Eli Craig
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…there’s also a level of self-awareness that is a hallmark of all of the best slashers since Scream…
The Scream franchise gave the horror sub genre a resurgence…
With franchises such as Scream being resurrected…
…there are some decent stabs at Scream-style meta-comedy…
…cut in the cloth of post-Scream slashers…
It’s a shame director Eli Craig and co-writer Carter Blanchard didn’t look toward the excellent ensembles in Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer or The Faculty for inspiration.
The titular hillbillies — shy, sweet Dale (Tyler Labine) and his best friend Tucker (Alan Tudyk) — are director/co-writer Eli Craig's genre-redemption project, peaceful rednecks hoping for some R&R who save a girl (Katrina Bowden) from drowning, only to have her jerky, classist friends assume a "Deliverance"-meets-"Texas Chainsaw Massacre" scenario and haplessly lay siege on the befuddled pair.
If your idea of a hillbilly is inspired by Deliverance, then <em>Tucker & Dale vs. Evil might make you rethink your banjo-picking prejudice (though it definitely tips its trucker cap to the traumatic river trip).
From Deliverance to the new Straw Dogs, elitist Hollywood hasn't shown rednecks any respect.
In a chance encounter direct from the Deliverance cliché file, while gassing up at a service station they coincide with a carload of airhead college students who misinterpret Dale's awkward friendliness as sure signs of rustic menace.
Scared senseless by campfire legends – and possibly one too many viewings of Deliverance, which Craig sends up nicely – the kids are superficial brats, reacting to a perceived threat where none exists.
When a bunch of college kids head off into Appalachia for a camping trip, everyone they meet along the way looks like leftovers from " Deliverance " -- or any of the dime-a-dozen horror flicks featuring inbred, slack-jawed, dead-eyed rednecks poised to turn into chain-saw-wielding cannibal-rapists at the strum of a banjo.
"Tucker and Dale" doesn't have the sustained pacing and escalating laugh density of, say, "Shaun of the Dead," but it has four or five of the funniest gags/lines I've seen this year, and it's a long overdue rebuke to genre laziness and Hollywood snobbery.Produced by Albert Klychak, Rosanne Milliken, Deepak Nayar and Morgan Jurgenson, directed by Eli Craig, written by Eli Craig and Morgan Jurgenson, music by Mike Shields, distributed by Magnet Releasing.
It's not as clever as, say, "Shaun of the Dead," but it's good for some laughs.
"Tucker & Dale vs. Evil" is more a cross between 2004's " Shaun of the Dead " and 2007's " Hatchet " than the crummy, convoluted recent " Creature ," and that's a very good thing.
Thankfully, co-writer and director Eli Craig gets the formula absolutely right on Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, making it THE best horror comedy since Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead in 2004.
The press materials promised that it does for hillbillies what "Shaun of the Dead" did for zombies... well not quite.
It’s all incredibly violent, but “Tucker & Dale” plays it for black comedy, like a kind of chicken-fried “Zombieland,” or redneck “Shaun of the Dead.”
…in a range of clown horror, Clown in a Cornfield fell in the middle between It and Terrifier: not quite serious and yet not quite too outrageous.
With Damien Leone’s Terrifier proving the existence of a dedicated clown slasher fan base, Clown in a Cornfield’s Frendo couldn’t be hitting the silver screen at a better time.
…the rise of Art from Terrifier…
Whether it’s Killer Klowns from Outer Space, Pennywise from Stephen King’s It, or most recently Art from Terrifier, are audiences prepped for a new clown who’s neither syrupy nor sweet?
…the cult success of Art the Clown in the Terrifier series…
Halloween (1978)
Directed by John Carpenter
influenced Clown in a Cornfield (2025)
Themes Characters
Slasher movies essentially kicked-off way back in the 1970s when John Carpenter unleashed Halloween in 1978.
Teens in the 70’s will recall possibly sneaking into the theaters to catch Halloween.
…the final girl, as in Laurie Strode in HALLOWEEN…
…she’s more Ginny from Friday the 13th: Part II than she is Laurie Strode from Halloween…
…over-the-top genre entries like Thanksgiving (directed by Eli Roth, the slasher genre's other Eli)…
“Clown in a Cornfield” is no “Thanksgiving” (2023), but it belongs in the same category for combining themes, having a message and committing to merciless mayhem.
…or the town-mascot-driven carnage of Thanksgiving…
…where Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving, M3GAN, and Ti West’s X prove the genre’s versatility…
…this plot eerily follows the bullet points of Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving, which itself was informed by his own fake film trailer made for the Tarantino and Rodriguez Grindhouse double-feature…
By the time Frendo goes on a murderous rampage in the midst of the town’s Founder’s Day weekend, it’s a pretty shameless knockoff of Thanksgiving.
From Deliverance to the new Straw Dogs, elitist Hollywood hasn't shown rednecks any respect.
But with this bright comedy , Eli Craig and co have revived it by giving a devilish twist to films such as Deliverance, Straw Dogs and endless B-movie horror flicks that demonise rural rednecks who prey on unwary city visitors.
Movies based on fear of leaving the interstate date to Norman Bates and beyond, but the trend has accelerated in recent years with remakes of 20th century countrified slaughterfests - "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," "Straw Dogs" "Last House on the Left," and on and on and on and on and on.
As recently as the rotten remake of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, anyone below the Mason Dixon line has been portrayed as a predator, a bloodlusting lunatic who just can’t wait to unleash his or her own internal demons.
Two weeks ago, " Straw Dogs " tiptoed its way around the Southerner-as-a-brute stereotype, with varying degrees of success, depending on whom you ask.
Friday the 13th (1980)
Directed by Sean S. Cunningham
influenced Clown in a Cornfield (2025)
Themes Music
…all wrapped in a haunting slasher package that will satisfy any Friday the 13th fan…
…its winks to classic horror moments (including an homage to that “Friday the 13th” score) feel random…
…a prologue set in 1991 that directly references the intros of “Jaws” and “Friday the 13th”…
Children of the Corn (1984)
Directed by Fritz Kiersch
influenced Clown in a Cornfield (2025)
Visuals Themes
Cornfields evoke many horror classics like the “Children of the Corn” franchise…
…with the obvious mash-up possibilities of “It” and “Children of the Corn,”…
You can have comedy with horror (“Tucker and Dale vs Evil”).
Comedic elements are less silly than the Zombieland films or Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil (not that these are bad films) because the fictional place these characters occupy simply and unapologetically exists…
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)
Directed by Marcus Nispel
influenced Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2010)
Themes Plot
Suffice it to say that "seeing how the other half lives" has been a horror movie convention almost as long as horror movies have existed; from Todd Browning to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, audiences have repeatedly been asked to rethink their expectations of oddballs and weirdos, in most cases "or else." (Hell, hillbillies basically wouldn't have an on-screen presence at all if city slickers didn't venture into their literal neck of the woods.)
This subversion of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Wrong Turn tropes is reasonably clever and delivered with requisite tongue in cheek, and a late revelation about Chad's relationship to a decades-old massacre further pricks horror cinema's fondness for "return of the repressed" thematic concerns.
One of the best comedic horror films since Shaun of the Dead chewed up and spat out the zombie movie, Tucker & Dale targets the genre spawned by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: pics about frat dudes and nubile coeds terrorized, tortured, dismembered, sexually molested, cooked, and eaten (not always in that order) by inbred, cannibalistic hillbillies.
The moment the antagonists of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Deliverance or The Hills Have Eyes hit the screen, they're identifiable on sight as an unknown "other" to be feared.
Years later, Craig makes his feature directorial debut with a horror spoof that turns the murderous hillbilly genre inside out while poking fun at movies like "The Blair Witch Project," "Cabin Fever," "Friday the 13th," "Blue Velvet," "Fargo" and the granddaddy of them all, "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."
In this goofy inversion of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, two innocent country boys (Tyler Labine and Alan Tudyk) must defend themselves from a group of overly vigilant "college kids" vacationing near their cabin.
The Breakfast Club (1985)
Directed by John Hughes
influenced Clown in a Cornfield (2025)
Plot Characters
Quinn befriends the town’s troublemakers in detention a la The Breakfast Club.
There is a Breakfast Club vibe to the group dynamic.
…now nightmare “fodder” after several “Jokers” and Pennywise of the IT flicks…
From Pennywise to the eerie grins in Joker…
Referencing everything from Deliverance to The Evil Dead to Fargo and nailing its central conceit dead-on (literally!), this is one of those rare genre comedies that near-perfectly balances its blend of grue, guffaws, and gag reflexes.
It's not exactly a house - more like an oversize shack, a creepy, rickety, ramshackle number straight out of Sam Raimi's 1981 spoof The Evil Dead.
"Tucker & Dale vs. Evil" manages this tough feat, and for that the feature writing-directing debut of actor Eli Craig (1999's " The Rage: Carrie 2 ") is worth noting.
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Directed by Wes Craven
influenced Clown in a Cornfield (2025)
Themes
Likewise, in the 80’s, with Nightmare on Elm Street and so on.
Johnny Depp, who broke out in Craven’s 1984 horror classic A Nightmare on Elm Street…
It felt like “The Stepford Wives” for parents without the science.
But I came back to one of my all-time favorites: [the mask in 1976’s] Alice, Sweet Alice.
It’s a shame director Eli Craig and co-writer Carter Blanchard didn’t look toward the excellent ensembles in Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer or The Faculty for inspiration.
While some media use that to create an idyllic place, like Gilmore Girls, the horror genre loves to take the seemingly picture-perfect little town and drench it with blood.