Fear of Clowns

Where the word coulrophobia came from

The account of where coulrophobia came from runs to a single clause: a neologism coined in the context of informal phobia lists. No coiner is named. No date is given, and no first attestation appears anywhere in the article. The first element of the word is not glossed at all, so this entry does not gloss it either. Only the suffix is doing recognisable Greek work.

One date sits nearby and is worth having. Websites devoted to evil clowns, and to being frightened of them, appeared late in the 1990s, which puts the circulation of the term in the same years and the same medium as the material that made a word for it useful.

What has actually been measured about coulrophobia

The survey of 987 adults is the only measurement anywhere in the article, and it is reported as a bare finding: a year, a sample size, a spread of countries, a percentage. Whoever conducted it goes unnamed. No threshold is stated either, and "some degree" is a wide door. A figure of 54 per cent counts the adult who finds a painted face unpleasant alongside the one who leaves a party when a clown arrives, and nothing in the record separates them.

The University of Sheffield is credited with a study concluding that children universally dislike clowns, some of them finding clowns frightening and unknowable. That study arrives without an author or a date. A correlation with the uncanny valley effect is credited to researchers who have studied the phobia, and not one of them is named, which is the shape of a citation with nothing inside it.

One name is attached to one claim. Joseph Durwin, who teaches psychology at California State University, Northridge, is quoted describing small children as highly reactive to what he calls a familiar body type with an unfamiliar face. That is as close to a mechanism as the record comes: the makeup conceals, and a concealed face reads as a threat that might be in disguise. It is also what makes the term hard to hold apart from a fear of masks, and the possessed clown doll of Poltergeist sits in the same account as a fear of dolls. Clown behaviour is described as transgressive and unpredictable in a way that produces unease, again with nobody's name on the observation.

What professional clowns say about coulrophobia

Ben Radford, whose Bad Clowns appeared in 2016, is the one investigator the article treats as an authority on the subject, and his position cuts against the term. Clowns through history are tricksters and fools who are permitted to speak their minds and stay in control while doing it. The malevolent version is a minority report. Radford writes that the good clowns outnumber the bad and that most people love them rather than fear them, which leaves the bad clown as the exception rather than the rule.

Working clowns dislike the persona for a plain commercial reason. Radford found them calling it the rotten apple in the barrel, whose sight and smell cast suspicion on everything around it, and they have no wish to propagate coulrophobia. The objection has an institutional form. Clowns of America International said as much in 2014, answering the character Twisty in American Horror Story, its president Glenn Kohlberger saying that Hollywood makes money sensationalising the norm and that the organisation supports no medium that adds to clown fear.

Radford's other observation is that bad clowns adapt to their period. Harlequin, the King's fool and Mr Punch were the earlier shapes. The current one, on his reading, is the internet troll, who wears no costume and works the same seam of teasing and abuse for private amusement.

Where the malevolent clown was assembled

The character is younger than the profession and considerably older than the word. Edgar Allan Poe put an early one in print in "Hop-Frog", which Jack Morgan of the University of Missouri-Rolla reads as drawing on a fourteenth-century masquerade ball where a king and his party, costumed as simian creatures in highly flammable material, were set alight by a flambeau. Murderous clowns reached the stage in 1874 in Catulle Mendès's La femme de Tabarin, and then in Leoncavallo's Pagliacci, which was accused of plagiarising it.

The Joker arrived in DC Comics in 1940 and topped Wizard magazine's ranking of the hundred greatest villains in 2006. John Wayne Gacy was arrested in 1978 and picked up the name Killer Clown once it emerged that he had worked children's parties as Pogo the Clown, though he committed none of his crimes in the costume. National Lampoon ran a mock comic through the 1980s called Evil Clown, with a malevolent lead named Frenchy. Menace was available on stage before any of that: Zal Cleminson of the Sensational Alex Harvey Band played in black and white clown makeup through the band's 1970s peak, his happy-sad-happy manner giving the performances an edge.

Then the decade that fixed the figure:

1. Poltergeist put a possessed clown doll in a child's bedroom in 1982
2. Stephen King published It in 1986
3. Killer Klowns from Outer Space followed in 1988

Pennywise has been played twice, by Tim Curry in the 1990 miniseries and by Bill Skarsgård for the 2017 film and the sequel two years after it. The joke arrived almost as quickly as the archetype. A very young Bart Simpson, traumatised by a badly built Krusty the Clown bed in "Lisa's First Word" in 1992, repeats that he cannot sleep because the clown will eat him, a line that became a catchphrase and then an Alice Cooper song on Dragontown in 2001.

Why no adult ever confirmed a phantom clown sighting

The panics run alongside the fiction and involve almost nobody who can be found. In 1981, children in Brookline, Massachusetts said that men dressed as clowns had tried to get them into a van, and the story travelled through the Midwest and the Northeast. Then it returned:

• Phoenix, 1985
• Brazil, 1990, by way of the tabloid Notícias Populares
• West Orange, New Jersey, 1991
• Honduras, 1995
• Chicago, 2008

Nearly every report came from a child. No adult and no police officer confirmed a sighting.

Explanations offered for the pattern run from It and Gacy's crimes to a moral panic carried along by the period's fears of Satanic ritual abuse, with a noted resemblance to the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

The later sightings had authors. The Northampton Clown, which stood silently about the English town through 2013 looking a good deal like Pennywise, was made by three filmmakers from the town, Alex Powell, Elliot Simpson and Luke Ubanski, and denied the rumours about a knife over social media. Matteo Moroni of Perugia began dressing as a killer clown for his DM Pranks channel in March 2014, drawing views in the hundreds of millions. The Wasco clown of the same year turned out to be a photography project his wife ran over twelve months. Radford's verdict on these surges is that pranksters account for most of them, and that the danger they produce runs in the opposite direction to the legend: painted pranksters and bystanders are the ones at risk from a public or a police force convinced a threat exists.

Why the evil clown may not be coulrophobia

Joseph Durwin has argued that the evil clown is not the phobia in costume. The concept, and the hostility it generates, is on his account a cultural phenomenon that transcends the fear alone. What Wikipedia has assembled under the heading supports him: a genre, a run of pranks and a trade association's complaint.

Mark Dery's chapter "Cotton Candy Autopsy: Deconstructing Psycho-Killer Clowns", in The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium, reads the figure through Mikhail Bakhtin's carnivalesque and Jungian writing on the fool, and settles on the evil clown as an icon of the age. That is a claim about a culture rather than about a fear. Wolfgang M. Zucker's remark that a clown's whitened face, the eyes nearly lost and the mouth painted to a ghoulish bigness, resembles the mask of death is the nearest thing to an explanation on offer, and it argues from appearance alone.

Nothing on record separates the two. No study distinguishes the people who dislike the trope from the people frightened by the figure, and until one exists, a survey reporting 54 per cent has measured a culture at least as much as it has measured a fear.