SPOILER ALERT: This story spoils all the twists and turns of “Clown in a Cornfield,” so be warned!
“Clown in a Cornfield” is a certified indie hit, earning IFC’s biggest opening weekend to date. Based on the hit YA horror book, what differentiates the film from other slashers is a mid-movie twist that flips the rules on their head.
The twist? The haunting Frendo the Clown, which had been previously glimpsed dispatching teens in a potentially supernatural manner, descends on a farmhouse party filled with drunk teens. But after one gory death gets the revelers’ attention, not one Frendo emerges from the cornfield, but a whole mob of bloodthirsty killer clowns start running out at once.
It was an indelible image for horror fans this year, and led to a compelling reveal, with all the adults planning to kill the kids of the town for rejecting tradition. It’s a twist that demands deeper analysis, as director Eli Craig and Adam Cesare, the author of the “Clown in a Cornfield” series, discussed in a recent Variety feature.
But now that the movie is out and being discussed, Cesare sat down with Variety once more to break down the twists in his book that made it into the big screen adaptation.
The movie’s biggest “Oh shit!” moment is when a bunch of Frendos come running out of the cornfield at the party. Was that always a twist you envisioned from the start?
Yes. It became such a battle — the motivations and idea of “Well, they can’t kill their own kids!” Not that I had any kind of contentious relationship with Harper editorial or anything. I love my editor over there. But really early that was the main creative discussion we were having on the book. “Can you kill this many children and have the culprits partly be the parents of the kids?” It’s getting hazy now because it was six or seven years ago, but I just remember so many phone calls walking around my small Philadelphia apartment on speakerphone and, we had a lot of neighbors too and some very religious neighbors, as I’m saying, “Yes, they can kill their own kids! Believe me, it’ll be great!” [Laughs]
This is a theme with publishing in general, especially in children’s publishing: Horror fans have fairly specific interests. Things that you can pitch will go over with the horror crowd that won’t go over with non-horror people. Especially in Book 3, there’s just a lot of stuff where I’m like, “I know this will work. Trust me. This is my life. I love this stuff more than anything.” Not to make it a casual versus elite fans kind of thing, but if you talk to non-horror people when you’re a horror person, you’ll get looks. I completely understand it, as someone who’s in a relationship with someone who’s not a horror person. Non-horror people can kind of pull you back to be like, “Oh, that’s an absurd thing,” or “That is a disgusting thing,” or “That is a taboo thing.” You’re like, “Oh yeah. I’m just so in it all the time with this stuff that I don’t even really mark it that way.”
Even before the movie, did you get a lot of feedback on the twist ending when you were talking with readers?
The funny thing was there was so much upfront discussion internally on HarperCollins’ part, and it wasn’t just my editor. I think it was just generally like, “What are we doing here?” Then, when the reviews came out and people started reading the book, it was well-liked by not only its target audience of younger horror fans, but with older horror fans too, and non-horror fans. I hear a lot from teachers and librarians and parents that “This got my kid into reading,” or “This got my kid into reading horror,” or a lot of spouses are giving the book to their non-horror people, so it’s this gateway horror thing. But it does have this certain viciousness to it, where it was such a long discussion about, “Can Cole’s dad really try to kill his own son? Can this plot be the plot?” Then you look at the reviews and reaction to it, and not no one, but not a statistically significant amount of people were thrown by it. I think anyone who’s been a parent or been a teacher … they get it.
There was speculation online that the film might change the source material and Frendo would be supernatural. Were there ever any discussions about that?
We’re going back a little while now, because Carter Blanchard’s first script had several key differences from the book. Carter’s a wonderful writer, and I love his work, but there was some hesitancy on my part. There were a couple of things in there I really would like to sneak back in from the book because I think they’re good ideas. But I’m not a big “rock the boat” guy, and as far as adaptation goes, I’m a proponent of filmmakers should be filmmakers and authors should be authors, and I’m cool with derivations and deviations from the story. But independently of me, Eli was hooked from the script, and I think it was that central twist, the multiple Frendos, that hooked him. And he’s like, ‘Yeah, there’s something here,’ which was in Carter’s script. And then he read the book — I’m not talking out of school, he’s said this in interviews — and said, “Let’s pull a bunch of stuff back from the book,” to which I said, “I think you’re right, but who am I to say, because I’m kind of biased.”
But there was never any … I do some real wacky stuff in the sequels, but for the adaptation of book one, there was never any discussion of “Should he be Michael Myers?” “Should he be Pennywise?” “Should he be Art?” There was a clear, almost creative decision of, “You can’t be those things when we have to be the thing that we have, and this is what it is.” It’s almost like a very stripped-back, whodunit slasher. It doesn’t have the accrual of franchise and too much genre expectation or genre knowledge on it, which I think is what makes the movie great. To try indulge in the speculation of “It’s Pennywise meets ‘Children of the Corn’” … that’s just pure rope-a-dope to get you in the theater or to get you pissed off in the comments section. It’s as close to trolling that a company like HarperCollins is gonna get.
Another late reveal in the movie is that two male characters, Rust and Cole, have a romantic history. How did you want to address that in the book versus how it is shown in the movie?
Writing it in the book I made it so much harder on myself than I had to. I look at the way Eli does it in the film — he doesn’t have the benefit of internal monologue and all these different things, where you’re setting a lot of these characters up as red herrings. Cole and Rust, for the first half of the film and the book, are the prime suspects. I think Eli does an amazing job … there’s something so elegant about how he does it without the benefit of the guide rails I had in the book. In the book, the reveal comes a lot later, at the very end is the CPR kiss. Because we’re so close with Quinn’s POV, at first, she thinks that Rust is doing CPR on Cole. It’s this moment, after all this bloody stuff, where you have a moment to breathe. Then they’re kissing, and she’s so taken aback. But it’s supposed to be like, in the film, the idea that everything kind of clicks and makes sense once you have this context.
I’ve said this in Q&As where people have just seen the movie, but it’s the one thing from the movie that I would actually entertain George Lucas’ing my own book and going back to how it’s revealed in the movie, when they’re all in the shed. It’s so smart and it gives them a bit more time to be a couple and to feel the stakes when Rust might die. It’s the one structural thing where I’m like, “Oh, that’s different from my book, but if I had a time machine, I would have Cole and Rust be revealed as a couple earlier.” But I also have the luxury of it being books and knowing while I was writing the first book that I was going to get to write a sequel. So I knew you could delay that, because if you like those characters and if you like that arc, that arc’s gonna continue.
