Coulrophobia, the fear of clowns, has been a rich vein for horror filmmakers to slice into for decades. From Pennywise to Art the Clown, these painted-face terrors have “honk-honk”-ed and “beep-beep”-ed their way into our collective nightmares, permanently taking residence. Now, Eli Craig’s adaptation of Adam Cesare’s 2020 novel Clown in a Cornfield attempts to join this macabre tradition. I’m almost ashamed to admit that I’ve carried Cesare’s paperback around for years, always meaning to read it before the film adaptation arrived. That day came before I cracked the spine, and maybe it’s fitting. Sometimes, you enter a story cold and hope it hits. This one doesn’t quite and stumbles through the stalks before finding its footing.

Cesare sure set things up with a can’t-lose premise. Quinn Maybrook (Katie Douglas, I Like Movies) and her dad, Glenn (Aaron Abrams), relocate to Kettle Springs, a half-ghost town, half-pressure cooker still recovering from a fiery tragedy at the Baypen corn syrup factory. With the main source of income closed for the townspeople, the adults feel stuck in the past and blame a group of privileged teens for why things fell apart. Never mind that Kettle Springs has also been plagued by a series of mysterious murders and vanishings at the hands of the town’s mascot, a grinning cartoon clown named Frendo since the factory was first built.

Quinn, grieving her mother’s death and resenting being the new girl on the block, quickly stumbles into a group of locals who blow off steam by filming horror skits for YouTube, often featuring Frendo, an unsettling relic of better days. Her dad tries to be cool with her acting out (she gets put into detention, finds a boy to make out with, and gets arrested within the first 24 hours), but as easy-going as he tries to be, he can’t see that what his daughter needs is to be treated like an adult now that she’s had to experience such an adult loss. Reconnecting will have to wait because the “real” Frendo starts showing up around the same time they arrive, wielding various sharp farm tools. Now, no one is safe from his evil smile and bad intentions.

Douglas holds this thing together by making the best of a script that often feels stitched together without a clear purpose. Giving Quinn a grounded edge, she emerges as an imperfect, but rootable heroine regardless of the narrative’s haphazard construction. Abrams feels natural as her earnest, out-of-place dad and more importantly, I believed that he was playing a father, balancing “uncool parent” and “supportive pop” with authentic charm. Among Quinn’s new friends, Carson MacCormac (Luckiest Girl Alive) and Vincent Muller add appropriate mystery as potentially deadly love interests, while Cassandra Potenza energetically gnaws on her mean-girl lines as Janet. Will Sasso (The Three Stooges) huffs and puffs effectively as the town sheriff and Elon Musk lookalike Kevin Durand (Abigail) chows down on the scenery as the heir to the Baypen dynasty.

Craig previously helmed the cult favorite horror-comedy Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, which cleverly inverted terror tropes. Clown in a Cornfield tries to blend similar bloody slasher fun with Gen Z anxiety and small-town rot, but the opening stretch struggles to find its rhythm. Despite the formidable energy brought by Douglas, there’s a sluggish pacing to the teen drama, and the film always works best when playing with our expectations of the slasher formula. Yet it rarely commits to this playfulness, preferring to stay closer to a by-the-numbers thriller with just enough weirdness to make you wish it had gone further.

Brian Pearson’s cinematography wants to conjure dread with moonlit cornfields and shadowy barnyards, but too often, we’re straining to see what’s happening. You keep waiting for that one showstopper kill, that beautifully demented image, but most deaths blur together, neither outrageous enough to be memorable nor grounded enough to be chilling, and hardly any suspense in the build-up. The Manitoba filming locations offer generic, spooky, small-town Americana vibes without enough distinctive character to make it feel like it could happen in your state’s farm country.

The movie only hints at bigger themes that could’ve given it a tangy bite. Generational distrust, social media’s warped incentives, small-town decay; but it barely scratches the surface. Information on additional deaths in the area are introduced late and quickly so a 1988 prologue feels even more extraneous and disconnected.  The teens’ YouTube antics vanish early, so the commentary on social media is cut short. There could have been ample mileage in the quartet of teens making clown-themed slasher videos, but it vanishes soon after it gets the requisite jump scares.

In its final act, Clown in a Cornfield almost redeems itself, finally finding its wicked groove. Delivering a few entertaining thrills (and surprising reveals) as the kill count rises, you can sense Craig letting go of the tight leash he’d been holding until that point. It’s then that the movie leans into absurdity, finally letting the concept have some deranged fun and finding a few honest laughs while the blood flows around the victims. (There’s a great bit with a phone that was both funny and a little sad.) It’s a final final dash to the finish line. If only the rest of the movie had matched that same energy.

Horror fans with a special fondness for masked killers terrorizing small towns will find enough scraps to enjoy to warrant a watch, and Douglas absolutely deserves a better genre vehicle. But for a film about a murderous clown in Middle America, it’s surprisingly safe. Craig occasionally captures the mix of horror and humor that made his earlier work unique. Still, you can’t help but think about the film this could have been: a sharper, more focused slasher that fully harvested its promising premise. Cesare has written two sequels, so…perhaps Frendo isn’t quite done with audiences yet.