‘Clown in a Cornfield’ Review: An Insightful Slasher for the Gen Z Age

Eli Craig's Clown in a Cornfield might just be the most fun you’ll have watching teens get butchered this year. Premiering at South by Southwest, the film is built on decades of slasher tradition, with plenty of humour wrapped in blood-splattered corn. Written by Craig and Carter Blanchard, and based on Adam Cesare’s hit YA horror novel of the same name, it doesn’t try to reinvent the slasher. It embraces traditions, straps it to a bloody clown tricycle, and rides it straight through the heart of a generational divide.

The film begins with a flashback to 1991. As dry leaves of corn are crushed under clown-size feet, the sound of a creepy jack-in-the-box establishes itself as more memorable than any score, a laughing clown popping out of the box. It’s quickly apparent that the characters in the film don’t know or care to follow the horror movie survival rules, as two teens, overcome by their horniness, are killed in the titular cornfield before they are about to have sex. You know you're in familiar territory from this opening sequence, tropes and all, but familiarity isn’t a flaw here. It’s the whole point. Clown in a Cornfield is a love letter to the slashers of the late ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, invoking the mood of Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Scream. But while those slashers were for adults about teens, Clown in a Cornfield has a YA heart and tone for a new audience. It twists its blade deep into the Gen Z experience.

The film follows Quinn (a compelling, emotionally grounded Katie Douglas), a high school senior forced to relocate to middle-of-nowhere Kettle Springs with her father (Aaron Abrams) after the tragic death of her mother. This adjustment, coupled with their grief, is the film’s emotional core as you see a father just trying to do his best and a daughter who’s tired of running from everything. The two arrive in a town that feels dead. A town where nothing fun happens. A town that feels stuck in the past and whose population is deeply resentful and deeply rooted in tradition. Kettle Springs is a town out of time, its adults clinging desperately to the “good old days,” while its teenagers just want to drink and party and escape the oppressive weight of nostalgia.

The Baypen Corn Syrup factory, once the town’s economic backbone, has gone up in flames. So too have the hopes of the community, smoldering under the weight of job loss, death, and a growing hatred for the younger generation. This hatred, directed at the teenagers Quinn soon befriends – Cole (Carson MacCormac), Janet (Cassandra Potenza), Ronnie (Verity Marks), Tucker (Ayo Solanke), and Matt (Alexandre Martin Deakin) – comes with the fact that they are believed to have burned down the factory. It’s easy to see why everyone’s fingers are pointed at them. For one, they make videos where they depict the old Baypen Corn Syrup mascot, Frendo the Clown, as a maniacal serial killer. There’s nothing older generations hate more than showing disrespect towards what the forefathers built. Frendo, in the teens’ depiction, becomes a twisted embodiment of that older generation. Frendo doesn’t just kill, he purges. And in a town like this, there’s nothing the older folks want to purge more than those who challenge backwards values and archaic traditions. It’s a brilliant thematic hook: Frendo isn’t just a slasher villain. He’s the festering embodiment of cultural rot, a walking, cackling metaphor for how tradition curdles into tyranny.

The town is gearing up for the upcoming Founder’s Day, a local holiday to celebrate the town’s invention of Baypen Corn Syrup by Cole’s family. This is also where the horror really kicks off, as Quinn and co indulge in a tradition of their own: a barn rave next to the titular cornfield. It's all fun, games, and hormones until Frendo crashes the party and starts slicing his way through the attendees like he's auditioning to replace Pennywise and Art the Clown in horror’s hall of fame. The kills? Brutal. From chainsaws to pitchforks, the deaths are increasingly gruesome. There’s also plenty of humour, often coming in the teens’ struggle to escape, whether trying to make a call on a rotary phone or struggling to work a stick shift while Frendo looms. It blends comedy and tension with technological illiteracy. "When your dad wants to teach you to drive stick, you fucking say yes," becomes a mantra for survival. Craig’s direction leans into voyeurism, frequently framing the group from Frendo’s point of view, playing cat-and-mouse games with the audience. Is he watching? Is he there? Or is that just the corn rustling in the wind? The sense of being trapped despite open spaces is perfectly executed.

The real strength of Clown in a Cornfield, though, lies beneath the carnage. It’s in its commentary on the generational divide. It's as subtle as a pitchfork to the gut, but it works, especially as it’s delivered through a lens that actually cares about the teens at the center of the story and the teens watching. The generational conflict is personified in characters like Arthur Hill (Kevin Durand) and Sheriff Dunne (Will Sasso) – the older guard who despise the young, even when they’re their own children. Arthur, Cole’s father, embodies the toxic pride of legacy, blaming the next generation for its failures, while the sheriff sees himself as a protector of values long since irrelevant. These men, and the town they represent, are not just frustrated – they’re furious.

Despite its strengths, the film is uneven at times. The tone occasionally wobbles, some dialogue is bad, and you know exactly who is going to get killed off first, but that’s part of the slasher charm. Clown in a Cornfield embraces what has been done before but adds plenty of surprises, too. There are moments of self-awareness that flirt with meta-commentary (think Scream), but never in a way that breaks the illusion. These kids aren’t parodying horror tropes – they’re just living in them. And we're in on the joke.

The film’s greatest legacy, though, might just be what it does for the underserved YA horror audience. For too long, slashers have ignored a group that has been so central to their narratives. Clown in a Cornfield looks at a new generation of teens and sees their struggles, validates their fears, and gives them a bloody good time without talking down to them. It lets them be dumb, smart, scared, brave, and flawed. The film also gives us another great final girl. Quinn is guarded, traumatized, and quietly resilient. The dynamic between her and her father brings heart and emotional depth to the piece. While the town sees her as a symbol of change, she just wants stability. She doesn’t want to be the one to fix anything. She’s tired. That exhaustion often comes with having to be tough to face what the older generations have created, bringing a relatability for a Gen Z crowd.

Clown in a Cornfield is not trying to be the next anything. It’s not trying to redefine horror. It’s here to throw a party in the middle of a generational battlefield, serve up some twisted justice, and let the blood run sweet with corn syrup. It's about catharsis. About rebellion. About survival in a world where the older generation has set Gen Zs up to fail. It's a slasher that understands what slashers are for – and who they’ve really been about.