Seriously, did you see what happened to Georgie? All he wanted was his boat!!
Damn you Pennywise…
I think the actual phenomenon might be in fact Uncanny Valley.
Otherwise known as “Almost, but not quite, entirely like human” … :dubious:
As a clown I don’t wear make up, speak loudly, or make bold or sudden movements specifically to avoid frightening kids. A clown is generally strange, loud, and making threatening movements while violating your personal space. That’s why children are scared of them. For some people, that fear carries over to adulthood.
Now then, wanna balloon? They float. We all float down here. You’ll float too.
For me, I can trace it back to Sesame Street.
It was a film clip they’d play, occasionally (if I saw it, it would have been before…1988 or so, I think.), that showed a time-lapse of a normal guy putting on clown makeup. IIRC—and it WAS burned into my memory at a pretty early age, so I’m fairly confident of this—it started with a shot of the guy’s face, in makeup, and him intoning in a deep, serious voice,
"I…am a Clown."
…Followed by the meat of the clip itself, which showed the fellow putting on/removing his makeup, to show that it really was just a person under the clown-white.
Maybe if I were a little older, it wouldn’t have gotten to me. Maybe if he had a nicer voice, or a “friendlier” looking face (either one of them), or if the film quality itself had been better than that of a high school health film made just after the introduction of not entirely lifelike color.
In any case, I couldn’t stand that goddamn thing. Scared the the hell out of me. And I liked Return to Oz as a kid. Does THAT say anything about it?
Oh…and, also, the scary nightmare firefighter clown in The Brave Little Toaster, with the hose that shot liquid forks and who breathed smoke. That guy probably didn’t help.
I’m just not sure what it is, maybe it’s just that they are anything but funny…which is all they’re supposed to be. Being in a room with a clown was strange as a child and awkward as an adult.
To give this condition a name, it’s coulrophobia.
Read about some study that made up various monster pictures and showed them to little children to see how scary they were. When you start with a human face and start changing things, the scare factor goes up to some maximum, but as the thing gets very very far from human the scare factor goes down again. So, clowns are somewhere near that big sweet spot.
My theory is that we’re evolutionarily programmed to pick healthy humans as mates (so our kids have good genes) and friends (so we don’t catch some illness) by preferring normal looks. I think this is why people unfortunate enough to be disfigured often find they’re stigmatized somehow. It’s this automatic system, and it is much too unsophisticated to distinguish between genetic deformity (which even evolution shouldn’t mind in friends) and injury (which probably evolution shouldn’t mind in mates) and new irrelevant phenomena like clown makeup (which evolution shouldn’t even notice).
Scene: Bruce Wayne, wealthy inhabitant of Wayne Manor, sits in his chair contremplating his future. How can he disguise himself in his vendetta against the sort of scum who killed his parents, and at the same time startle and disorient his opponents? Some sort of costume, perhaps. But what.
Suddenly the window bursts inward, and lying on the floor is…
…a Clown!
Inspiration strikes!
“Yes!” he shouts, “A Clown! I shall become a Clown! Criminals FEAR Clowns! No one will recognize me when I fly through the night as ClownMan, dealing out justice with thrown pies and squirts of seltzer water!” He husrles away to his basement lab and shop, to prepare the Clown Suit, with its Utility Belt of Clown weapons. He leaves the clown supine on his carpet.
Five minutes later a bat flies in through the broken window, but there’s no one to notice.
One of the things that seems to be hardest for adults to understand is that a kid doesn’t perceive the world in the same way; they don’t have the same information, the same acquired reflexes. Many kids are terrified the first time they see a man with a beard. They stare at people who look “unusual” to them. The first time my parents took me to a movie, I was four; the first time they took me to the circus, six. Some friends took their 2yo to a movie recently and the kid was in tears until they got out, although they’ve been using the TV as a babysitter; he’d never had a problem sleeping with the lights off but now he’s terrified. Way to go :smack:
As a child, I always loathed clowns rather than fearing them. I didn’t know about fear of clowns until I read an article about Federico Fellini and how he turned his childhood fear of clowns into cinematic art. I resonated with his negative emotions, but still didn’t get scared, just went on loathing them. I resented that we kids were supposed to like them when they were just so… stoopit.
The most disturbing clown scene I ever saw was not in a horror film. It was in Born on the Fourth of July where Ron Kovic comes back from the Vietnam War to a 4th of July parade, and sees a bearded hippie dressed as a clown, giving him the peace sign. It kind of brought home to him how much America had changed while he was away. That was the turnaround point where he began to oppose the war.
And Roberto Benigni as a comedian in a Nazi concentration camp? Absolutely brilliant, funny, and heartwarming. Mille baci.
See, this is why I like you, Auto, even though other people think you’re no more than…er, a certain confession.
This is a great line, and oh-so-very-true. I’m not actively afraid of clowns, and even have laughed at them on occasion, but mostly they’re just - faintly creepy. Someone who goes around in heavy makeup, smiling all the time, forever hiding their true feelings, is a bit icky.
I was never a fan of clowns growing up.
I don’t think clowns in person are scary. But I think images of clowns are scary. Jus… creepy. And that was very early in childhood. I had a picture of a clown on my wall, and in the daytime I didn’t mind it at all. But at night I could see the clown mask leering down at me…
Meh-that wasn’t nearly as creepy as I thought it would be. The part where he gave the kid hamburgers, near his waist-that was creepy, but the whole thing was kinda lame.
But that was soooo not Ronald McDonald. BTW, I have a doll of the REAL Ronald. (And I’m not afraid of it, either).
But then, I’m not afraid of clowns. I find them more annoying than anything else.
For me it is about masks, whether painted on or otherwise, that distort the features of the face. (Similarly, I also find heavily made-up women rather creepy. And don’t even come near me with those fake painted talons you call nails. shiver)
Ditto. They should have their pituitary glands snipped and remain stunted and freakish forever.
You forget - Criminals are a cowardly and superstitious lot. 
Hmmm… the voice, the look… I think that Ronald McDonald is Willard Scott.
whoah … I remember that. For the longest time I thought they recycled their makeup and was fairly awed by the process. CTW never seemed to understand that most kids aren’t from New York City, and that people from NYC can be really creepy to kids.
I too am averse to clowns.
Not trying to offend anyone, but isn’t this the stereotype of a Southern woman? I know, I know, bless my heart.
The only clowns I’ve ever seen that I didn’t just loathe or fear on sight were the ones in the movie Rize and that’s a totally other world of clowning.