Clown in a Cornfield (2025) review

Dir. Eli Craig

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★★

“When your dad wants to teach you how to drive stick, you fucking say ‘yes’!” – Quinn (Katie Douglas), Clown in a Cornfield

It’s been said that all you need for an effective country song is the combination of three chords and the truth. Now, here’s a horror film that suggests all you need for a horror movie is a clown in a cornfield. Who am I to argue? When the end result is a strong, sturdy creative work that features more developed characters than you’re liable to find in a dozen slasher movies, it’s a formula worth embracing.

Based on a young adult novel by Adam Cesare, Clown in a Cornfield is the work of Eli Craig, whose name would be a household one in the horror community if he wasn’t so sporadic with his output. It was a different moviegoing world when his debut, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, was released in 2010. While still affectionately remembered as a relic of its era, I actually believe it would see more love and embrace had it been released this decade. It’s aged gracefully, and its general sensibilities showed Craig’s love for horror is as rooted in the characters we meet as much as it is the way in which we see many of them slaughtered.

As the title alludes, Clown in a Cornfield features something I immediately love in movies: Midwest representation. We’re dropped in the remarkably unremarkable town of Kettle Springs, Missouri; the kind of town whose “historic downtown” features a bevy of closed businesses, aging façades, and maybe a diner where the waitress calls you “hun.” It’s the new home of Quinn Maybrook (Katie Douglas), a teen girl who leaves the east coast with her doctor father (Aaron Abrams) so he can start a new practice. The boring new setting and the still-recent death of her mother makes Quinn a justifiably rebellious young woman, and she wastes no time getting in trouble with both teachers at her new school and the law enforcement in the town.

Refreshingly, however, Quinn isn’t an outcast. She’s immediately accepted by a fun yet troublemaking group of teens who have learned to, how you say, embrace the suck of their hometown. Of them, the ringleader is Cole (Carson MacCormac), whose family ran the old Baypen Factory in town. Baypen was a corn syrup manufacturer that helped put Kettle Springs on the map, and its mascot, a smiling clown named Frendo, is synonymous with the otherwise barren enclave. For fun, Cole and his friends (Cassandra Potenza, Verity Marks, Ayo Solanke, and Alexandre Martin Deakin) curate their own fun by making low-budget slasher shorts featuring a murderous rendition of Frendo the Clown. Slightly outside of the mix, but eventually a pivotal character, is Vincent Muller’s Rust, a local farm-boy with a quiet disposition and a matter-of-fact way of speaking. He’s a truly authentic character. Small towns are rife with dudes like Rust.

Clown in a Cornfield‘s roots as a work of YA horror lit shouldn’t off-put seasoned fans of the genre. Its roots doesn’t mean it compromises what you desire. This is a bloody, gnarly little movie with more than a couple memorably gruesome kills and an equal dose of humor. One of the highlights of the former comes when a trio of the friends discover the decapitated head of one of their mutuals assume it’s a prop for a prank video he’s making.

The coming-of-age storyline involving Quinn learning to communicate with her father, as well as let her friendships with her new peers, particularly Cole, naturally develop instead of forcing courtship, has a lot in common with other works of the era, such as Netflix’s Fear Street trilogy, and of course Stranger Things. Katie Douglas is a dynamic lead, who goes beyond the typical teenage malcontent archetype. Her friendship with Cole, who also gradually reveals more about himself as time goes on, is terrific, as both her and Carson MacCormac have a naturally easygoing chemistry with one another. Just when you think Aaron Abrams is going to get relegated to being a generic father figure, screenwriters Craig and Carter Blanchard give him a few meaningful things to do in the third act. Apropos of nothing, but it’s also fun to see Will Sasso in a rare antagonistic role, this time as a corrupt local sheriff.

You might lament the fact that the titular “clown” isn’t a fully developed character. I can only assume there is some degree of faithfulness to Cesare’s source material, but while there is a real clown, who does plenty of murdering over the course of the film, he’s a slasher with more of a metaphorical slant. Clown in a Cornfield very organically reveals itself to be something of a commentary on why dusty, backwards, and so-called “homey” small towns look and operate like relics of a bygone era. Having spent time in many downstate Illinois and Iowa cities, population in the triple digits, they’re far less friendly to outsiders than you’d otherwise be led to believe. It’s MacCormac who has a great retort for that in the film’s final minutes, and helps send Craig’s latest off as a rousing compliment to what continues to be a banner year for the horror genre.

Starring: Katie Douglas, Carson MacCormac, Aaron Abrams, Cassandra Potenza, Verity Marks, Ayo Solanke, Alexandre Martin Deakin, Vincent Muller, Kevin Durand, and Will Sasso. Directed by: Eli Craig.