The 5 Best And 5 Worst Clown Movies

Clowns: you may remember them from your childhood as the objectively terrifying middle-aged men in makeup who insisted on painting your face and twisting balloons into animal shapes. We always instinctively knew there was something off about them, and in more recent years, the veil has been lifted on their sinister ways. Popular culture has drawn back the curtain and, in so doing, exposed supposedly benign children's entertainers for what they really are: serial killers, extra-dimensional monstrosities, supervillains, aliens, and, in particularly severe cases, Jerry Lewis.

With so much relatively new information on the dastardly intentions of clowns being immortalized on film, it can be difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. Luckily, there are still brave cultural champions willing to wade through the great primordial pool of greasepaint and honking noses, splitting the genius from the unwatchable. We're here to bring you the five best — and five worst — clown movies.

If you haven't seen Terrifier, congratulations on your ability to sleep a full eight hours without waking up in a cold sweat, but maybe stop bragging about it so much. 

An indie film that sat on the shelf for a few years before being released, Terrifier is one of those rare horror movies that doesn't seem to feel the need to over-explain its villain. The audience knows that he's a clown, probably with some demonic whatnots going on under his monochrome facade, and you know what? That's about it. He's silent, grinning, and more than delighted to go on a trip to Slaughtertown any time he can. He stalks, stabs, slinks, and smiles. He's a 21st century nightmare. 

Terrifier is a low-budget horror movie spinning off of an even lower-budget short film, and it's got "love letter to the good old days of horror" dripping off of it like viscera off a clown monster's chainsaw. It has gory practical effects. It has party girls getting mutilated. Darn it all, it has a clown turning a transient into a suit made out of skin. If you're down with the macabre, slasher throwback sickness, it's 100% worth looking up.

The words "so bad it's good" have been thrown around so much that they've pretty much lost all meaning at this point. Cultural interpretations of what's camp and what's just vanilla-flavored lameness ebb and flow over time. Somewhere, floating atop the tides of our willingness to accept silliness, there is the unsinkable ship that is Killer Klowns from Outer Space. 

Killer Klowns is a tough movie to sell on paper. No two ways about it, it's the story of a species of alien invaders who look, act, and accessorize like clowns. Their ships look like a circus tent and they kill with an array of weapons running the gamut from popcorn guns to living balloon animal attack dogs. It's pretty much the perfect movie if you live in places like Washington, Colorado, or across the hall from a guy who introduced himself by asking if you're a cop. There are even rumblings of an upcoming sequel from the original creators.

When it was first announced that Stephen King's It was being re-adapted for the big screen, fans of the 1990 TV movie might have been skeptical — but that lasted exactly as long as it took for them to see a picture of Bill Skarsgård in character as Pennywise the Dancing Clown, at which point they, like all of us, quit their jobs, changed their identities, moved across the country and hoped that he'd never be able to find them.

The new It movies aren't perfect. The CGI can be less than impressive, and there are unsatisfying moments. But as adaptations of million-page books about trans-dimensional ageless horrors go, they're just a gosh-darned hoot. They manage to pull believable performances out of the child stars, which is sort of the filmmaking equivalent of landing on Mars. Also, and this point can't be stressed enough, Bill Hader has never, not once, done anything but make everything he touches better by orders of magnitude.

There are arguably a number of characters in Zombieland who could be considered its star. Jesse Eisenberg is the audience surrogate, Emma Stone steals her scenes, Woody Harrelson is what every self-identified alpha male would see if they looked into a magic mirror that shows them their aspirations, and Abigail Breslin kicks ass in a part significantly removed from the Little Miss Sunshine situation she'd been associated with. And then there's Bill Murray's unexpected, legendary cameo, a magical scene that people still talk about a decade later. 

But maybe the real hero is that clown in the third act. More than just a final boss fight, he's the representation of all of Columbus' fears and self-defeating neuroses — a totem for everything that needs to be defeated. Through vanquishing him, Columbus manages to self-actualize and become a better man.

Also, it's just really cathartic watching him get smashed over the head with a carnival hammer.

Bobcat Goldthwait is a national treasure. Once a comedian and actor known for his aggressively annoying persona, he's become a director whose movies tend to be tragic, complicated, peculiar, excessive, and agonizing. Before World's Greatest Dad and God Bless America, he wrote and directed a movie called Shakes the Clown, and it's been dividing critics and audiences ever since.

The elevator pitch version is that it's the story of an alcoholic birthday clown who's framed for murder and has to outfox the borderline Mad Max-level gangs of performers who rule the entertainment circuit. The more complicated version is that it's Goldthwait's representation of the comedy cliques that exist at every open mic community in America. It watches like garlic: you'll either hate it or want it on everything. Some critics called it amazing. Some called it terrible. Martin Scorsese called it the Citizen Kane of alcoholic clown movies. Art is subjective, and there's no right answer, but if nothing else, Shakes the Clown is the only movie ever to feature a cameo by Robin Williams under the assumed name Marty Fromage.