Transgressive clowns: between horror and humour

Abstract

In his essay 'Horror and Humor' (1999) Noël Carroll muses upon what he considers the somewhat paradoxical existence horror-comedy subgenre in cinema. He finds that the clown best exemplifies the collision of the genres of horror and comedy, as the clown presents an uncanny figure that is at once familiar and unsettling, moving between the monstrous and the humorous. Clowns have maintained a presence in cinema since the earliest days of the medium, from the first short animated projections, Émile Reynaud’s Pauvre Pierrot (1892 Reynaud, Émile. (director) 1892. Pauvre Pierrot. [Google Scholar]), to the rotoscoped, mischievous Koko the Clown in the Fleischer Brothers’ Out of the Inkwell series (1918–1929), to Stephen King’s IT (both the 1990 television mini-series and the 2017 feature film adaptation). Somewhere along the way (with certain exceptions) the clown in cinema has become associated with ‘evil’ and in particular with the horror genre. Following Carroll, this paper proposes to examine the clown in cinema at the intersection of humor and violence, focusing in particular on the 1988 cult film Killer Klowns from Outer Space, directed by Stephen Chiodo. This essay first proposes to broadly trace the representations of clowns in cinema; the essay will then turn to Killer Klowns, exploring the ways that film uses special effects, and references various pre-cinematic techniques such as shadow theatre and puppetry, in order to examine the ways these effects evoke a sense of the uncanny, of horror, and enable the spectacular commingling of humor and violence.

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