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Sheila Sim and Anthony Steel in West of Zanzibar (1954)

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West of Zanzibar

He Who Gets Slapped: The Original Creepy Clown Movie
Jim Knipfel Sep 5, 2019

With the release of It Chapter Two, we take a look at one of the first creepy clown films.

As a culture, we seriously hate our clowns. A deep-seated and supposedly irrational fear of clowns is so commonplace it’s even been given a scientific name: coulrophobia. It’s hardly a surprise then that angry, axe-wielding or merely creepy clowns would become such a pop cultural mainstay, from The Simpsons and Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, and more recently from Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight to Stephen King’s It and It Chapter Two. Back in the day, the video store where I used to work carried (I counted) nineteen clown-themed horror movies, from Killer Klowns From Outer Space to Divine’s last film, Out of the Dark.

Evil Clown comics used to be a regular feature in National Lampoon. The 1928 silent film The Man Who Laughs...
See full article at Den of Geek
  • 10/4/2016
  • Den of Geek
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