09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Field of screams
By a weird coincidence, three horror movies shot in Manitoba in the last few years depict a war on youth.
David Slade's underrated 2023 film Dark Harvest, depicting rural townsfolk sacrificing their sons to a supernatural creature to ensure an agricultural status quo, could be read as a Vietnam War allegory.
The upcoming film The Long Walk (scheduled for release in September) was adapted from a novel Stephen King wrote when he was 19 while the Vietnam War was happening. Again, the premise of young men being sacrificed for a nebulous greater good is apparently front and centre in the movie going by the recently released trailer.
Now playing in theatres, Eli Craig's Clown in a Cornfield, which shot in Manitoba in the autumn of 2023, may look like just another '80s-slasher-inspired thriller featuring a murderous clown. (It's a surprisingly sizable subgenre.)
But here too, generational conflict is at the heart of this adaptation of the 2020 novel by Adam Cesare.
Screenwriter-director Craig is not inclined to make this one overly grim. The man behind the 2010 horror-comedy gem Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil can't help but give into his satiric urges at times, happily. Nevertheless, this film tends to go for the jugular more often than not.
Generational friction is front and centre, starting with designated heroine Quinn Maybrook (Katie Douglas), who arrives in the Midwest town of Kettle Springs, Mo., with her doctor dad (Aaron Abrams) seeking to rebuild their lives in a remote backwater community after a family tragedy.
Before long, Quinn strikes sparks with fellow high school student Cole (Carson MacCormac). Cole also has a fractious relationship with his dad (Kevin Durand), who happens to be the mayor of Kettle Springs. But Quinn finds herself comfortably ensconced with a clique of new friends (all played by Winnipeg actors: Verity Marks, Cassandra Potenza, Ayo Solanke and Alexandre Martin Deakin), given to pranking each other by staging gory hijinks for social media.
Before long, the mischief turns deadly, thanks to the titular jester Frendo, the longtime mascot for the town's now shuttered industry, the Baypen Corn Syrup Factory.
Treated as a joke by Cole and his pals, the clown seems to be taking revenge for the kids' mockery, only this time, the blood is real. (Any clown who takes his name from a term used by No Country for Old Men's Anton Chigurh is not to be taken lightly.)
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Apparently not interested in investigating a growing number of disappearances, the town's nominal lawman Sheriff Dunne (Mad TV's Will Sasso in rare serious mode) seems blinded by resentment.
Shauna Townley / IFC Films
Frendo the Clown isn't known as Friendly the Clown for a reason.
'That's the problem with your generation,' he sputters at one point. 'You think you're so much cleverer than us.'
The film itself is plenty clever, avoiding the over-the-top sadism of another killer-clown franchise, Terrifier, but one wishes director Craig embraced his smarts instead of being slavishly faithful to the tropes of '80s slashers.
As Verity Marks' character Ronnie obliquely indicates in one scene, you'll know it when you hear it — many of those tropes haven't aged well.
Randall KingReporter
In a way, Randall King was born into the entertainment beat.
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