A true rarity in film adaptations is faithfulness — which, admittedly, can be a slippery slope. Keep it too close and you risk your film becoming bloated and something that feels like it was meant to be a miniseries. Change too much and you simply lose your target audience. In the case of co-writer/director Eli Craig’s adaptation of Adam Cesare’s Clown in a Cornfield, he walks that tightrope with glee and never stumbles.
Granted, there is more to the book than how the film ends, but it still includes enough hinting at what could come next that you’d never know. Constantly zigzagging from hilarious to scary, filled with some awesome gags (pun intended), and even a surprising amount of heart — daddy/daughter relationships continue to be a big theme this year — with a sharp eye set on Middle America.
Quinn (Katie Douglas) and her father, Dr. Maybrook (Aaron Abrams), has just arrived in their new town of Kettle Springs, Missouri. Quinn quickly gets taken under the wing of the local high school clique and winds up going from detention to jail within days. The last of which is thanks to a mishap during the town’s annual Founder’s Day festival, where a float for the town’s clown mascot, Frendo, catches fire.
Soon enough, the teens decide to do what they do best and throw a party at the deserted Baypen corn syrup factory which was shut down a year earlier due to another fire. Before you can say “we all float down here,” Frendo arrives to spoil the fun and everyone winds up in a fight for their lives while trying to find out just who Frendo really is.
Laughs and blood are what’s on the menu with Craig keeping the tone of the novel while injecting it with his own brand of trope aversion therapy. A fantastic plot twist — miraculously not spoiled in the trailers — flips the film on its head and leaves the audience as bewildered as the book does. With a majority of the book taking place throughout one night, there was the need to trim things down, giving Craig the opportunity to streamline a lot of the events into a more practical timespan.
The teens are all played as expected, with Douglas making for a new final girl we can truly root for. Old school is the name of the game, making Clown in a Cornfield a fantastic throwback to our favorite lean and mean ’80s slashers. It never tries to reinvent the wheel while still giving us enough twists to keep us engaged. And for those not in the know, there are already two sequel novels, with Cesare currently working on a fourth entry. Hopefully Frendo and friends can draw enough attention in theaters, or its eventual Shudder premiere, for Craig to give us the sequels it deserves.
