The prospect of debuting a film at SXSW would excite any filmmaker, but few can match the energy of director Eli Craig, who premiered his movie Clown in a Cornfield there last week. He was so excited, in fact, that he couldn’t help but shout “I’m effing back, baby!” after walking into the Den of Geek Studio in Austin.
“I wanted to be here so bad,” Craig elaborates. “You know, when you’re a writer-director, a lot of projects that you spend a lot of time on don’t get made. But this was one I had to see to the end and I had to play at SXSW. It was my dream, my focused dream from the moment I said ‘yes’ to the script, to be here now.”
Craig’s enthusiasm is due to the fact that it isn’t his first time at the festival. Fifteen years ago, Craig brought another horror film to SXSW, Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. While Tucker and Dale has long since secured its place in the horror-comedy cult canon, Craig has only made two feature films since, and one is Clown in a Cornfield. Hence the enthusiasm.
The joy also might be explained by the energy of the movie itself, which adapts a YA novel by Adam Cesare. “This movie’s a ride,” Craig promises. “I wanted to make like something that gets you locked in and gives you this experience. I think horror can do that. It can transport you with an adrenaline rush.” For Craig, that rush makes horror special, especially in our current climate. “So much of our culture right now is looking like dopamine hits and little moments of rush,” he argues.
“I love how horror scares us out of our own heads,” adds veteran genre actor Kevin Durand, who plays Arthur Hill in Clown in a Cornfield. “It scares us out of our own lives. Sometimes when you sit down and watch a drama, you need really compelling things happening on screen just to draw you in. Whereas horror, when it’s done properly, doesn’t say, ‘Hey, why don’t you come over here?’ It says, ‘Get over here!’ And you go, ‘Okay.’ And we love that.”
Craig also hoped to tap into horror’s power by drawing from the great slasher movies of yore in Clown.
“I was definitely thinking of the old ’80s slasher horror like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween, even just masked slasher,” the director admits. “One thing that’s really fun about making a movie that’s this size is the tempo and the pace of it. We’re shooting really fast and we’re doing a lot of practical effects, not relying on CG. I want to almost never use CG if I can get away with it. There’s a tiny bit of embellishment in the movie, but almost no VFX shots. Just a lot of live, in-camera stuff.”
The commitment to the classics is part of what helped Craig bond with Cesare, who admits that his first question when getting on set was about the intended rating of the movie.
“So we think this is going to be an R? Because the books are YA,” Cesare laughs now about his first question to people working on the movie. And Eli was like, ‘Yeah, I’m pumping the blood. It’s definitely going to be an R!’ That’s so great to hear, as a horror fan.”
For actor Aaron Abrams, horror provides that thrill in part because it brings people back to their youth. “I think it’s something the audience is familiar with. There’s a sense of nostalgia,” Abrams tells us. “But within that nostalgia and familiarity, it can take right turns when you’re expecting left turns and constantly surprise and reinvent the wheel.”
That mixture of familiarity and surprise is central to Clown in a Cornfield, which takes its structure from ’80s horror movies. “This movie is kind of a familiar throwback slasher, but it has a very specific vision behind the camera… with its sense of humor,” says Abrams. “It has a different kind of final girl. I think it has points-of-view and things to say on top of having, you know, a psychopath and clown makeup running around killing kids, which is, you know, really great.”
Ironically, actor Katie Douglas’ character Quinn has the exact opposite approach to the past. “She’s pretty bummed out,” Douglas says of her character’s feelings about moving to a small town at the start of the movie. “She recently went through something really hard, but she’s doing a good job at looking forwards and keeping it together. But there are outside forces in her life holding her back, like her dad running away from his problems and bringing her to a new town.”
“I grew up in a town that like that,” Durand adds, “about a decade kind of behind the rest of the world. This town [in Clown in a Cornfield] feels like a couple decades behind, if not more.”
“We’re losing that small town feeling in America,” explains Cesare. “Everything is a strip mall, it’s all the same thing. This film tries to evoke the idea that towns have their own little idiosyncrasies and unique problems—especially if there’s a murderous clown.”
Of course nothing ever stays the same, certainly not a festival like SXSW, which has changed quite a bit in the 15 years between Tucker and Dale vs. Evil and Clown in a Cornfield. For Craig, that’s a good thing.
“When I was screening Tucker and Dale, I was begging a distributor to come to our screening because it’s freaking hilarious,” Craig remembers. “It still took us nine months to get distribution. Now, we have great publicists. Our film is being distributed in two months,” he adds. “I feel like this is a blessing we’re here right now.”
Clown in a Cornfield comes to theaters nationwide on May 9 2025.
The post Clown in a Cornfield Marks a Homecoming for Tucker and Dale Director appeared first on Den of Geek.
From https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/clown-in-a-cornfield-homecoming-tucker-and-dale-director/
