags. I was one myself, we were all different breeds, like Pound Puppies who did knife hits in the kitchen when the parents were away which was frequent in my feral community. One of these kids was a juggalo and this was when they were a fairly new species of dirtbag. He never wore facepaint, but he owned their first few albums which were pretty rare back then and would constantly play them while we were mashing buttons on Tekken 3 on the Playstation trying to figure out all the combos in Hwoarang’s different Tae Kwon Do stances. We listened to a lot of other rap music that was generally perceived as ‘good’ but no matter how much my juggalo friend tried to convince me that Insane Clown Posse were great, I could not understand the appeal. The rapping is bad, the beats and production is bad, and the theme- CLOWNS.

I’ve never understood the WiCkEd cLoWn appeal. Is anybody madly truly deeply afraid of clowns? It’s a bunch of middle-aged men slapping on facepaint and running around acting like idiots spraying soda. Circus clowns, I mean, but this does apply to ICP and their legion of devotees. Before we go further, I do want to stress that I have no ill will towards juggalos, I’ve known many and they were nice and loyal people. I’m glad they’ve found a family of outsiders that understand them and support each other. They just have very confusing standards of what kind of music is worth devoting their lives to.

The one thing I could pin it back to would be seeing ‘It’ (1990) as a kid. Tim Curry’s performance is still chilling, and his make-up with those horrific teeth and yellow eyes peaking out from below a gutter is pretty damn scary to an 8 year-old. But if you’d finished watching the thing, all that horror is diffused by a bunch of boring adults processing trauma and then fighting a giant spider.

But outside of movies, how often do you even SEE clowns anymore? I assume they’re one of the few things left at the circus after they finally got pressured to stop abusing animals, but that’s a pretty contained ClownZone.

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I think the last time I saw a clown in the wild was at a rest stop on the Kansas/Oklahoma border in 2005. My noise group Projectile Cesarean played a show at a VFW outside of Wichita and stayed up late partying with the dudes who booked it. I woke up at 6am hungover underneath a table. We packed up our shit and started to drive home. The rest stop we hit along the way was very grimy, so we figured it would be the perfect place to take a Projectile Cesarean press photo. Right as the flash clicks, this haggard man stumbled in, loose fitting western clothes wrinkled and partially unbuttoned, grease paint smeared across his face.

‘Don’t mind me,’ me rasps as he turns the faucet on and washes his face. The rest of the trip home we were giggling about the idea of an ‘all-night clown bender.’ Who were we to judge, having an all-night unlistenable music bender?

ANYWAYS we are getting into the weeds as we always do with TINYCPWICT so let’s get back to scary clown culture!

The most famous scary clown is The Joker but I have no interest in discussing that other than his influence on white dudes (wait is this entire genre a thing built for white dudes?), and a very specific kind. If you have a Monster Energy Drink tattoo, there is a non-zero chance that you think Joker is badass and actually represents your own tWiStEd and misunderstood outsider self. You are not scared of clowns, you ARE the clown. There is definitely some juggalo overlap here, but juggalos at least generally have a sense of humor.

The next big movement in wicked clowns was Mr. Robert Zombie’s ‘House of 1000 Corpses’ (2003). This was huge for people whose favorite shirts were those black T's with white lettering that displayed slogans such as ‘Can’t Sleep Clowns Will Eat Me’ or ‘Normal People Scare Me.’ Honestly, I’d been waiting for years to see it because Fangoria had been reporting about its development hell forever and it became this mythical film and how could the King Of Horror Rock not make a good movie? Well… Let’s just say I think he should’ve stuck to yelling about skeletons and hearses and Frankystein stuff instead.

The most current freak to tear up the box office is of course Art the Clown. I didn’t watch either of the ‘Terrifier’ movies initially because as you can probably tell by now I think killer clown as a conceit is fuckin dumb as hell (UNLESS we are talking about ‘Killer Klowns From Outer Space’ (1988) which is pure campy fun and not really trying to scare you as much as have a good time) so I shied away until I saw that ‘Terrifier 2’ made TWELVE MILLION FUCKIN DOLLARS at the box office on a $250,000 budget. Wild! As a horror freak, I can’t not help but be curious to see what the hype was about.

I’ll give Art credit, if you’re gonna make a clown out of nightmares, this is the one. Even outside of this niche genre, he’s one of the most merciless and sadistic slasher villains ever. That is definitely not for everyone, but compelling enough to watch them both twice in a month. Other than the outstanding practical gore fx, and the imposing silent performance from David Howard Thorton, I don’t know if they’re good movies, but I can’t stop thinking about them, so that’s something. A lot of the acting is clunky, which is almost endearing in that these are loveletters to the Video Nasty era of cheap and vicious filth, but it’s distracting. The second one is 138 minutes, which is the length of ‘8 1/2’ (1963), and there is no fucking reason to have a goddamn slasher clown epic that long. Unlike a severed limb, you could chop a lot off and nobody would notice.

Anyways, I guess this is one color in the prism of Let’s Make Innocent Things Bad. Creepy little kids, creepy old ladies, Santa Claus but evil, etc. I’m not willing to spend that much time in the big top, but if they give John Leguizamo another shot at a Violator spin-off, I might have to buy some circus peanuts and give it a spin.

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