[COLUMN] Clown in a Cornfield is a Post-Metamodern Slasher Movie | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains full spoilers for Clown in a Cornfield, which is on premium video on demand now, including the identity and motive of the killer. While Clown in a Cornfield doesn’t reinvent the genre - and, indeed, very pointedly is making the case for not needing to reinvent the genre - it is a fun, clever slasher movie that is worth a look for anybody who likes a straight-down-the-middle slasher aimed at teen viewers. I do, in fact, fuck with Friendo.

Clown in a Cornfield introduces Quinn (Katie Douglas), its final girl, complaining about the hollowness of 1980s nostalgia. Travelling with her father Glenn (Aaron Abrams) to their new home in Missouri, Quinn has been subjected to an endless playlist of artists like Eric. B & Rakim. “Oh, please God, dad,” Quinn complains. “No more '80s rap.” When Glenn counters that it is “dope”,  Quinn bluntly responds, “You do realize that the '80s are as far away from me as the '40s were to you, right?”

It is a small moment that feels like a mission statement for Clown in a Cornfield, a very classical and traditional teen slasher movie that earnestly asks whether the genre has anything to offer its teenage audience that isn’t steeped in nostalgia for an era decades before they were born. It is possible to read this as an overt criticism of the genre’s dependency on ageing franchises like Halloween, Texas Chainsaw, Candyman and so forth. However, it also hints at something a bit broader.

Over the past decade or so, even new entries into the slasher genre have worked hard to frame the horror subgenre in a way that is overtly and aggressively nostalgic. It isn’t just individual characters like Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) who are the subject of nostalgic fascination, but this entire type of movie. Audiences are asked not to see slasher movies as something particularly contemporary or urgent, but instead as throwbacks and curiosities that invoke some romantic past.

This is true in a variety of ways. Many of these slasher movies, such as Ti West’s X trilogy, the Fear Street films or the time travel adventure Totally Killer are explicitly period pieces, playing in theme park recreations of earlier eras. Others blend the slasher template with beloved classics, as Happy Death Day does with Groundhog Day, Freaky does with Freaky Friday and Totally Killer does with Back to the Future. The “slasher” is treated as a historical object or a genre affectation - it is a flavor in the meal, an ingredient in a cocktail.

Often, the audience is asked to consider the slasher as a mediated and fictional object, framed as a fiction within the fiction of the film to create an additional layer of remove. Dude Bro Party Massacre III is presented to the audience as a lost film. In The Final Girls, the characters are literally trapped inside a slasher movie. In Until Dawn, the characters are forced to live the same night over and over. The X trilogy is very overtly about the role and evolution of cinema in American popular culture.

As with most long-running franchises in other genres, long-running horror franchises become monuments to themselves. The first Scream was about the legacy of other horror movies like Halloween and Friday the 13th, but the fifth Scream movie is about a reboot of its own franchise and Scream VI climaxes in a literal museum of franchise iconography. Nia DaCosta’s Candyman is a metaphor for the commodification and mass marketing of this sort of trauma and horror, specifically the plot of the first film in the franchise.

It is worth acknowledging that many – even most – of these movies are good and enjoyable. Still, it is hard not to sense a large trend. In many ways, these films feel like a reaction to the self-aware postmodernism that Scream imbued into the slasher revival of the late 1990s. Scream allowed a cine-literate generation of contemporary teenagers to deconstruct and interrogate the classic slasher movie, calling out its misogyny and its clichés with a knowing smirk.

This modern wave of slasher movies feels like something of a response to that incisive criticism of the genre. After all, the slasher is a contested horror movie framework, often critiqued for its sexism or its conservatism. The way that many of these modern slasher movies position the genre as a nostalgic throwback allows them to indulge in the clichés of the genre without having to earnestly critique them. After all, what is the point in having a cake if one does not get to eat it too?

Sure, characters in these movies might call out some of the more egregiously sexist moments, as Collette (Kiernan Shipka) does in Total Killer, but the understanding is that it is all in good fun. It is just the kind of thing that happens in a movie like this, and there is an implicit understanding that perhaps these gender politics and reactionary tropes are best left in the past, but also they are fun and what is wrong with having a little fun? Who is taking any of this seriously?

It is, in many ways, a post-postmodern approach, a construction of the slasher film that understands many of the critiques of the genre were entirely valid and reasonable, but doesn’t really have an answer to them, and so responds by bringing the audience in on the joke and pushing the clock back. Rather than engaging in a meaningful debate over what the slasher movie can or should be, the classic slasher instead becomes a historical object, a period affectation like shoulder pads or big hair.

If Scream birthed “the postmodern slasher film”, then this is perhaps “the metamodern slasher film.” Indeed, Stephanie Graves argues that the opening scene of the fifth Scream movie represents “a metamodern turn toward concomitant ironic parody and sincere enthusiasm.” These are horror films that are detached and earnest at the same time, built on an assumption that the audience knows all the tropes backwards but still wants to see them play out.

Metamodernism is part of a larger cultural trend that began in the early 2010s. “I’m noticing a new approach to artmaking in recent museum and gallery shows,” Jerry Saltz wrote in May 2010. “It’s an attitude that says, I know that the art I’m creating may seem silly, even stupid, or that it might have been done before, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t serious. At once knowingly self-conscious about art, unafraid, and unashamed, these young artists not only see the distinction between earnestness and detachment as artificial; they grasp that they can be ironic and sincere at the same time.”

The artistic movement was codified by Timotheur Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, who argued that “[i]t oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity.” Over the past decade and a half, it has crept into the mainstream, arguably reaching its apotheosis with Everything Everywhere All At Once.

However, as with most artistic movements, there comes a point where the trend becomes so familiar and so casual that it becomes a hollow imitation of itself. After all, after an extended period of reiterating over these familiar tropes, it is inevitable that the cleverness and self-awareness slips away, and these films just become examples of the trends they were initially reacting to. Scream VI is less a commentary on tired late-franchise sequels than it is a tired late-franchise sequel. Fear Street: Prom Queen is less in conversation with lazy ’80s slashers than it is just a lazy ‘80s slasher.

More broadly, it’s possible for these exercises to get lost in fun self-aware arguments about the genre that appeal to horror die-hards and nerdy film fans. These films can fixate on the abstract idea of the slasher movie so hard that they lose sight of the film itself. Who are these films for? The original wave of slasher movies, codified (if not started) by John Carpenter’s Halloween, were movies that spoke to teenagers. They resonated with younger audiences. They weren’t nostalgic objects.

This is part of what is so interesting about Eli Craig’s Clown in a Cornfield, adapted from the novel by Adam Cesare. It is a surprisingly straightforward slasher movie in many respects. It is, on one level, a great example of “the title is the premise.” There is still truth in marketing. It is about a serial killer with a gimmick – in this case being dressed like the local mascot “Friendo the Clown” – murdering a group of hapless teenagers holding a party in the middle of a… well, you can probably guess.

The biggest twist in the movie arrives quite early: there is, in fact, more than one masked killer. Even then, this is a classic slasher movie cliché, effectively an escalation of the twist at the end of Scream, a franchise that regularly employs multiple killers to make it harder to identify the villain. However, the rest of the movie is a reliable and familiar slasher set-up. New in town, Quinn connects with both the isolated outsider Rust (Vincent Muller) and local bad boy Cole (Carson MacCormac).

It initially seems like the film is setting up a love triangle between Quinn, Rust and Cole, with Rust and Cole as potential killers. Rust is a weird loner. Cole is an intense boyfriend. He and Quinn almost have sex shortly before the killings start, the moment ruined by his impotence, and he talks openly about his frustration with the local community and his dream of “burning it all to the fucking ground.” When Cole conveniently disappears from the group halfway through the film, in the back of a squad car driven by Sheriff Dunne (Will Sasso), he may as well be wearing clown shoes.

However, Clown in a Cornfield has a few smart modern twists that find a way to update the modern slasher template without pushing the film into full-blown self-awareness. There is a love triangle between Quinn, Rust and Cole; Rust and Cole are gay, and that Cole’s discomfort with his sexuality is what alienated Rust from the friend group and turned him into a loner. Cole’s desire to burn it all to the ground makes sense, given the killings are masterminded by his father, Mayor Arthur Hill (Kevin Durand). Cole’s red herring disappearance is just Arthur abducting him for a final father-son chat.

Arthur’s motivations for the killing spree boil down to intergenerational tension, an expression of the conservatism baked into the classic slasher template and a literalization of the belief that the slasher movie should serve as a way of punishing younger generations for their transgressions. “I just came to the realization that my boy is just a bad seed, and daddy has to start all over,” Arthur offers as the culmination of his grand motive rant.

What is really interesting about Clown in a Cornfield is that it feels like a rejection of the more overt metamodernism and nostalgia of the contemporary slasher movie. The film doesn’t believe that the slasher has to be filtered through layer-upon-layer of knowing irony to make it palatable to a modern audience. Instead, Clown in a Cornfield suggests that the fairly standard out-of-the-box template need only be tweaked slightly to help it resonate with modern viewers.

The engine that drives Clown in a Cornfield is the same engine that drove Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street and many others: the understanding that the kids are not okay and it’s the adults’ fault. Indeed, Hill reveals that the town has gone through multiple cycles of slasher killings: hobos in the 1930s, hippies in the 1960s, disaffected teens in the 1990s, and now this generation “with [their] fucking preening and [their] goddamn cat videos.”

“You're so worried about what's wrong with the kids, when you guys are the ones that fucked everything up!” Cole challenges his father. “You don't care about the Earth. You don't care about the next generation. Well, guess what, the world's going to change  whether you like it or not, and I know that scares the shit out of you,  because if you can't have things the way that you want 'em, you'd rather burn it all to the fucking ground! You'd rather kill us than just listen.”

It's a compelling argument, in large part because it taps into the same generational anxieties that informed movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th while also resonating with this moment. It is a film that uses the established structures of the classic slasher to craft a movie that doesn’t feel obliged to offer a layer of nostalgic insulation around it to make those elements appealing to a contemporary teenage audience.

Clown in a Cornfield never takes itself too seriously, but it also doesn’t feel the need to hide its corniness behind winking self-awareness.