New Review: Clown in a Cornfield (2025)

Director: Eli Craig

Cast: Katie Douglas, Aaron Abrams, Carson MacCormac, Cassandra Potenza, Verity Marks, Ayo Solanke, Vincent Muller, Kevin Durand, Will Sasso, Alexandre Martin Deakin

★★ ½ (out of ★★★★)

“We’re totally going to be headless teenagers without heads.”

--seriously, this is an actual line from Clown in a Cornfield.

There is a very odd disconnect in Clown in a Cornfield that’s a little difficult to look past. On the one hand, this is a very bloody horror movie with decapitations, slashings, hangings, and blood-splattered kills involving a chainsaw. On the other hand, there are moments of comedy that are so over-the-top that they rob the movie of the tension that it’s clearly going for. It’s obvious that the filmmakers were going for a Scream vibe, one that satirizes the genre while making an effective genre entry. However, some of the jokes here feel as though they belong more in Scary Movie rather than the classic Wes Craven helmed series.

Take the scene near the climax where our main characters discover that there’s a killer clown nearby. They’re at a party in an isolated barn. A girl screams and emerges from the cornfield with an arrow in her back. Two girls think it’s just a prank and dismiss the lifeless girl lying in the grass. Then, the titular clown throws a severed head at them from the corn. How do they respond? “Oh my God! This looks so realistic.” One of the girls picks the head up and tosses it to her friend. “Aw, did you get an owie on your neck?” one of the girl’s jokes. It isn’t until our main heroine checks the pulse of the girl with the arrow in her back that they realize, hey, these are real dead bodies.

Now, I’m not going to lie. I laughed during this scene. Maybe a little too hard, because when the crap hits the fan shortly after, it was difficult to take the resulting carnage too seriously. Take another scene for example. Our leading lady and another survivor hide out in a farmhouse and try to call for help on a landline. They find it, but unfortunately for them, it’s a rotary phone, prompting our main protagonist to deliver this gem: “What kind of phone is this? Where are the buttons?!”

Again, I laughed. I actually laughed quite a bit in this film. The problem is that when it comes to the hacking and slashing, director Eli Craig takes the mayhem a bit too seriously. Or maybe he doesn’t. It’s hard to say. The opening scene, set in 1991, feels so generic that it would seem right at home in Stab, the goofy horror movie in Scream 2 that was based on the events in Scream. Maybe that opening is his way of telling us not to take the movie too seriously, but then we get a really dark kill scene that involves a sheet of plastic, and it becomes difficult to tell again.

The story takes place in the present day and follows Quinn Maybrook (a very good Katie Douglas) as she and her father Glenn (Aaron Abrahms) move to the small farming town of Kettle Springs, Missouri, where Glenn is to start working as the new town doctor. Their relationship is loving but strained due to the recent passing of Quinn’s mother (who died of an accidental overdose) and the fact that Glenn bought their new home without really looking at it (the place is a fixer-upper and totally has no cell service).

On her first day of school, Quinn gets thrown into detention by an angry teacher for no reason and falls in with a gang of highschoolers the locals consider to be nothing but trouble. There’s cute guy Cole (Carson MacCormac), who has a secret that I didn’t see coming; Matt (Alexandre Martin Deakin), the jock who’s in love with his own muscles; Tucker (Ayo Solanke), who plays the drums; Janet (Cassandra Potenza), the queen-B; and Ronnie (Verity Marks), who’s kind of a ditz (she spoke the line from the start of the review). There’s really not a whole lot to these characters but give credit to the cast: they’re a pretty likable bunch of kids.

The town of Kettle Springs used to thrive and make its money with the production and manufacturing of corn oil. For some reason, the mascot for their corn oil business was a creepy looking clown named Frendo. Quinn’s new friends are social media stars who make short videos of Frendo returning to the town as a mad slasher. It’s no surprise that an actual mad slasher shows up dressed as Frendo to finish the kids off. What is surprising are the killer’s shoes, which seem to squeak with each step after he kills someone but are curiously silent when he tries to sneak up on a victim.

The adults in town have a real problem with the local young’uns. When Quinn and her father go to a local diner, the waitress smiles at the good doctor but sneers at Quinn. The local high school teacher seems a little too eager to pass out detention to his students. When something goes wrong at the local Founder’s Day parade, the sheriff is quick to arrest Quinn and her friends even though they obviously had nothing to do with what happened. This divide does seem to be a focus of this story, even though not a whole lot is really done with it. Because of this lack of development, the killer’s motivation feels rather strained when it’s revealed in the climax. The movie is based on a best-selling YA horror book by Adam Cesare. Maybe the novel handled this idea better.

That said, I can’t quite tilt the thumb upward on Clown in a Cornfield, but that isn’t to say that I disliked this movie. There are a few surprising twists (I was genuinely caught off-guard by the reveal involving the killer), the jokes do land (a little too well at times) and carrying us through the uneven mayhem is a very charming and spunky performance by young Douglas. There is a total of three books in Adam Cesare’s series, and the door is left open here for a sequel. With a stronger tonal balance, this series might turn out to be something really fun if it continues. If not, we still have a decently watchable film with this one.

Rated R for bloody violence, profanity, teen drinking and drug use