As jovial as Bozo and Ronald McDonald are, clowns have always been a little creepy. There’s something inhuman about their made-up faces and exaggerated mannerisms, whether they appear in circuses, television, or even more serious theatre. While we normally think of clowns as incessantly cheerful (no doubt influenced by jesters and circus clowns), there’s also a long history of tragic and sad clowns. The “evil clown,” however, is an invention of the last century, and this monster originates from a gruesome place.

Looking over the lists of movies and TV shows featuring evil clowns, I can’t help but notice how almost all of them come from the 80s and onward. What could have happened to sway public opinion about clowns in the 70s and 80s that an entire genre of “clown horror” would arise? Well, for one, serial killer/rapist John Wayne Gacy rose to prominence in the late 70s, and part of Gacy’s psychosis included dressing as a clown. Gacy worked many charity events in his alter egos as “Pogo the Clown” and “Patches the Clown”, and according to author Tim Cahill, Gacy felt that dressing as a clown allowed him to regress to childhood. (You creeped out yet? I’m creeped out.) Shortly after this infamous Killer Clown made headlines, our pop culture began to reflect what I suspect people knew all along: clowns are creepy.

Now, just because Gacy’s arrest and the sudden glut of clown horror happened around the same time doesn’t necessarily mean one caused the other. Still, the idea of scary clowns was certainly in the atmosphere at this point in American history (along with the general phenomenon of “stranger danger”), so authors and filmmakers easily capitalized on it. Eight years after Gacy’s arrest, we got arguably the definitive scary clown story: Stephen King’s novel It, which prominently features a monster posing as a clown to abduct children. Tim Curry’s iconic portrayal of Pennywise the Dancing Clown in the 1990 adaptation of It emotionally scarred a generation and ensured clown horror wasn’t just a passing fad. The record-breaking success of the 2017 It remake only further confirms clowns are here to stay as part of the horror monster pantheon.

Be it Gacy or Pennywise or any of the other myriad killer clowns,
scary clowns represent an subversion of expectations;
they personify a corruption and twisting of innocence,
a cheerful visage with murderous intentions,
all the glee of a clown focused instead on mayhem.
Fueled by a historical psychopath, killer clowns make us distrust the staples of childhood and view the world around us with skepticism and terror.
What’s hiding behind those painted-on grins?

That’s why clowns are scary.

Additional Note:
There’s one big exception to the “killer clowns became a thing after John Wayne Gacy” theory: The Joker. Originally inspired by the 1928 German Expressionist film The Man Who Laughs (which features a tragic protagonist with a deformed harlequin grin), the Joker debuted in Batman #1 in 1940 as the perfect opposite to the caped crusader. While Batman represents goodness cloaked in darkness, the Joker is pure malevolence and insanity disguised in whimsy. His cinematic portrayal by Jack Nicholson in 1989 cemented his status as a monster, and Heath Ledger famously took the character in an even more chaotic direction in 2008’s The Dark Knight. Joaquin Phoenix looks to be channeling more of the ’89 Joker aesthetic in the upcoming 2019 Joker film, and looking at the test footage of Phoenix’s Joker, he’s even using the sharp-cornered lip lines Gacy made infamous. Of course, there was also Suicide Squad, but I don’t like talking about Suicide Squad.