Clown in a Cornfield: Not Enough Clowning Around

Based on a popular novel of the same name, director Eli Craig’s Clown in a Cornfield (2025) promises fun. To riff on the immortal Dr. Steve Brule: you’ve got corn. You’ve got clowns. What more could a person want? Craig’s picture does indeed supply both cornfields and an army of killer clowns wielding everything from shovels and chainsaws to crossbows and hangman’s nooses.

This combination should make for a rip-roaring good time. In fits and starts, it does. But I fear the film’s ham-handed generational criticism impedes its attempts to get goofy. Nobody wants a stern lecture from a snooty clown.

The movie follows Quinn Maybrook (Katie Douglass) and her father, a medical doctor (Aaron Abrams) as they move out to the countryside to figure life out after the mother of the family’s death. The town of Kettle Springs loves its hayseeds. The locals hunt, fish, and celebrate Founders Day. Quinn quickly finds herself dissatisfied with this zero-horse town in which the local corn syrup factory recently burned down, leaving the residents exactly nothing. She falls in with a crowd of goodhearted hooligans who like making horror YouTube videos about the factory’s spooky clown mascot, Frendo. All the adults seem to blame this group for everything that goes wrong.

The film never lets you forget that these issues are generational. “You kids,” “your generation,” “the old people”—these phrases must announce themselves two dozen times over the movie’s slim runtime. When we learn that the series of grisly teenager murders are the work of more than one Frendo, we can hardly find ourselves surprised by the culprits. These are the much-needed adults of the corn (that doesn’t sound quite as good).

If this all sounds a little serious for a movie about hick corn syrup clowns gone Ed Kemper, you’d be right. The film understands this to a degree. Many kills play for laughs, as when one girl, pricked by a chainsaw, keeps vibrating after she’s dead. To my lights, however, it’s not enough. A movie with this sort of premise couldn’t help but stir to mind images of 80s and 90s comedy-horror classics. Leprechaun (1993), Uncle Sam (1996), Night of the Comet (1984), and Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama (1988) all flooded my brain. Even when these films are not good, they are at least goofy to the point of being entertaining. Some like Christmas Evil (1980) go the other way and play it more-or-less completely straight despite otherwise laughable premises. Clown in a Cornfield never chooses, and it suffers for it.

The age of the trauma picture seems to be ebbing. The age of goof, perhaps, is upon us once again. I can’t say for sure. What I do feel equipped to state, however, is that Clown and a Cornfield ought to clown around a bit more and enter the discourse a bit less. That’s for X, the Everything App not the silver screen.