Clown (2014) (Cloyne)
Perfect pitch of clown horror. The movie coagulates in the singular expression of an idea, the Cloyne. The tension and buildup, appropriate amounts of gore and scares. What you expect, even as the ideal clown horror movie, is surpassed.
The fright of the idea is compounded by a demonic possession, and a father’s madness destroys his family. An Overlook Hotel looms in the mist.
From The Indestructible Mr. Weems. Underfoot Hitchcock POV.
Paths of Glory. Anatomical style: clothes resemble body parts. A fashionable illusion of nudity. A movie not about war tactics but ethics, or is it authority? Soldier clothes resemble fabric arms and legs, so alien that they wear their bodies.
In Cloyne, the clown costume gets stuck. His wife has to yank his nose off with medical pliers. Like the roach clip Louis used to have, which we might have been using that first time I saw Cloyne. I was also reminded, when he attempted to behead himself, of the way Louis and Boyle and I tried to smoke a speck of weed with two knives and a sliced up Gatorade bottle. Knife hits. We were more successful than Kent.
“Well, this is splendid. Superb!”
Something about the Anthill. Also the name of a coffee shop in Rayle, a metal spiral staircase leading downstairs, and a library wall. A key strategic position. Are there key strategic positions in cities during peacetime, like business centers or beer gardens, or are they certain apartments on the edges of forgotten streets?
A clown in the suburbs. The thing was raging in its bonds which resembled a frying chair. It needs to eat five children or else be beheaded. It’d be funny if, like in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, they found a way to de-curse Kent and he had to deal with his crimes, fully recognizing them with his fluffy soul. Don’t put him in jail. Probably no way to live with that, but if there was, it’d be another movie.
“I beg your pardon, Sergeant. There is no such thing as shell shock!”
His eyes shine. He’s climbing through a spherically inclined spaceship. The Cloyne menaces its prey inside a PlayPlace hamster maze, coughing up jaws and other detritus… “Don’t go up there,” says one fleeing child to another. Smell of the glowing pink plastic, the way the static bothered your clothes, that particular echo inside the sun; the dust. It’s a forever realm, another dimension belonging wholly to childhood. I don’t even think the Cloyne matters in that scene. Its sticking power is in the singular space of pursuit the set piece provides. Soldiers crawl up to the Anthill among crisscrossing wires, trenches upon trenches, a place of no account.
The bonkers old man, his cursed costume tucked in a chest, diamond-patterned harlequin. It shrivels, clinging like snakeskin in reverse. The form of the demon struggles to erupt through human flesh. Fatherhood? Family? Some fear is consuming this fellow to the point where the evil feelings must be released. The director John Watts made this, his first full-length feature, and then the Tom Holland spidermans. A fake trailer with his name on it brought in Eli Roth. I think despite everything what we really want is for the Cloyne to get loose.
Loophole: he still gets to eat some kids who are inadvertently killed, and later we credit the possessing demon for the murders. The struggle is probably what makes it rich, our dwindling character having the life force drained from his bod. If the whole clown went on an It spree, half of the suspense would be lost. No rest for Kent.
(Anton Bitel writes: “all this genre material might be regarded as a mere guise for the more human — but no less harrowing — story of a family man's losing struggle with his own paedophiliac impulses.” I don’t know. The fears this schlock plays into are the childish ones of monstrous transformation, of an ancient item endowed with the power to twist goodness until its spine cracks. Cannibalism suggests itself just as readily as an unspeakable taboo. There’s a nice courtesy shot—which to me recalls Dave McKean’s Arkham Asylum panels—when he eats the first child, a boy who insists on offering him snacks. We’re a bit saturated with harlequins, I know. I like the way the colors drain, from the blood red clown nose to the pale makeup that creeps over Andy Powers’ face despite all attempts to wash it off.)
The shock and torment of wearing a leather onesie that shrinks around you. Roth characterized it as a version of The Fly. Good body horror’s about more than the ick. It’s the emotional distress and physical turmoil: disfigurement, injury, suffering. Show what a disease does to the body, the body in decline. Force us inside the airless suit, try to yank off the wig that’s become my hair. Add a compulsion to harm. Disgustedly house two bodies in one. Throw guilt on top of it: a salty-sweet melange.