In 1982, my family piled into our Ford station wagon and headed for the local theater to see Poltergeist. I was ten at the time, the youngest of four children. Ten is an age where you begin to fear things on a deeper, more cerebral level. But the movie was rated PG, so we went with it.
Today, this movie would easily warrant the stronger PG-13 rating. But there was no PG-13 in 1982. It was either G, PG or R. So the Motion Picture Association went for the middle ground. Bear this in mind, as we revisit the movie through the eyes of a ten-year-old.
The Clown Doll Cometh
This movie gives viewers a smorgasbord of scares. It features hellish entities, dark realms that “absorb” children, corpses bobbing like corks in an unfinished swimming pool, and gnarly trees that come to life. Parental guidance, indeed!
But there was one particular fright in Poltergeist that warped my ten-year-old sensibilities. It was the clown doll.
You know the scene, right? Little Robbie Freeling (who was close to my own age, at the time) lies in his bed, tossing and turning. He has insomnia. And who can blame him? By the time this scene comes around, the Freeling family has already endured a hellish series of attacks from otherworldly forces. Insomnia seems fitting.
The infamous clown from Poltergeist
Robbie soon realizes the source of his unease. It’s the clown. His seemingly innocent clown doll sits by the foot of his bed, gazing at him with painted-on eyes. Robbie tries to throw a shirt over the doll’s head, but it slides off with a tinkling of bells.
Moments later, after he settles back into the bed, he hears a soft whump as if something has fallen to the floor. And if you listen closely in this scene, you can hear the soft tinkling of a bell. You know the rest. And if you don’t, I won’t spoil it for you. (Watch the movie!) Suffice to say this clown is not a boy’s best friend.
When the movie ended, the Cornett clan piled back into the grocery grabber and headed home. But I had a problem. I couldn’t go to sleep that night. In my bedroom, perched high on a wall-mounted shelf, was a Howdy Doody doll.
Howdy was a red-headed “dummy” with freckled cherub cheeks, bright blue eyes, and a matching blue bandana. You could pull a string on the back of his skull to make his mouth move. Just a silly little doll. But on this night, he was a monster. His dimpled grin didn’t fool me. I knew his intentions. He would wait, with inhuman patience, as I drifted off to sleep, and then he would launch his attack.
My mother had to remove Howdy from my room, relegating him to a drawer or cabinet elsewhere in the house. But still I couldn’t sleep. The Poltergeist clown was in my head.
Beware of the False Face
This anecdote says a lot about clowns and how we perceive them. Spielberg and company wrote the clown doll into that movie for a reason. They knew it would make for a creepier scene and a scarier movie.
But why? What is it about clowns that give so many of us the heebie-jeebies?
Clowns have populated horror fiction for decades. Their origins can be traced back to 19th-century opera, with works like Pagliacci. And while they have their differences, they also share something in common. Their faces. Clowns wear a painted-on mask, a facade that hides their true emotion. As it turns out, our brains really don’t like those fixed, painted-on expressions.
On the Geisinger.org website, psychiatrist Robert Gerstman explained it this way:
“Since clowns paint on their smiles and frowns, you can’t read their emotions or know what they’re thinking. If a clown has a painted-on smile but isn’t acting or sounding happy, your brain gets mixed signals. This interrupts the pattern that your brain is used to, making you uneasy.”
Jerry Bubrick, a psychologist at the Child Mind Institute, agrees: “When you take away our ability to read someone’s expression, it’s disturbing because we don’t know what they’re feeling.”
A study conducted by the University of Sheffield concluded “that clowns are universally disliked by children. Some found them quite frightening and unknowable.”
So yes, there’s something to it.
Bill Skarsgard’s Pennywise
In horror movies, the fixed expressions of clowns and dolls belie their ulterior motives. Pennywise from It. The doll from Poltergeist. Chucky from Child’s Play. These and other examples show that clowns and dolls can make us cringe as easily as they make us laugh.
I’m not a child anymore. I’m forty-six, with a teenage daughter of my own. But some things never change. Some things are immutable. My daughter sat through The Exorcist like it was nothing. But she walked out of the living room the moment Bill Skarsgard’s Pennywise appeared in a storm drain. Why? Because she finds a creepy clown a helluva lot scarier than demonic possession. And she’s not alone on this one.
Here’s a strange-but-true factoid to drive this point home. Serial killer John Wayne Gacy used to perform at children’s hospitals and charities as “Patches the Clown.” Those are his costumes in the image below, displayed in the National Crime Museum.
John Wayne Gacy’s costumes. National Crime Museum. Photo by Becker1999 (Flickr)
What was it about clowns that appealed to a man like Gacy, a man with murderous intent? My guess: he liked how the makeup hid his true self. He could paint on a smile and sneer beneath it, and who would know?
Clowns show us one side while hiding another. And for that reason, they’ll always be scary.
Brandon Cornett is a longtime writer whose stories have appeared in the Mississippi Review and other journals. His first novel, Purgatory, a horror-based thriller, is now available through Amazon. His next novel, Olive Undead, will appear on Wattpad in summer 2020. Brandon also blogs about the horror genre here. The clown scene from Poltergeist comes in at #8 on his list of the scariest horror scenes with children.
