‘Clown In A Cornfield' Director On Horror Comedy's Catchy Title And Why He Avoided The ‘Terrifier' Route

Forbes

08-05-2025

Scene from "Clown in a Cornfield."
RLJE Films/Shudder
When Clown in a Cornfield director Eli Craig first heard the title for what his next movie could potentially be, he immediately fell in love with it.
After all, it's not too often that a title alone for a film yields so much potential — think Snakes on a Plane or Sharknado — but given the source material was already established as a beloved book, Clown in a Cornfield was too cool of a crop not to be picked.
'I saw the title and I was like 'I got to make this movie, and I hope that I hope the book is something I want to make,' Craig told me in a recent Zoom conversation. 'The title alone to me captures the spirit of something … It has so many layers to it. It has everything horror and funny, and of course, a clown.'
While Clown in a Cornfield is a blood-splattered R-rated comedy, the story originated from author Adam Cesare's Bram Stoker Award-winning young adult novel from 2020. And while the book was written for YA readers, it didn't preclude Craig from amping up the scares for laughs.
'I always believed that the R-rated films I saw as a young adult affected me forever,' recalled Craig, whose mother is legendary screen star Sally Field. 'I remember the first horror films I ever saw vividly. They made me want to be a horror film director someday.'
And quite the horror filmmaker Craig has become, with credits including the 2017 Netflix horror comedy Little Evil with Adam Scott and Evangeline Lilly, and the 2010 horror comedy cult classic Tucker and Dave vs. Evil, starring Tyler Labine and Alan Tudyk.
When it came to Clown in a Cornfield, Craig said he wasn't about to change the way he makes his horror comedies because the source material originated as a YA novel.
'You can't give young people too little credit for their sophistication, and I didn't want to talk down to Gen Z at all [with this movie]
Playing in Thursday previews ahead of opening in theater nationwide on Friday, Clown in a Cornfield stars Katie Douglas as Quinn Maybrook, a teen who moves with her doctor father, Glenn, move to the sleepy farm town of Kettle Springs to start anew and try to heal the fraught relationship following the death of Quinn's mother.
What Quinn and Glenn don't realize is that Kettle Springs is going through tough times after the town's lifeblood industry — the Baypen Corn Syrup Factory — has burned to the ground, leaving the community in a lurch.
In a bid to ease the town of its depressed state, the Baypen Corn Syrup Mascot — Frendo the Clown — has turned into a demented soul and is emerging from the rural cornfields to dispatch his victims in a particularly cruel ways, and Quinn and her new friends in Kettle Springs are in Frendo's line of sight.
Of course, having a clown in Clown in a Cornfield automatically makes the film creepy, especially in the wake of the IT movies' Pennywise the Clown and Art the Clown from the Terrifier movies.
The big difference, though, is while yes, there's ample amounts of blood and gore in Clown in a Cornfield, Eli Craig — who co-wrote the screen adaptation of Adam Cesare's book along with Carter Blanchard — didn't want the film to cross the line into Terrifier movie territory and have audiences vomiting in theater aisle.
'My gut is the line and sometimes I go to the point where I feel like I'm testing my own gut, where I can't really watch something myself,' Craig explained. With Terrifier 3, I had to watch the film in little segments to study it and I realized, 'Oh wow, Damien Leone is a master.' I wanted to look at how he was doing in-camera special effects. [At the same time]
That's not to say Craig doesn't push the line with his blood and gore in Clown in a Cornfield. It's just that when he does, the kills are imbued with sights that can't help but make you laugh.
'I feel like I've hit the mark where most people are going to go, 'Ooh!' and start turning away, but then I'm done,' Craig said. 'I have these moments that may be a little shocking, but there's just a touch of humor in it as well that makes it tolerable.
'I want to have the kills be quite real and a little bit shocking, gritty and brutal, but also have a touch of playfulness to them,' the director added. 'They're not brutal to the point of being sickening, though. That's the line for me. I'm not interested in making a sickening movie. I want to make a fun movie that has kills in it.'
Scene from "Clown in a Cornfield."
RLJE Films/Shudder
Masks, of course, have defined so many evil villains throughout horror film history, whether it be Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Michael Myers in the Halloween movies and Ghostface in the Scream franchise.
As such, Eli Craig worked in close collaboration with his special makeup effects designer Doug Morrow and the film's producers to create a creepy Frendo the Clown mask that audiences wouldn't forget.
'The design goes way back to trying to figure out what this clown would look like in a commercial for the Kettle Springs corn syrup factory,' Craig recalled. 'He was like a Ronald McDonald in the 30s or 40s, like a salesman. The idea was to first represent the optimism of America, which then dissipated into this darkness, which shifted, melted and distorted into an evil-looking clown.
'So we took the features of like the joyful salesman clown with the eyes and then warped it a little bit and brought the smile up a little more with these awful-looking teeth,' Craig added. 'That's when we nailed it. When we finally got it, we were like, 'Okay, that's it. Let's print that. Let's make that mask. It's quite frightening.'
With any luck, audiences are going to be freaked out by Frendo the Clown when the film opens in theaters this weekend and the masked creeper will be back to (corn) stalk and slay some more in a sequel or sequels to Clown in a Cornfield.
After all, Clown in a Cornfield is just the first of three books by Adam Cesare, which is followed by Clown in a Cornfield 2: Frendo Lives, which was published in 2022 and The Church of Frendo, which was released in 2024.
Going back to the idea of a movie title meaning everything, I shared my idea with Craig for a potential sequel for the next Frendo film: Clown in a Cornfield: Field of Screams.
'I'm writing it down. Do I have to give you credit?' Craig answered me with a laugh. 'I actually genuinely like that. Right now it's called Frendo Lives, but Field of Screams is pretty rad … thanks for that, Tim!'
Also starring Kevin Durand, Carson MacCormack, Cassandra Potenza, Verity Marks, Ayo Solanke, Vincent Muller and Will Sasso, Clown in a Cornfield plays in Thursday previews before opening in theaters nationwide on Friday.