Review: Clown in a Cornfield (2025)

Clown in a Cornfield (2025)

Rated R for bloody horror violence, language throughout and teen drinking

Score: 3 out of 5

Say it with me now: the book is always better... but that doesn't mean the movie can't be good, too. Clown in a Cornfield is an adaptation of the 2020 slasher novel by Adam Cesare, a paperback copy of which recently served as a faithful companion of mine for a couple of weeks on the bus to and from work, because that is a better use of my free time during my commute than draining my phone's battery scrolling social media -- an argument that I'm sure the villains of both the book and the film would agree with. It takes a classic '80s-style slasher plot and uses it in service of a story about the generation gap between today's youth and their parents, and if I'm being honest, I feel that the book told that story in greater depth than the movie did, with most of the changes that the movie made to the story serving to take out many of its twists and push it into a rather cliched teen slasher template. That said, a cliched teen slasher flick can still be a very fun time if done right, and director Eli Craig assembled a great cast and delivered a fun, intense movie that was often quite amusing and was never boring, all while still maintaining the most interesting ideas in the story in such a manner that what seems like generic slasher boilerplate at first glance really picks up in the second half. I'd sooner recommend the book, but the movie is still a very solid companion to it and a good slasher flick in its own right.

Our protagonist Quinn is a teenage girl who has just moved from Philadelphia to the small town of Kettle Springs, Missouri with her father after her mother died of an overdose. She soon gets acquainted with her new home and meets her classmates, who as it turns out like making low-budget horror shorts for social media where they take Frendo, the clown mascot of the recently shuttered food processing plant that used to be the town's economic backbone, and paint him as a creepy slasher villain who stalks and kills teenagers. Of course, pretty soon somebody dressed as Frendo starts doing it for real, and from there we find ourselves dropped into what starts out as a fairly boilerplate teen slasher story but goes off in some more interesting directions in the second half as we learn more about who, or what, is actually killing the kids.

Like many modern, post-Scream slasher stories, this is a whodunit where the killer's identity is only revealed in the third act, and in this case, the story gets political, the motive being, without going into too much detail, an Americanized version of the villains' plot in Hot Fuzz that plays up both the horror elements and the focus on cracking down on the younger generations. It was a timely twist, and while I do think the book handled it with more depth and shades of gray, on a purely visceral level some of the changes the movie made did help keep me on my toes as someone who went in knowing the broad strokes of the plot, ensuring that I wouldn't see everything coming even if I do think that, if you're going in blind, it ultimately plays out a bit more conventionally than the book did. At the very least, it not only answered a lot of questions about how useless the adults are in these sorts of movies, it also made for one hell of a moment when Frendo finally stepped out from the shadows and straight-up went to war with our protagonists towards the end of act two.

It helped that director and co-writer Eli Craig injected a fair bit of humor into the proceedings that the book generally lacked. The characters like to goof off, and the fact that Frendo is ultimately an ordinary human being under the mask is played for outright laughs in a way that even Ghostface's fumbles in the Scream movies generally weren't. A scene where a guy lets it slip that he's gay, causing all the girls in the room to suddenly realize at the same time why their relationships with him never worked out, had me laughing my ass off. That isn't to say that this is an outright horror-comedy, though. Craig may have made Tucker & Dale vs. Evil and Little Evil before this, but here, he shows that he can work his way around a straightforward horror movie as well as anything else. Frendo may have a silly name and be evocative of any number of killer clown horror villains, but that doesn't make it any less scary when he's stalking teenagers through houses, barns, and cornfields, the film bringing his killing spree from the book to life with prodigious gore, brutal kills, and a scary-looking costume. The cast is stellar all around, particularly Katie Douglas as Quinn, playing the most stock final girl I've seen in a long while but proving that just because you've seen this character type a hundred times before doesn't mean she still can't be interesting with the right actress playing her.

The Bottom Line

All around, this movie just works. It's nothing I haven't seen before from a slasher, especially compared to the book, but it's definitely a great introduction to the genre for younger folks just getting into horror, and a sweet 96-minute thrill ride for seasoned fans that gets the job done and never overstays its welcome. Not really much else to say beyond that. If you wanna see a killer clown kill people and you think Terrifier is just a bit too mean-spirited, this might do the trick.