ClownsA magic combination of childhood fears, social media and psychology has powered the spread of clown ‘sightings’ around the world. But will Halloween mark ‘peak clown’? And what should you do if you are confronted by one?
It began in the UK on Friday 30 September. Police in Newcastle received reports of someone dressed as a “creepy clown” leaping out of bushes to scare children. Over the next few days, half a dozen such clown incidents were recorded. A teenage clown was arrested in possession of a “bladed article”. On 5 October, the tabloids announced that a “terrifying clown craze” had hit these shores. And so it began to spread.
The first named victim was 17-year-old student Megan Bell, who has a “lifelong fear of clowns” and was chased down the street by one at night. Soon, more clowns began to pop up: in Wales, Manchester, Sheffield and Liverpool. Then just about everywhere. Concerned parents made Facebook pages about clowns, thus inadvertently helping to spread the meme. The Metropolitan police advised schoolchildren to call 999 if they saw a “killer clown”. Some observers spoke knowingly of a classic “social panic”, since only a very few of the clown incidents involved actual physical assaults. But being chased down the street at night by a clown, or anyone else, is frightening enough for adults and children alike. As Met commander Julian Bennett pointed out: “Antisocial behaviour can leave people feeling scared, anxious and intimidated, and I would urge those who are causing fear and alarm to carefully consider the impact their actions have on others.” These stories were surreal news fodder, but not, when you thought about them, actually funny. But why clowns? And why now?
The current craze started, as crazes often do, in the US, where, since the beginning of August, people dressed as clowns had been popping up creepily all over the country. There was speculation that it was all a PR stunt for the upcoming release of a movie version of Stephen King’s 1986 horror novel It, which features a famously eerie clown called Pennywise. In fact, the earliest reported incident, a creepy clown standing in the street holding black balloons in Green Bay, Wisconsin, was a marketing ploy for a short film entitled Gags produced by a local, Adam Krause. But subsequent clowns began to terrorise children and sometimes attack people, while commentators spoke of panic and hysteria. In Pennsylvania, a teenager was reported to have been murdered by someone in a clown mask. Police later said it was the victim who had the mask. Two weeks ago, a clown stabbed a teenager in Varberg, Sweden. There are, we are told, “creepy clowns” or even “killer clowns” everywhere. Last weekend, the NSPCC said that Childline counsellors had received hundreds of calls from children worried about clowns. People call it the great clown panic, or clown uprising, or clown invasion, or clown craze, of 2016. And so far it shows no sign of abating.
Clowns have never been straightforwardly funny. Connoisseurs of pulp fiction will cite King’s Pennywise. Comics fans will think of Batman’s antagonist, the Joker. Anti-corporate activists will probably point to Ronald McDonald. But the killer-clown meme is grounded in a far more sordid reality. David Wilson, professor of criminology at Birmingham City University, was lecturing on just this subject earlier in the summer, before the current wave of clown-related incidents. “We’ve got a brand new module that I teach in the final year about serial murder,” he says. “I was showing the students some images of killer clowns. And the idea of a killer clown is all too real if you know the history of John Wayne Gacy.” An American serial killer and rapist, Gacy was convicted of the murders of 33 boys and young men in Cook Country, Illinois between 1972 and 1978. He was also well known in his community as Pogo the Clown, performing at children’s parties and fundraising events. As he was arrested, Gacy is reported to have said: “You know, clowns can get away with murder.”
The fear of clowns is known as coulrophobia. And it’s understandable because, even if they are not serial killers, clowns are already creepy. “It’s misleading to ask when clowns turned bad,” warns the writer Benjamin Radford in his history, Bad Clowns. “They were never really good.” Radford cites Joseph Campbell’s classic analysis of myth, The Hero With a Thousand Faces: “Universal too is the casting of the antagonist, the representative of evil, in the role of the clown. Devils – both the lusty thickheads and the sharp, clever deceivers – are always clowns.”
“Clowns deliberately exaggerate the human face and cover the human face with paint so as to make the face less human,” says Wilson. “When a small child is first learning about the world, to have exaggerated features is incredibly disquieting. It makes them question what they are just beginning to feel is normal. Of course, the clown’s behaviour is meant to be funny, but if you haven’t yet developed that sense of the world then you simply view them as odd, scary.” Even once we are old enough to understand what clowns are, their very point is to upset expectations. Clowns “behave in ways that transgress behavioural boundaries – they run up and throw water over you, for example, though of course it never turns out to be actual water; it’s just paper. So the contemporary relevance of killer clowns through John Wayne Gacy taps into this broader cultural coulrophobia.”
Aaron Balick, a psychotherapist and author of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking, suggests that the strong feelings about clowns we half-remember from childhood are contributing to the dual virality of the present phenomenon – the virality of the stories about clowns, and the virality of the idea that one might dress up as a clown to scare people. “Psychologists understand ‘contagion’ to include the spreading of an idea, feeling or behaviour through a group,” he explains. “Historically, you’d see this in small clusters of people, villages and groups – think of the Salem witch trials – but social media enables a crowd mentality to be extended like never before. And the closer a contagious event comes to something psychologically or emotionally deep and/or universal, the more likely it is to trend.” The scary-clown idea fits this pattern perfectly. “This volatile mix of intense feeling and contagion via social media spreads the idea of participating in an emotionally charged behaviour to such a large population that even if a tiny percentage of its viewers wish to mimic it, we’re bound to see instances of it far and wide.”
Alex Pentland, a professor at MIT and the author of Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread, agrees. The clown phenomenon, he says, is in one way a “standard craze”, such as planking before it, when people competed to lie face down in odd locations and post images and videos to the internet. But because this new fad is also a “deeply buried cultural meme – kids are scared of clowns – it has additional virality compared to most”.
Add another factor: the charged vocabulary of news reports about the clown incidents. They are routinely referred to as “sightings” – a word normally used when people claim to have seen ghosts or the Loch Ness monster, rather than blokes in costumes. On the day the first reports of clown shenanigans appeared in the mainstream UK media, the Mirror headlined one article: “Creepy clowns approach girls walking to school in terrifying UK craze”. This was a telling variant on the article’s first sentence, which read: “Two schoolgirls were approached by two creepy clowns yesterday as the terrifying American craze hits the UK.” That this was already an “American craze” was an accurate statement; but the headline’s reference to a “terrifying UK craze” could hardly have been true, because only a handful of incidents had so far been reported. Does pre-emptive talk of a “craze” become a self-fulfilling prophecy, helping to create a craze where there was none before?
Any kind of mask, of course, is disquieting. Admirers of the movie Point Break will remember that the gang Keanu Reeves infiltrates is called the Ex-Presidents: they rob banks while wearing rubber masks of Reagan, Carter, Nixon and LBJ. They look almost like real faces, but not quite. This is well known in psychology as the “uncanny valley” effect. As Tom Stafford, senior lecturer in psychology and cognitive science at the University of Sheffield, explains: “There is something especially disturbing about something which is nearly lifelike but isn’t” – such as a clown mask, or a painted clown face.
The obscuring of the face, moreover, is often perceived as a threat multiplier. Serial killers wear masks in slasher flicks such as the Friday the 13th or Scream series. And in the modern TV series Mr Robot, an Anonymous-inspired collective of hackers-cum-social-revolutionaries appear in public wearing what resemble Monopoly Man masks. (The mask in the show is in fact copied from a 1980s horror short, The Careful Massacre of the Bourgeoisie.) “Ultimately we judge people by looking at their face,” Wilson says. “Clowns disguise their face, and we – by and large rightly – distrust people who wear masks, because we don’t know how to assess them.”
The creepy clown thus embodies wider cultural faultlines of the present day – consider, for example, the polemics (especially in France) about women who wear the burqa and thereby keep their faces covered in public. Remember, too, that the clown is a grown man who tries to ingratiate himself with small children: some measure of subconscious paedophile anxiety is probably also in play. And the way the clown craze has spread to seemingly disconnected individuals who then act it out might also remind us of the global dynamics of what is called “radicalisation” via the internet. “I doubt clowns know other clowns directly; they aren’t copying their peers, but instead copying the media story about clowns,” Stafford observes. “So the ideas seed among disparate individuals – a bit like with some seemingly lone-wolf terrorists.” In which case, just as the media is at fault when it provides terrorists with precisely the publicity they crave for their acts of violence-as-PR, the media must accept some responsibility for the way in which a fun, weird story about clowns tipped over in some cases into actual violent assaults.
What should you do if confronted by a clown? Just try to ignore them, Wilson advises. “When you and I were growing up, we encountered people who behaved inappropriately – from exposing themselves to making inappropriate and lewd comments – and the best advice I was given was just to walk away, avoid them.” Don’t give the clown the fear-reaction he wants; but also don’t challenge the clown. (The clown won’t expect an aggressive response and might panic – possibly escalating, Wilson thinks, to physical violence.) Just walk away and report the incident to the police.
An analogous strategy will probably work more broadly, in the media and on the internet. Which is to say: the clowns will only disappear when we get bored and start to ignore them. At the moment we’re in a loop, as Stafford observes. “The media has an interest in reporting clowns; we the public like hearing scary stories about clowns; certain individuals pick up on the idea of being clowns. And on it goes.” To send away the clowns we just need to stop giving them the attention they so desperately crave – in which case it must be acknowledged that this article is certainly not helping. “It will die out,” Wilson predicts. “It’s a phobia du jour.” Maybe, after Halloween is over, peak clown will be behind us, and it will just fizzle out. Something else will become the new fad.
But for the moment it’s just such a good story that we can’t help ourselves. The creepy-clown phenomenon is a compelling collaborative narrative – written by both the few actual clown marauders, and a public that is both titillated by a weird and scary story, and also existentially resigned to a news cycle in which the facts seem ever more ridiculous, and nothing seems less credible than anything else. After Brexit and a Trump presidential candidacy, after all, why shouldn’t clowns be on the rampage, too?
This article was amended on 1 November 2016. An earlier version said a teenager in Pennsylvania was murdered by someone in a clown mask. That was initially reported, but police later said it was the victim who had the mask.
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