Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Dimension Films, Disney, MGM, New Line Cinema, Nickelodeon, RLJE Films, Shudder, Warner Bros.
Ask the internet why clowns are scary, and you’ll come up with a variety of answers, none of them particularly satisfying. Clowns are unpredictable, and that makes us nervous about what they have planned. (Nothing good, presumably.) Clowns reside in the uncanny valley because they look human but not quite human enough. Clowns’ exaggerated facial features make us feel threatened. Or maybe we’ve just come to associate clowns with John Wayne Gacy, who — with apologies to the clowning profession — kind of doomed the entire enterprise to bad vibes.
It’s not that these explanations don’t ring true; it’s that they’re taking an analytical approach to something that feels too primal to pin down. For those of us with a healthy aversion to clowns, whether that’s a mild discomfort or full-blown coulrophobia, it usually began at a very young age. At this point, as with so many enduring childhood fears, it’s too deeply rooted to explain away. That fear, meanwhile, has been compounded by decades of deliberately terror-inducing representations of clowns, brought to life by writers and filmmakers eager to exploit one of society’s most widely held phobias. Instead of asking why clowns are scary, it may be more productive to ask which clowns are scariest.
When it comes to fictional clowns, pinpointing the most frightening is obviously a little subjective and guided by one’s individual neuroses. Are you more freaked out by a clown who looks like he could plausibly do children’s birthday parties or one who’s more overtly monstrous? Would you be more likely to run screaming from a wisecracking clown or a clown who stayed silent (minus the occasional honk)? In many cases, the scariest clown may just be the one you saw at the most impressionable age. I took these questions and my own childhood trauma into consideration when putting together this list of the scariest movie and TV clowns. Even if you end up disagreeing with some inclusions or their placements, my hope is that there’s enough nightmare fodder here for everyone.
Photo: Glen Wilson/Columbia/Everett Collection
On a purely visual level, the drooling zombie clown who pops up at the amusement-park climax of Zombieland is deeply unnerving, his bright-red nose punctuating a bloody and partly decayed zombie face. (The paint job, it must be said, is holding up nicely!) The reason the zombie clown — or clown zombie, depending on what you believe is more intrinsic to his identity — doesn’t rank higher is that he turns out to be nowhere near as menacing as he looks. Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) is able to dispatch him without much of a struggle.
Photo: New Line Cinema
For fans of largely forgettable slasher movies, the ’80s offer an embarrassment of riches. These films are often only as good as their gimmicks, which include — in at least a few cases — clowns. Out of the Dark may be most notable for featuring the final onscreen performance of drag icon Divine, who appears alongside such other luminaries as Karen Black, Tab Hunter, and Lainie Kazan. But it’s also worth watching as a bizarre and lurid thriller about phone-sex workers being targeted and murdered by a clown named Bobo. There’s never any real explanation as to why the film’s serial killer has taken on this persona, but he’s much more compelling with the clown mask and Bobo voice than he would be otherwise, so it’s best not to ask too many questions.
Photo: Warner Bros./Everett Collection
After Joker: Folie à Deux, it’s hard to think of Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck as particularly scary — his Foghorn Leghorn–inspired simple-country-lawyer shtick notwithstanding — but we can’t forget that the first Joker had people so freaked out about widespread violence that undercover cops were deployed to monitor screenings. Those concerns turned out to be overblown, as Arthur’s ability to incite a riot in the movie couldn’t translate to the real world. Still, there’s something unnerving about the panic itself, a brief but powerful delusion that an anarchic clown would turn New York into Gotham City. While Arthur may not be the scariest iteration of Batman’s Clown Prince of Crime, he’s the one who caused us the most palpable anxiety.
Photo: New Line Cinema/Everett Collection
As in the comics the movie Spawn is based on, Clown is the human form of Violator, the enormous demon tasked with keeping the titular antihero in line. In the film, though, it’s Clown who leaves the lasting impression. Violator is rendered with the best CGI 1997 had to offer, while Clown is powered by practical makeup effects and the fully committed performance of John Leguizamo. Viewed through a modern lens, the fat suit is regrettable, but that’s only one aspect of the transformative makeup, which also includes the character’s trademark blue face paint, red eyes, and razor-sharp teeth. And ultimately it’s Leguizamo who gives Clown a malevolence that overshadows the rest of this otherwise disposable adaptation.
Photo: Disney+
Like many of the one-off characters introduced in a “Treehouse of Horror” segment on The Simpsons, the Evil Krusty Doll is so much scarier than he has any right to be. An otherwise normal (though strangely sentient!) talking Krusty doll that’s been switched to evil, this tiny terror follows in the grand tradition of Chucky from the Child’s Play series, even if he’s a more direct parody of the Talking Tina doll from The Twilight Zone. Like his predecessors, the Evil Krusty Doll packs an impressive amount of homicidal rage into his diminutive stature, making him feel like an actual threat. Dolls, of course, fall into the same uncanny valley as clowns, which is why a clown doll is such a distinctly unsettling prospect — and why there’s another on this list.
Photo: Cinema Group Home Video
Sometimes it’s more about who’s under the makeup than the clown persona itself. You can probably guess from the title that Blood Harvest is another of those semi-interchangeable ’80s slashers: The hook in this one is the casting of musician Tiny Tim as a man named Merv and his clown alter ego, the Marvelous Mervo. (It does feel like he could have workshopped that name a bit more.) For much of the film, Mervo appears to be the killer, simply by virtue of the fact that he’s unhinged enough to wear clown makeup 24/7 and is played by Tiny Tim in all his affected and childlike glory. Horror fans are probably most familiar with Tiny Tim for “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” and its use in the Insidious films, but his Mervo is a memorably creepy creation (even after he’s absolved of the murders).
Photo: Everett Collection
When a movie’s called Killer Klowns From Outer Space, you can guess it’s not meant to be taken too seriously. Nevertheless, those who saw this intentionally schlocky sci-fi horror comedy at the right age report being legitimately frightened by the alien invaders. The Klowns are extraterrestrials who merely resemble the clowns we have on Earth, and they go on quite a killing spree in their quest for world domination, using both a popcorn gun and a cotton-candy-like substance that cocoons their victims. More important, they’re a showcase for the makeup and practical effects work of the Chiodo brothers, who wrote and directed the film. Yes, they’re very goofy, but the Klowns’ oversize features and murderous whimsy make them freaky, too — particularly to kids who grew up in the ’80s.
Photo: Artists Releasing Corporation
You have to at least give The House on Sorority Row credit for its title, which has almost certainly helped it find an audience and develop a cult following in the years since its 1982 release. The plot — about a group of sorority sisters getting stalked and murdered after a fatal prank gone wrong — is nothing you haven’t seen in countless other slashers. But if you make it to the end for the big reveal, you’ll get to see Eric, the deformed child of the prank victim, dressed up in a truly haunting jester costume. As in Out of the Dark, there’s no real explanation for the killer’s clown regalia, except perhaps that he now looks like the jack-in-the-box toy his mother gave him before she died. Regardless, he is easily one of the scariest-looking clowns on the list, and that’s extra impressive given his limited screen time.
Photo: Shauna Townley/IFC Films/Everett Collection
The newest entry in the scariest-clowns canon, Frendo has a lot going for him, including a restrained, throwback clown look and a penchant for violent kills. A clown with a pitchfork? Old hat. A clown with a chainsaw? Now we’re getting somewhere. Clown in a Cornfield could have ranked even higher, if not for the twists the 2025 film — and the 2020 novel it’s based on — take. The reveal of who Frendo really is proves a bit deflating, both because it’s fairly obvious what’s going on much earlier in the movie and because Clown in a Cornfield stops being about a killer clown. Given the carnage inflicted by Frendo (and his associates!), I’m confident he will scar a new generation of vulnerable young minds, but is it too much to ask for an evil clown who’s truly committed to clownery?
Photo: Dark Sky Films
And here we arrive at an actual clown — a birthday clown, no less! — who comes back from the dead to get revenge on the teenagers who caused his accidental death when they were children. Even as a reanimated corpse, Stitches has a sense of humor about his vengeance. As we’ll see with subsequent entries, clowns are actually scarier when they’re having some fun with their wanton violence. It’s important that Stitches never lets his revenge get in the way of being an entertainer: If he pulls out someone’s insides, you bet your ass he’s going to make a balloon animal out of the intestines! Not everyone will be able to stomach the gnarly kills in Conor McMahon’s splatter comedy, but they’re meant to make you laugh. That’s what Stitches would want.
Photo: Saban Films
It almost feels wrong to pick one clown from Rob Zombie’s 31, a film about multiple killer clowns torturing and killing a group of carnies; I don’t want to play favorites! (It’s also not possible to pick just one clown from Zombie’s oeuvre — a tease of what’s to come.) Of all the Heads in 31, however, it’s Doom-Head who continues to haunt. His white face paint and mouth obscured by shadow and blood, coupled with his gleefully sadistic nature, make him the hardest to shake. It helps, of course, that he’s played by frequent Zombie collaborator Richard Brake, otherwise best known for his (sorry) chilling work as the Night King on Game of Thrones. And there’s no closure when it comes to Doom-Head, thanks to 31’s open ending, which leaves you feeling all the more unsettled.
Photo: Dimension Films
While Clown has a similar level of over-the-top violence to Stitches — there’s a reason producer Eli Roth’s name is all over this thing — the less cartoonish approach means the film falls on the scarier side of the spectrum. The conceit is, to be fair, still pretty silly: Kent McCoy (Andy Powers) puts on a clown costume for his son’s birthday party, then discovers that he can’t take it off. The costume turns out to be the skin of an Icelandic demon called the Clöyne, who begins transforming Kent into something more monstrous and (duh) homicidal. The clown (or Clöyne, whatever) threat in Clown works especially well because the demon’s victims are young children. Yes, violence against kids in horror films can feel a little edgelord (again, producer Eli Roth), but who else should a killer clown be killing?
Photo: Warner Bros./Everett Collection
The second Joker on this list (and the second Academy Award–winning performance as the Joker!), Heath Ledger’s take on the character has become the most indelible. The success of his version — with credit, of course, to Christopher and Jonathan Nolan’s script — is the character’s anxiety-inducing unpredictability. This is one of the top traits psychologists have pointed to as a reason for our collective coulrophobia, and it’s what makes Ledger’s Joker so relentlessly frightening. There’s never an explanation for his madness or his scars, just as there’s never a straightforward articulation of his plans beyond the broad incitement of anarchy. Some clowns really do just want to watch the world burn!
Photo: Warner Bros.
When Stephen King wrote the character of Pennywise the Dancing Clown into his epic 1986 novel It, he was taking advantage of a cultural fear, as well as the push-and-pull relationship between clowns and children. Kids are drawn to the bright colors and balloons, even as they feel innately repelled and frightened; it makes sense that an ancient shapeshifting child-killer would choose the form of a clown. For the 2017 film adaptation It and its 2019 sequel, Pennywise was given a more old-school look with the character’s costuming and makeup reflecting past eras as a nod to his immortality. The movies rely a bit too much on (shoddy) CGI in key moments, but when the horror rests on Bill Skarsgård’s ability to effect a drooling rictus smile, his Pennywise is as scary as they come.
Photo: FX
American Horror Story: Freak Show may be one of the weaker installments of the anthology series, but Ryan Murphy knew exactly what he was doing when he cast John Carroll Lynch as Twisty the Clown. In David Fincher’s Zodiac, Lynch memorably played Arthur Leigh Allen, the man who probably did all those murders. On AHS, Lynch gets to pay homage to one of Zodiac’s most upsetting scenes when Twisty brutally butchers a couple in the park, and it’s among the best sequences Murphy has ever cooked up. Of course, the character design of Twisty goes a long way toward placing him in the upper echelon of scary fictional clowns — particularly the mask covering the lower half of his face, which gives him a permanent grin that recalls Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs, a notable influence on the Joker.
Photo: Paramount+
When I said the scariest clown might just be the one who reached you at the right age, I was thinking about Zeebo, a one-off character from Are You Afraid of the Dark? who has nevertheless haunted elder millennials since the episode first aired on Nickelodeon in August 1992. Though ostensibly a show for children, Are You Afraid of the Dark? offered some of the rawest nightmare fuel of anything on television at the time. (Remember when entertainment for kids was actually scary? We used to be a country!) Zeebo was alarming in oversize fun-house form and as a ghost demanding the return of his nose, even if his character design wasn’t exactly reinventing the wheel. Sometimes a really big smile is all it takes; see also the actual scariest villain Are You Afraid of the Dark? ever gave us, the Ghastly Grinner.
Photo: MGM
While we’re on the subject of kindertrauma, it’s important not to overlook the clown doll from Poltergeist. (Tobe Hooper’s 1982 original, that is. The clown doll in the forgotten 2015 remake is a bit too try-hard, sorry to say.) We’ve already been over the uncanny-valley collision of clown and doll, but Poltergeist offers the purest and most chilling distillation of the concept. There are threats everywhere in the film — from tree branches with minds of their own to voices in the TV static — but nothing is anywhere near as frightening as a clown doll moving when you aren’t looking. The scene when young Robbie (Oliver Robins) looks for the doll under the bed only for it to be lurking behind him waiting to strike is a formative jump scare for anyone who saw this movie around Robbie’s age.
Photo: Cineverse/Everett Collection
It hasn’t taken long for Art the Clown to become a slasher icon. Though he first arrived on the scene in 2013’s All Hallows’ Eve, he didn’t strike it big until he got his own series. Terrifier found a niche audience in 2016, but 2022’s Terrifier 2 and 2024’s Terrifier 3 achieved shocking success for stomach-turning gorefests and brought this clown to the mainstream. Though mostly silent, Art has a ton of personality, a credit to performer David Howard Thornton, who seems inspired by actual clowning and the exaggerated movements of silent film stars. Art is a true clown and a true sadist, a combination that yields the most repulsive kills in any of the films or shows represented on this list. It also places him alongside classic slasher villains like Freddy Krueger and Chucky — he’ll torture you to death, but he’s such a lovable scamp about it that you can’t help but be a little endeared.
Photo: Lionsgate/Everett Collection
Captain Spaulding isn’t the only Rob Zombie–created clown on this list, but he is the only one who’s named after a Groucho Marx character, and that has to count for something. It’s not just the name, either: Captain Spaulding, played by Sid Haig, balances Groucho’s entertainer instincts with his mean streak. In the first film in the Firefly trilogy, 2003’s House of 1000 Corpses, the depths of Spaulding’s depravity and his connection to the murderous Firefly clan aren’t fully clear. It’s in the far superior sequel, 2005’s The Devil’s Rejects, that we see how brutal and twisted he really is. Zombie completed the series with 3 From Hell in 2019, though Haig’s declining health kept Spaulding from being a main player. The actor died that same year, but his harrowing performance as Captain Spaulding lives on in horror film (and killer clown) history.
Photo: Warner Bros./Everett Collection
Of course Pennywise couldn’t be limited to just one entry on this list. Even if his true form is as a giant space spider, his clown form is the peak of evil clownery — without the massively influential Pennywise, several of the killer clowns who followed almost certainly would not exist. The 1990 TV miniseries adaptation of It may not have the R-rated violence of the later films, but Tim Curry’s take on Pennywise is the scarier version of the character. No CGI embellishments necessary: just garish white face paint, tufts of red hair, and an impossibly oversize forehead. The look makes this Pennywise seem like a real clown, one who could conceivably lure a small child to the sewer before tearing his arm off. He’s a nearly immortal embodiment of evil, and he looks like the kind of clown you’d see at the circus or a kids’ party. In the end, what could be scarier than that?
