Clown in a Cornfield (2025)
Directed by Eli Craig
Quinn and her father have just moved to the quiet town of Kettle Springs hoping for a fresh start. Instead, she discovers a fractured community that has fallen on hard times after the treasured Baypen Corn Syrup Factory burned down. As the locals bicker amongst themselves and tensions boil over, a sinister, grinning figure emerges from the cornfields to cleanse the town of its burdens, one bloody victim at a time.
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40 films that influenced Clown in a Cornfield
What critics say influenced Clown in a Cornfield
Director
Wes Craven
Critics invoke Craven by name, and compare Clown in a Cornfield to 2 of Craven’s films.
Plot
On Craven, rather than any one film
Horror audience members have been conditioned to suspect the love interest thanks to Wes Craven…
…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.
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…
…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…
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.
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…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”…
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,”…
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…
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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.