Movie Review
Clown Panic
5/10
TLDR
Hulu’s Clown Panic revisits the 2016 clown sightings but rarely asks whether the threat was real. Guilford Adams is a delight, and the final twenty minutes hit hard. The history of scary clowns goes missing.
Where to watch: Streaming on Hulu
The Facts
Synopsis: When children in a small South Carolina community report seeing clowns hiding in the woods in 2016, few believe them. But as sightings spread across the country, panic escalates into school lockdowns, police investigations and a nationwide media frenzy. Featuring chilling archive footage, viral internet videos and revealing interviews with witnesses, law enforcement, clowns and cultural commentators, Clown Panic examines the collision of fear, social media and modern America at a moment of deep national anxiety.
Director: Ed Perkins
Stars: Guilford Adams, Benjamin Radford, Nat Arnold, Donna Arnold, Ken Miller, Traci Fant
Rated: TV-MA
Running Length: 84 minutes
The Thoughts
I’m not a clown hater, so let’s be clear about that before we get into Hulu’s new Clown Panic documentary. Do I want to find one standing in my backyard or chasing me down a deserted road? Heck no. When the original IT miniseries aired, there were reports in my hometown of someone dressed like Tim Curry‘s Pennywise. He’d stand in backyards at dusk with a red balloon, scaring little kids. I was barely ten, with my bed pressed against a second-floor window. Every night, it took me a good fifteen minutes to work up the courage to peek around the curtain and check for clowns. So I understand the fear on display here, at least to a point.
Clown Panic Goes Back to 2016
If you weren’t paying attention in the fall of 2016, it’s hard to explain how big this got. It started in late August in Greenville County, South Carolina, when kids told adults that clowns were trying to lure them into the woods. Many of those first sightings came from Black neighborhoods and poorer communities, and at first nobody took them seriously. People only started listening when a clown seemed to threaten a school.
After that, the sightings piled up like passengers in a clown car. Schools went on lockdown and police opened investigations. Hundreds of Penn State students went hunting for a clown one night, and Target pulled clown masks from its shelves. Even Stephen King had to remind everyone that most clowns are good guys. It finally reached the White House briefing room, where press secretary Josh Earnest fielded a question about it.
Director Ed Perkins (The Princess) built his last big documentary entirely from archive footage, and there’s plenty of it here too. Grainy phone video, breathless local news packages and viral posts keep the whole thing spinning. This time, though, editor Julian Quantrill weaves in new interviews with the people who lived through it. There’s a police chief, a pastor, a detective, an FBI agent, reporters, kids and the parents who had to decide what to believe. Simon Chinn (Man on Wire) and Jonathan Chinn produce for their company, Lightbox.
Everybody Believed the Clown Was Real
For much of the film’s 84 minutes, I kept waiting for one line. “We knew all along it was just a guy in a mask taking a joke too far.” It never really comes. Most of the people interviewed still seem convinced a killer clown was prowling their town, just waiting for the right moment to strike. That’s frustrating, because the prank angle was there from the start. One of the first viral clown photos that summer showed a clown called Gags lurking under a bridge in Green Bay, Wisconsin. He turned out to be a marketing stunt for a short horror film.
Living inside that fear is fascinating for a few minutes, and Perkins clearly wants us to understand how real it felt. Stretched across an hour, though, it turns into a lot of fear and very little perspective. The film keeps telling us how scared everyone was without ever stepping back to ask why.
Send In the Good Clown
The film perks up whenever Guilford Adams is on screen. He sits for his interviews in full clown gear, and he gets some genuinely funny moments. He also lands the film’s saddest point. His whole profession was built to make children and adults happy, and suddenly it was tied to threats, assaults and hate crimes. His livelihood took a hit, and so did his sense of safety. Adams makes you realize that in a panic like this, even the people in the costumes become victims.
Stories about lost income do pale next to the people who were hurt or scarred. In its final twenty minutes, the slow boil of nervous people waiting for a clown finally spills over into real tragedy. I won’t spell it out and spoil it, because it’s the heaviest part of the documentary. I’m sure it’s the reason the film was made in the first place. It’s also the most affecting stretch of the film, because it shows what all that fear actually cost. What started as a joke turned into a deadly game that nobody needed to play.
That’s also where I wished Perkins had widened the lens. The film never digs into how the clown went from children’s party staple to horror icon. It even has clown expert Benjamin Radford on hand, which makes the missing history more frustrating. A little context about Bozo, Ronald McDonald and John Wayne Gacy would have explained why the panic caught fire so fast.
Ronald Retired, Pennywise Got a Franchise
Here’s the irony the film skips. In 2016, McDonald’s benched Ronald McDonald while the panic played out, and the famous mascot has never returned to his full glory. Meanwhile, Pennywise got a hit movie in IT the following year and now an HBO origin series, IT: Welcome to Derry. Poor old Ronald got an early retirement, and the clown in the storm drain got a franchise.
That’s the story I wanted, and Clown Panic only gets to it in passing. As a time capsule of 2016, it’s worth a look, and its last act will stay with you. As an explanation of why we were all so ready to be scared, it leaves the balloon untied.
The Final
A watchable time capsule of the 2016 clown scare that never questions the panic it documents. Guilford Adams and a devastating final act help, but the missing history leaves the balloon untied.
5/10
Where to watch: Streaming on Hulu
Reviewed by Joe Botten
Joe Botten is The MN Movie Man, a Twin Cities film critic writing spoiler-free reviews since 2012. He also writes for Loud and Clear Reviews, a Rotten Tomatoes approved site. Find him on Instagram and Letterboxd.
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