The Many Lives of Scary Clowns

Essays on Pennywise, Twisty, the Joker, Krusty and More

Buch | Softcover

182 Seiten

2022
McFarland & Co Inc (Verlag)
978-1-4766-8091-0 (ISBN)

Artikel merken

The frightening yet comic clown is one of the best and most enduring characters in literature, theater, television, and film. This volume offers an in-depth analysis of the clown horror genre, covering topics such as nostalgia, race, class, and new portrayals of the scary clown as zombies or phantoms.

The frightening yet comic clown is one of the best and most enduring characters in literature, theater, television, and film. Across the centuries, from Shakespeare's Porter in Macbeth to Edgar Allan Poe's "Hop-Frog," or Stephen King's Pennywise, horror and comedy have blended to create the perfect recipe for entertainment.

This volume gives an in-depth analysis of the clown horror genre, including essays by revered horror scholars such as Kevin Wetmore, Dale Bailey, Kim Hester Williams, Jennifer K. Cox, and Joanna Parypinski. Their essays cover topics such as nostalgia, race, class, and new portrayals of the scary clown as zombies or phantoms. It also offers interviews with actors and directors working in the clown horror genre: Eoghan McQuinn (Stitches), Kevin Kangas (Fear of Clowns), and Jaysen Buterin (Kill Giggles). Some of fiction's most terrifying creations--like the Killer Klowns, Captain Spaulding, Art the Clown, Krusty, Frowny, the Joker, and Twisty--jig through these pages of analysis and deconstruction, asking what these many iterations of scary clowns have to say about our society and its fears.

Writer and actor Ron Riekki has won several screenplay awards including best sci-fi/fantasy from the International Family Film Festival, best comedy from the Los Angeles Film Awards and the Nuclear Pen Award from the GenreBlast Film Festival.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Ron Riekki

Part One: Television and Film Clown Horror

A Clown in the Living Room: The Sinister Clown on Television

Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.

Killer Klowns vs. the Blob: Klowning Around in the Generation

Dale Bailey

Corpses, Rejects, Afterlives: Welcome to Zombieland

Jason V. Brock

“Art for Art’s Sake”: Art the Clown, Visuality, and the Cruelty of Allegoresis

Mattius Rischard

Clowns, Bogeymen, and the Anxiety of Strangers: Analyzing the Cautionary Elements of Jon Watts’ Clown (2014)

Debaditya Mukhopadhyay

Out of the White (Terror) and into the Black (Presence): Difference as Monstrous in Stephen King’s

It: Chapter

Kim Hester Williams

Part Two: Real-Life Clown Horror

The Return of the Killer Clowns: A Field Guide to Surviving the Zombie Clown Apocalypse

Jennifer K. Cox

The Transcendental Anonymity and Moral Ambiguity of Phantom Clowns

Joanna Parypinski

From Scream to Screen: “Killer Clown” John Wayne Gacy on Film

Benjamin Radford

Part Three: Interviews and Accounts

Interview with Kevin Kangas (Fear of Clowns, 2004)

Ron Riekki

Stitches (2012)

Eoghan McQuinn

Interview with Jaysen Buterin (Kill Giggles, 2020)

Ron Riekki

About the Contributors

Index

Erscheinungsdatum	31.03.2022
Zusatzinfo	bibliographies, index
Verlagsort	Jefferson, NC
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	245 g
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Film / TV
ISBN-10	1-4766-8091-4 / 1476680914
ISBN-13	978-1-4766-8091-0 / 9781476680910
Zustand	Neuware