What Makes Clowns and Horror Movies Go

Together So Well?

Horror movies have all sorts of different characters that jump out at us and leave us hiding behind our cushions, from creepy kids to dolls with a life of their own. In the past few decades, creepy clowns have become a character type in horror movies and television shows that are consistently terrifying and fit quite well into the horror genre. Even without the chilling storyline of a horror movie, the shocking twists, or the unexpected jump scares, clowns alone have become a fairly common fear, especially in young children. Is this because of their increasingly popular association with horror movies?

While we used to associate clowns with funny makeup, jokes and children’s entertainment, they have now taken on a darker and, in most cinematic cases, murderous disposition; from the scary clown panic of 2016 to the IT franchise and the recent film The Black Phone, clowns have gotten dark. So how did clowns find their role in horror movies, and what makes them go together so well to create a sinister atmosphere and generate such a deep fear within us?

Where did Clowns come from?

Coulrophobia is the extreme or irrational fear of clowns, but how did this fear become so popular? While most clowns are trying to be innocent, silly, and fun, nowadays, most children actually don’t like clowns and find them weird. Yet, clowns were originally joyous and jolly characters — pranksters, jesters, jokers, and tricksters — which have been around for centuries and were important figures in cultural history.

They typically appeared in most cultures long before the dawn of TV, and were used to serve as entertainment, even making Egyptian pharaohs laugh. Ancient Rome’s version of a clown was a stock fool called the stupidus, and in the 18th and 19th centuries, the clown figure of Western Europe became the pantomime clown. Not long after, they began to appear at children’s birthday parties. All these versions of clown were made to be fun or the butt of jokes, and the ultimate goal was to make people laugh, so where did it take this modern horrifying turn? Well, clowns are silly and mischievous — and mischief can easily be dark. The clown’s manic behavior and urge to cause mischief (and their love and joy for causing it) can easily be associated with chaos, which can be seen with the Joker from Batman, the ultimate association of the clown archetype with chaos itself. Furthermore, the clown has recently become synonymous with malice and murder, which is exactly what has hap-