Maybe you had a bad experience with one at a birthday party, circus, or fair when you were younger. Or maybe the Stephen King movie “IT” scared the living crap out of you. Either way, the fear of clowns -or Coulrophobia- is pretty common among kids, teens, and adults alike.

evil clown

That portrayal of ‘Pennywise’ in IT, was terrifying, (Though, to be fair, Tim Curry is pretty unsettling in most of his roles) and it spurred an entire genre of movies that have haunted many individuals. Eerily enough, it isn’t just the fear brought from these movies that scares people, it’s the very really possibility of a ‘killer clown’. One man, named John Wayne Gacy often threw block parties for his neighbors and friends. During these parties he would dress as a clown to entertain the children. As it turns out, he was arrested in 1978 for the rape and murder of thirty-three boys and young men. Twenty seven of them were found in the crawl space under the floor in his house. Though he never killed while in his clown suit and makeup, this terrible happenstance made the idea of a ‘killer clown’ very real.

But most of this just re-affirms an already existing fear for people. Because it isn’t really the fact that “it’s a clown” that makes it scary. Most people have had their fear of clowns since they were children, and children are particularly sensitive to things being ‘not right’. They often cry at the sight of mascots, even if it is something very cute like a mouse or rabbit. It’s the simple fact that they know what size that creature should be, and to see it ten times larger is unnatural and scary. Clown costumes have unnatural hair colors, their faces and expressions are either concealed or exaggerated by thick make-up, their voices are changed to sound higher pitched or goofier. All of these things take away the normal human aspects of the person and leave you wondering what it is they are really like, or perhaps what they really are.

May we reconvene under the blood red moon,
-Black Widow