eli craig

Clown in a Cornfield (2025)

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It has got to be frustrating for kids & teens that almost all youth-marketed pop culture these days is reheated leftovers from their parents’ generations. The kids-on-bikes YA horrors of yesteryear have been repackaged in overly nostalgic teen fare like the most recent iterations Stranger Things, Ghostbusters, and Goosebumps. Recent animated kids’ movies have brought Super Mario Bros, Transformers, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles back from their 20th Century gravesites with updated pop culture references & Chris Pratt vocal tracks to appeal to the whole family, not just the children in the room. No wonder entire theaters full of sugar-addled middle schoolers are launching popcorn in ecstatic uproar for a “Chicken Jockey” meme reference in a Minecraft movie. I have no idea what a chicken jockey is, as I’ve never played the Minecraft video game, and that’s entirely the point. The kids deserve something of their own that has zero appeal for anyone over the age of 30, or the entire theatrical distribution system will die a slow death as Gen-Xers & Millennials age out of the moviegoing habit. I don’t know that the new teen slasher Clown in a Cornfield provides that fresh, much-needed teen appeal that’s missing from modern genre filmmaking, but it’s at least demonstratively aware of the problem.

Like most other YA horrors of recent decades, Clown in a Cornfield starts as a nostalgic throwback to a popular fad of yesteryear – in this case teen slashers of the 80s & 90s. Meanwhile, its setting & iconography pull as much influence from vintage Stephen King material as Stranger Things and the recent two-part adaptation of IT, blatantly positioned as a mashup of IT and Children of the Corn. You see, there’s something evil lurking in the cornfields of Kettle Springs, Missouri, and it’s taken the form of the local corn syrup factory’s birthday-clown mascot, Frendo. The local Gen-Z teens who find themselves at the wrong end of Frendo’s chainsaw anger the evil clown by making prankster YouTube videos mocking how scary he looks on the corn syrup’s advertising, setting up a clash between an ancient entity and Kids These Days’ newfangled online hobbies. Things get even eerier as the adults in town prove to be arbitrarily hostile towards the kids for merely existing, locking them up in afterschool detention, bedroom groundings, and literal jail cells for the slightest annoyances. By the time Frendo emerges from the liminal-space cornfield at the edge of town to massacre the teens at their annual barnyard kegger on Founders Day, it’s outright generational warfare, where the crime of being a teenager is an automatic death sentence.

The teens of Kettle Springs are vocally fed up with having to live in a world defined by their parents’ retro pop culture references. We meet the New Kid on the Block, Quinn (Katie Douglas), while she groans at her dad for half-mumbling the lyrics of an Eric B & Rakim track, reminding him that the 1980s is, mathematically speaking, just as outdated for her now as the 1940s was for him then. Later, when her new friend group of fun-loving Zoomer YouTubers is chased around her new hometown by a killer clown, their escape plans are frequently thwarted by their ignorance of older, more physical technology—namely, rotary phones & stick shifts—demonstrating that a disconnection from the past cuts both ways. When confronted with any “The problem with your generation is …” lectures from parents, teachers, and the local sheriff (an unusually macho Will Sasso), the kids spit back accusations of world-destroying apathy at those Gen-X grumps, laying out their motivations for declaring generational warfare in the clearest terms possible. The movie smartly lands on the teens’ side of that cultural debate, even if its violence is a little too safe and its soundtrack is a little too unhip to actually appeal to real-world teens. Maybe that means its appeal is most potent for a crowd slightly younger than its protagonist, which was exactly the case with the teen horrors of my own tween years way back when: I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Faculty, The Craft, Urban Legend, etc.

As the goofball title suggests, Clown in a Cornfield is foremost a horror comedy, finding ironic humor in these lethal intergenerational clashes. The title is fulfilled in the first three minutes of runtime, wherein two Gen-X teens are slain by Frendo in 1991, discovering his presence via the novelty squeaks and oversized prints of his clown shoes. As Frendo slashes, decapitates, and impales his way through Quinn’s Gen-Z friend group, their corn-syrup-thick blood fills the screen with convincing brutality, but the overall focus is on the teens-vs-adults culture clash, not on crafting memorable gore gags. The movie has a similar splatstick-satire energy as director Eli Craig’s earlier triumph Tucker & Dale vs Evil in that way, except maybe with fewer laughs per minute. Given the recent popularity of fellow killer-clown horror franchise Terrifier, it’s unlikely that there’s enough blood or cruelty here to satisfy teens who’re hungry for a memorably extreme, rowdy experience at the picture show with their dirtbag friends. Its YA patina means that it’s a little safer & healthier for their developing brains than the unbridled misogyny & general misanthropy of films like Terrifier, which is just about the last thing that audience wants to hear from a crusty adult like me. So, Clown in a Cornfield still ultimately appeals to parents more than kids, even while actively trying to combat that impulse. It’s cute, which makes it harmless, which makes it “cringe” to its target audience.

-Brandon Ledet

Little Evil (2017)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

When I was a kid, my mom introduced me to the horror classics of her youth whenever I was fortunate enough to be left behind while my father went deer hunting. We watched Carrie, Halloween (which she and my dad had gone to see in the theaters on their first date, although he left halfway through and waited for her in the lobby), and one of her favorites, The Omen. In case there are any among you who have never seen it (and shame on you), The Omen stars Gregory Peck as an American diplomat whose child dies at birth; he is convinced to adopt a local orphan instead. He and his unwitting wife name the child Damien, and as the child grows he starts to suspect, correctly, that little Damien is the Antichrist. There were a few sequels (including one where the adult Damien, played by Sam Neill, is an American politician) and a remake released on the apropos date of 06/06/06.

Although the remake is one of the better revisitations and reimaginings of the early millennium (perhaps helped by the fact that I find both Julia Stiles and Liev Schreiber to be quite charming), my new favorite follow-up is 2017’s Little Evil. Adam Scott plays Gary Bloom, the new husband of Samantha (Evangeline Lilly) and thus stepfather to Lucas (Owen Atlas), who dresses and acts just like Damien, including using a “goat” sock puppet to talk in a low demonic voice. Samantha is completely blind to (or hilariously complacent about) the blatantly supernatural events happening around her: bloody rain, flickering lights, the backwards speech of the priest at their wedding, even Lucas’s use of a compelling voice to tell his teachers to kill themselves.

Gary gets conflicting and terrible advice from the other stepfathers in his community, including Victor (Kyle Bornheimer), Wayne (Chris D’Elia), and Larry (Donald Faison). The best and worst of these is Al (Lady Dynamite‘s Bridget Everett), his co-worker and a woman so butch she considers herself to be a part of the stepdad community. Everett all but steals the show here; she’s hilarious, and her deadpan delivery of her lines about her own stepson and her relationship with the new wife are perfectly timed and exquisite. Rounding out the case are the always-welcome Sally Field as a social worker and Clancy Brown as Reverend Gospel, an end-times theologian.

After Lucas causes his birthday clown to set himself on fire, Child Protective Services gets involved just as Gary seeks out professional help, including the assistance of a demon hunter, just as in The Omen. But unlike The Omen, Little Evil evolves into a story about something else: fatherhood, and the need for good role models. The film ultimately makes a surprisingly heartwarming statement about the nature of paternity and the importance of love over biology.

The film is not without a few low points, of course. There is a bit of the film that drags in the middle, as it gets wrapped up in some of the typical dudebro lowbrow comedy that we’ve come to expect from directors like Judd Apatow, but director Eli Craig (who gave us the fantastic horror comedy/pastiche Tucker and Dale vs. Evil back in 2010) shifts back into gear pretty quickly after this, and the high points more than make up for the less-than-perfect moments. Lilly is also a high point of recommendation; embodied by another actress, Samantha might have come across as dim-witted or inept, but Lilly finds the perfect balance between defensive (but lovingly) maternal and comically missing the point.

Little Evil is a Netflix original, so it’s presumably not going anywhere soon. If I were you, I’d use the last days of January to watch as much Futurama as you can before it leaves the streaming platform at the end of the month. But when that’s done, go back and check out this easy-going comedy. And also, watch The Omen if you haven’t already, you Philistine!

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond