In 1981, Fortean writer Loren Coleman coined the term “phantom clown.” This describe alleged sightings of weirdo clowns scaring kids, that have reoccurred with enough frequency that a specific term was needed to describe the phenomenon. In 2014, a trio of filmmakers in Northampton, England would start to dress up as a clown and lurk around town. They attracted enough attention that copycat clowns started to pop up around the world. By 2016, this escalated into a full-blown public panic, fueled largely by social media making it easy to spread videos and accusations. It got to the point that law enforcement was getting involved and corporations stop selling clown masks. All of this suggest that the idea of a clown that spreads fear, instead of laughter, that performs devious acts, instead of jolly pranks, is a premise deeply ingrained in our culture that isn't going away any time soon. No matter how overexposed and overdone the trope might be. In 2020, author Adam Cesare was inspired by these events to write the novel, “Clown in a Cornfield.” Not long ago, “Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil” director Eli Craig would helm a film adaptation of Cesare's book which saw release back in May. So let's see if Craig and Cesare brought anything new to the well-worn premise.
Seventeen year old Quinn and her recently widowed dad move to the town of Kettle Springs, Missouri. For a hundred years, the Bayben Corn Syrup factory – and its mascot, Frendo the Clown – have been the centerpiece of the community. But the factory recently burned down and the town is starting to struggle. The group of kids Quinn falls in with have started using an evil version of Frendo as an unhinged serial killer in the internet horror shorts they make. After one such prank, Quinn spots an unknown individual dressed as Frendo in the background. Soon, a very real murderous version of Frendo begins to knock off the teenagers. It climaxes at the anniversary after-party the kids have in the cornfield every year. That's when multiple Frendos appear, wielding weapons and ready to dismember any young people they set their eyes on.
At the same time, “Clown in a Cornfield” isn't truly for the teenagers of 2025. From earlier on, the film adopts a blatantly obvious theme: The older generation always resents and fears the younger ones. The teachers are assholes to the kids, giving Quinn detention for no reason. The sheriff is always giving the youths a hard time. The father of Cole, Quinn's apparent love interest, is the town leader. He clearly has little affection for his boy. This proceeds a narrative turn that is so heavily foreshadowed that it's difficult to call it a twist. “Clown in a Cornfield” is trying to make a statement about how generational gaps are universal. Previous Frendo the Clown massacres took place in the twenties, sixties, and nineties, the feared subculture of the day always been the target. However, the film never truly addresses why all these grown-ups think the kids are no good. Mayor Hill makes empty platitudes about how Kettle Falls is a beacon of old fashioned, American values. The function of nostalgia for an idealized time and displacing of blame onto an easily scapegoated demographic is not considered. The adults of Kettle Falls simply hate the youths because it serves the plot.
Which points to another element of “Clown in a Cornfield” that lets me down: Why a clown? Pop culture is awash with evil clowns these days. You can always tell which writers and filmmakers are actually engaging with the concept and which are simply trying to cash in on our wide-spread cultural coulophobia. The Joker tells jokes. Pennywise danced and performed pranks. The Killer Klowns incorporated a circus theme into every aspect of their operation. Stitches committed murder in the form of elaborate pranks and Art seems perpetually, impishly amused by the mayhem he causes. Frendo doesn't do any of that shit. He leaves a jack-in-the-box as a calling card and wears honking oversized shoes but that's about it, as far as antics go. You could replace the clown get-up in this movie with any other costume and the story would remain unchanged. For that matter, why is a clown a mascot of a corn syrup manufacturer anyway? Make it make sense!
I've spent my entire life as a dog person, preferring the goofball charms and devoted loyalty of our canine friends. The woman who insists she wants to marry me, meanwhile, has a deep affection for cats. I don't dislike kitties but, admittedly, have found the ones I've previously cohabited with to be assholes. Being engaged to a cat person quickly makes you into a cat person too. As much as felines are fluffy, snuggly little cutie-pies that run the internet and get scared of cucumbers, they also have a distinctly different cultural legacy. The ancient Egyptians and Romans venerated cats as symbols of the gods. As pagan religions were demonized by the rise of Christianity, cats became associated with other, unholy deities. In medieval times, the old and unmarried women who lived on the edge of town and brewed concoctions kept cats to kill the mice that ate wheat and yeast. Thus, cats became the familiars of witches and warlocks, emissaries of the devil said to suckle from hidden third nipples or carry their masters to profane sabbats. Most of the devil-fearing hysteria has been forgotten but we still associate black cats with bad luck and cackling crones. Various cultures around the world have stories of demonic cat beasts, the Celts, the Japanese, the Quechua tribes of South America. Unlike the dogs who stick by their humans, cats are independent creatures who wander off on their own. Who knows what mysterious worlds precious pink toe-beans pitter-patter into? What sights do glowing, ever-watchful, slit eyes observe that we do not? All of which is to say that there is tradition of horror stories about our fuzzy feline friends, including a handful of movies. One such example is the 1977 omnibus feature, "The Uncanny."
Wilbur Gray, an author specializing in the paranormal, arrives at the home of his publisher to present his new manuscript. The book puts forth the theory that the common house cat is actually an otherworldly creature capable of great evil. He supports his case with three incidents: In 1912, London, wealthy governess Miss Malkin intended to leave her considerable fortune to her pet cats. Her maid, Janet, plots to steal Malkin's will and rewrite it so that her nephew – Janet's boyfriend – is the sole recipient. The scheme results in the elderly woman's death, which her cats seek to avenge. In 1975, Quebec, a strange girl named Lucy moved in with her aunt. She brings her black cat, Wellington, with her. Her cousin, Angela, resents the girl's presence. The bullying goes on until Wellington helps Lucy punish her abusers. In 1936, Hollywood, horror star Valentine De'ath engineers an on-set accident to kill his wife. He replaces her with a younger co-star, his mistress. Upon returning home, he discovers his late wife's cat has delivered kittens, which he also disposes of. The mama feline stalks the man to enact her own unfortunate “accidents.”
If there's any one boundary preventing felines from being a more potent horror trope, it is that cats are, it should go without saying, cute. Bird decimating predators though they may be, our kitty friends have big eyes and chubby bodies and fuzzy faces and they buzz when we hold them. All of "The Uncanny's" segments struggle with this dynamic and none more so than the first. The story features the grisly habit of postmortem predation, which is easily its nastiest shock. However, attempts to create chills from shots of floofy kitties jumping on someone's face do not have the same impact. Any cat owner can relate to their pets trying to trip them as they go down the stairs but that doesn't make for an especially creepy horror movie fate. The first segment is also undone by a largely uninteresting protagonist that is never developed much. Janet spends most of the episode hiding in the pantry from the houseful of killer cats, which does not make her seem like an especially wily or compelling antihero. Though I did sort of like the parallels of her being forced to live off rotting preserves and peanut butter, the same way the cats are forced to eat their former owner's corpse to survive. Regardless, this opening episode can't make cliches like the eccentric old millionaire leaving their fortune to their pets or a much-sought will driving the plot all that interesting.
The second segment at least gives us a main character we can root for, in theory anyway. Lucy is, after all, an orphaned child thrust into a situation where she's resented by someone meant to be her friend, merely because she's taking attention from the other girl and has something she does not. Unfortunately, the young actress playing Lucy – Katrina Holden Bronson, the daughter of Charles Bronson and Jill Ireland – seems to have been dubbed. I think Chloe Franks, as Angela, might have been dubbed too. Which would be weird, since Franks wasn't subjected to that in her other seventies horror movies, such as "Straw Dogs" or "Tales from the Crypt." The result is extremely distracting and constantly took me out of the story. Angela's torment of Lucy includes pelting her with remote control airplanes and bickering with her, which is more annoying than traumatizing. You'll notice the plot makes the spooky cat a secondary feature. The feline comes back into focus at the end, during a rather silly climax that features some less than convincing special effects.
I was ready to dismiss "The Uncanny" as a miscalculated production until the third story finally won me over. That's largely thanks to Donald Pleasence as the murderous movie star. Pleasence goes for full camp in the role, carrying the haughty actor type with an overly elevated sense of importance about himself. He seems to regard murder as more of an annoying inconvenience than a serious criminal act. Exactly the kind of cartoonish jerk we want to see get his comeuppance, in other words. Pleasence brings lots of bitchy charm, playing the guy as so ridiculously vile – he literally flushes kittens down the toilet! – that you can't help but be entertained by him. That silly air finally makes the slightly improbable premise of "The Uncanny" easier to accept. The farcical tone, the somewhat exaggerated gore and the blatantly goofy supporting characters, leads to a properly amusing climax that makes a literary cliche into a literal cliche. I bet that joke was the first thing writer Michel Parry thought of.
Peter Cushing appears in the framing device, also giving an entertainingly hammy performance as the author made nervous by all the cats lurking around. Horror regulars like Cushing, Pleasence, and Ray Milland going the tongue-in-cheek route suggests that each of "The Uncanny's" episodes needed a recognizable actor camping it up. (That was often the strategy of the Amicus anthologies this film is something of an unofficial follow-up to.) The concluding moment is an ironic joke – cats really do control the world, because they tell us what to do, something any cat owner can attest to – and that makes me think all of "The Uncanny" is meant to be taken as comedy. It does not truly work but the final story and the wraparound are worth seeing for Pleasence and Cushing. In the short canon of movies that attempt to make cats scary, "The Uncanny" is classier than "Uninvited" or "Strays" but can't overcome the fact that your common puss-puss invokes warm and fuzzy feelings and not chilling ones. [6/10]
Wilbur Gray, an author specializing in the paranormal, arrives at the home of his publisher to present his new manuscript. The book puts forth the theory that the common house cat is actually an otherworldly creature capable of great evil. He supports his case with three incidents: In 1912, London, wealthy governess Miss Malkin intended to leave her considerable fortune to her pet cats. Her maid, Janet, plots to steal Malkin's will and rewrite it so that her nephew – Janet's boyfriend – is the sole recipient. The scheme results in the elderly woman's death, which her cats seek to avenge. In 1975, Quebec, a strange girl named Lucy moved in with her aunt. She brings her black cat, Wellington, with her. Her cousin, Angela, resents the girl's presence. The bullying goes on until Wellington helps Lucy punish her abusers. In 1936, Hollywood, horror star Valentine De'ath engineers an on-set accident to kill his wife. He replaces her with a younger co-star, his mistress. Upon returning home, he discovers his late wife's cat has delivered kittens, which he also disposes of. The mama feline stalks the man to enact her own unfortunate “accidents.”
The second segment at least gives us a main character we can root for, in theory anyway. Lucy is, after all, an orphaned child thrust into a situation where she's resented by someone meant to be her friend, merely because she's taking attention from the other girl and has something she does not. Unfortunately, the young actress playing Lucy – Katrina Holden Bronson, the daughter of Charles Bronson and Jill Ireland – seems to have been dubbed. I think Chloe Franks, as Angela, might have been dubbed too. Which would be weird, since Franks wasn't subjected to that in her other seventies horror movies, such as "Straw Dogs" or "Tales from the Crypt." The result is extremely distracting and constantly took me out of the story. Angela's torment of Lucy includes pelting her with remote control airplanes and bickering with her, which is more annoying than traumatizing. You'll notice the plot makes the spooky cat a secondary feature. The feline comes back into focus at the end, during a rather silly climax that features some less than convincing special effects.
Peter Cushing appears in the framing device, also giving an entertainingly hammy performance as the author made nervous by all the cats lurking around. Horror regulars like Cushing, Pleasence, and Ray Milland going the tongue-in-cheek route suggests that each of "The Uncanny's" episodes needed a recognizable actor camping it up. (That was often the strategy of the Amicus anthologies this film is something of an unofficial follow-up to.) The concluding moment is an ironic joke – cats really do control the world, because they tell us what to do, something any cat owner can attest to – and that makes me think all of "The Uncanny" is meant to be taken as comedy. It does not truly work but the final story and the wraparound are worth seeing for Pleasence and Cushing. In the short canon of movies that attempt to make cats scary, "The Uncanny" is classier than "Uninvited" or "Strays" but can't overcome the fact that your common puss-puss invokes warm and fuzzy feelings and not chilling ones. [6/10]
Continuing last September's strategy of watching and writing about the episodes of “The Twilight Zone” that are actually well known, here's maybe the second most widely parodied and referenced installment. “It's a Good Life” is set in the small town of Peaksville, Ohio wherein lives six year old Anthony Fremont. For reasons no one can decipher, Anthony is omnipotent and omnipresent, able to hear everyone's thoughts and alter any facet of reality whenever and however he pleases. The first thing he did was either teleport Peaksville to an alternate universe or cast the rest of the world into non-existence. Perhaps thinking it “into the cornfield,” the default and vague punishment Anthony reserves for those things that displease him. Either way, mister and missus Fermont, Aunt Alice, and everyone else have no other option than to constantly think happy thoughts and praise Anthony for every horrible thing he does. The isolation has made life more difficult, supplies dwindling, but still they go on, reassuring Anthony that all his actions are “good.” His parents attempt to throw a birthday party for their neighbor, Dan Hollis. Dan, well fed up with living under Anthony's reign of terror, gets drunk and starts verbally attacking the boy. This does not go well for him.
In Jerome Bixby's original short story, Anthony is three years younger than he is here. It's specified in the text that the boy does not always act maliciously. In the past, he has attempted to make the world a better place too. However, he is a child, inexperienced and naive, and even his better-natured acts had unintended, horrific consequences. Rod Serling's adaptation removes any of his sympathetic qualities. However, the intent remains the same. Anthony Fremont is a monster, directly referred to as such in the episode. He casually turns animals into hideous creatures, ending life and warping reality without a second thought. Every adult lives in terror of him, constantly putting on a big, flashy, fake smile. That veneer of bliss is always on the verge of cracking, the absolute hysteria underneath always visible. However, through it all, Anthony remains a little boy. He acts selfishly because he's too young to know better, to know that other people have feelings different from his own or that whatever pleases him isn't necessarily what's best for everyone. Within “It's a Good Life,” the casual sociopathy of children who are still processing the world around them is exaggerated to a state of prolonged horror. It's not too difficult to see a moral in here about not raising your kids to be selfish brats, to inspire a sense of empathy for others inside them, least you get stuck with a little Anthony Fremont of your own.
Rod Serling, however, usually intended a political – or at least socially aware – subtext to his writing. Considering “It's a Good Life” aired in 1961, well into the Cold War and only a year before the Cuban Missile Crisis, it's easy to assume that the townsfolk living in constant fear of an all-powerful figure is meant as a criticism of living under a dictatorship. That all the adults in town must live with the limited supplies of what's left over, while Anthony can get whatever he wants, certainly recalls the life of starving commoners in a country ruled by a selfish tyrant. Or perhaps forced smiles and repeated vocalizations of it all being good is a commentary on the crushing conformity of the Red Scare era. Whether it was Joseph Stalin or Joseph McCarthy that Rod was thinking of, comparing either totalitarianism force to the undisciplined whims of a child makes Rod's feelings about such men clear.
However, watching “It's a Good Life” tonight, another thought occurred to me. Anthony is essentially a god, knowing all and seeing all. The adults around him praise his actions, putting up with them no matter how awful they might be. They insist that the TV broadcast Anthony wills into being – footage of stop-motion dinosaurs fighting to the death – is better than any of the original options for entertainment. They do this because they fear displeasing him and the subsequent wrath. Thus, we have a population forced into a code of living that they do not agree with but follow because they'll be smited otherwise. Is Anthony Fremont the Old Testament God, demanding constant praise despite raining nothing but death and destruction on the world? What kind of “loving” God operates on a “love and praise me unconditionally and uncritically or else” philosophy? Through this lens, “It's a Good Life” becomes an indictment of the idea that people do good only because the moral codes of society instruct them to. In his drunken rage, Dan Hollis begs someone to smash Anthony's head in with a fire poker. Nobody does it. Perhaps because of the fear that, if Anthony dies, everything else will go with him. What kind of freedom is that, forced to appease a petty and vengeful God only because you would cease to be without him? I think I'd take the cornfield over that.
However you interpret it, “It's a Good Life” remains an effectively chilling half-hour of television. That Serling and his team dropped such a bomb of nightmare logic, most of the mechanics behind this scenario left unexplained, the ending distressingly open-ended, shows how cutting edge “The Twilight Zone” was at the time. Most of the truly horrible stuff Anthony does is kept off-screen. He creates a three-headed gopher and then wills it to die, the audience only seeing the facial reactions of the adults watching. Most infamously, grouchy Dan Hollis is transformed into a jack-in-the-box for his tirade. The implication sure seems to be that Anthony stuck Dan's decapitated head on a spring. Such vagueness makes these ideas a lot creepier than seeing the mutations could. The cast is what truly sells this one. John Larch and Cloris Leachman, as the parents, do an excellent job of plastering on smiles over the obvious state of panic and anxiety they live in. Billy Mumy – who later referenced this episode in a song by his weirdo comedy band Barnes & Barnes – balances being a typically smiling and freckle-faced kid with being a wide-eyed, unsettling force. The visuals, simple, shadowy, and stately, convey the feeling of the ordinary disrupted by the inexplicable. It's good, in other words. Real good. I'm real glad I watched this. [9/10]
In Jerome Bixby's original short story, Anthony is three years younger than he is here. It's specified in the text that the boy does not always act maliciously. In the past, he has attempted to make the world a better place too. However, he is a child, inexperienced and naive, and even his better-natured acts had unintended, horrific consequences. Rod Serling's adaptation removes any of his sympathetic qualities. However, the intent remains the same. Anthony Fremont is a monster, directly referred to as such in the episode. He casually turns animals into hideous creatures, ending life and warping reality without a second thought. Every adult lives in terror of him, constantly putting on a big, flashy, fake smile. That veneer of bliss is always on the verge of cracking, the absolute hysteria underneath always visible. However, through it all, Anthony remains a little boy. He acts selfishly because he's too young to know better, to know that other people have feelings different from his own or that whatever pleases him isn't necessarily what's best for everyone. Within “It's a Good Life,” the casual sociopathy of children who are still processing the world around them is exaggerated to a state of prolonged horror. It's not too difficult to see a moral in here about not raising your kids to be selfish brats, to inspire a sense of empathy for others inside them, least you get stuck with a little Anthony Fremont of your own.
However, watching “It's a Good Life” tonight, another thought occurred to me. Anthony is essentially a god, knowing all and seeing all. The adults around him praise his actions, putting up with them no matter how awful they might be. They insist that the TV broadcast Anthony wills into being – footage of stop-motion dinosaurs fighting to the death – is better than any of the original options for entertainment. They do this because they fear displeasing him and the subsequent wrath. Thus, we have a population forced into a code of living that they do not agree with but follow because they'll be smited otherwise. Is Anthony Fremont the Old Testament God, demanding constant praise despite raining nothing but death and destruction on the world? What kind of “loving” God operates on a “love and praise me unconditionally and uncritically or else” philosophy? Through this lens, “It's a Good Life” becomes an indictment of the idea that people do good only because the moral codes of society instruct them to. In his drunken rage, Dan Hollis begs someone to smash Anthony's head in with a fire poker. Nobody does it. Perhaps because of the fear that, if Anthony dies, everything else will go with him. What kind of freedom is that, forced to appease a petty and vengeful God only because you would cease to be without him? I think I'd take the cornfield over that.
I don't know why Morticia gets high-lighted in this episode's title when the entire Addams Family meets royalty here. Maybe that sounded catchier? Nevertheless: Gomez's Aunt Millie comes to visit 0001 Cemetery Lane. Her late husband was a prince so, despite him blowing through his entire fortune (save some seemingly useless oil stocks), Millie still insists on being treated like a princess. She demands the entire family fall into line, Morticia assuming the role of lady-in-waiting, Gomez as caviler, Fester as the court jester, and Lurch as the loyal service. Millie also brings along Lady Fingers, her literal handmaiden. Thing is immediately smitten with her. When Millie is eventual offended by the Addams' inability to conform to her vision, she takes Lady Ringers with her. That leaves poor Thing devastated. Gomez and Morticia must think of some scheme to get Millie back to the house and get these hands reunited.
This is clearly an episode where the title came first and the rest of the script flowed from there. Someone – credited writer Leo Rifkin, I guess – figured the Addamses interacting with a snooty would-be princess would lead to some solid gags. And it does. Fester's attempts at playing court jester, telling some corny jokes, got a chuckle out of me. Lurch sewing an accordion into his pants becomes an amusing running gag. Princess Millie is too eccentric for even this famously eccentric brood and quickly gets fed up. That tracks, of course. The Addams Family has no use for monarchs, preferring to keep things individualistic and chaotic. The minute she's gone, Fester and Lurch celebrate in a one-sided fashion that also produced a sensible chortle. When the family must inevitably back-track on throwing Millie out, that leads to the one gag that spotlights Wednesday and Pugsley. Though it's a decent one.
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