Clowns: Our Fascination and Our Fear
By Tiffany Apan
Throughout the ages, many creatures have served as a fascination for our imaginations while terrifying us in the process. Vampires, werewolves, black-eyed children…and clowns. Yes, that seemingly innocuous person making balloon sculptures at many a children’s party. They simultaneously bring joy and terror.
Clowns are a morbid curiosity. They also have a long history, dating back to ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. They have long been associated with the term, “rustic fool” and the concept of a circus clown didn’t even arrive until the 19th century. Until then, a clown was typically a “fool” character in theatrical productions. He was often lower class, dressed in a tattered servant’s attire, and often the comedic relief in an otherwise serious plot of a play. But if clowns were meant to bring humor and joy, how did they come to have such a sinister reputation?
There are many different theories, and an article on LiveScience.com suggest that perhaps this is partly due to that even as court jesters their comedy was often quite dark. There is also suggestion of long time association with being quite otherworldly. Some examples include how they seem to be able to cram themselves into a tiny car, twenty at a time before emerging seemingly unaffected by the cramped space. They perform acts of magic and are often unpredictable in their feats and actions. This can evoke strong emotions in different individuals, and sometimes, those emotions are negative ones. Perhaps it is these seemingly supernatural abilities and such unpredictability that gives reason for authors and filmmakers to feature the clown as a malevolent character, even a killer. Many individuals suffer from coulrophobia, or a clinically diagnosed fear of clowns. While this is not the average person, clowns tend to invoke feelings of disconcert among much of the population. Even Stephen King, author of the novel “IT” which features a demonic killer clown, is quoted as saying the clowns can be quite terrifying. According to the LiveScience article (along with a few interviews by King himself):
King admitted that seeing a clown outside of the character’s typical context, such as a circus or a birthday party, could be unnerving — yes, even for him.
“If I saw a clown lurking under a lonely bridge (or peering up at me from a sewer grate, with or without balloons), I’d be scared, too,” King said.
For me, clowns are mainly harmless. But I will also agree with King, in saying that if I saw some random clown standing somewhere in a field, under a bridge, or a street corner, I would be pretty unnerved myself.
For more of Tiffany’s work, check out her official website and blog:
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I asked authors concerning their feelings about the phenomenon of “creepy lowns”
Cheryllynn Dyess replied…
It’s not long at all… but this is my experience and where it all started .
Why clowns creep me out all begin with the movie Poltergeist in 1982! I was a whopping ten years old and my mother thought this would be a good movie to watch. Yeah, well not so much but it did start the life-long trend of not liking clowns.
I remember when we sat down and watched this movie. I remember the room we were in while watching the moving. I remember it being night because of course who would show this to their ten-year-old in the middle of the day, right? I even remember eating popcorn as it played and how my mother and her friend sat on the floor to get in closer.
That clown terrified me. I would never look at clowns the same way. While that has been 34 years ago, I still don’t handle clowns well. I am not terrified of them as I was in my childhood, but I do tend to give them their space and watch them ever so closely.
I have been to amusement parks where clowns try to be cheerful and I just stand back and shiver inside. Around 2008, I remember going to a theme park for Halloween and a scary clown came at me, I hit him. Poor clown was just doing his job.
About Cheryllyn
Cheryllynn’s vivid imagination comes through in all she does in life. Her writing started in junior high, although she never truly shared her work until recently. They were kept hidden away in an old tattered orange folder. Original works she wrote as early as 1984 still hold ink on the pages and are just now coming to life. Paranormal and Fantasy are her favorite genres with Mystery and Thrillers close behind.
Born in Northwest Florida and raised in Southeast Georgia she developed a love for nature and the outdoors. Her experiences outdoors allows her to create universes with vivid detail. After a detour of almost twenty years in the health care industry and obtaining her Bachelors of Science in Healthcare Administration/Healthcare Information Systems she has returned to her love of writing.
Currently living in Central Texas with her family, she has begun a new chapter in life that has opened her heart and soul to many great adventures. Her hobbies include fishing, crochet, gardening…and of course reading.
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I asked authors concerning their feelings about the phenomenon of “creepy clowns”
Gina Marks replied
I have no real childhood memories of clowns good or bad. I don’t like them and am suspicious of them because you can’t see their real faces, but they do not terrify me as such. I was terrified as a toddler of a five foot tall rubber Bugs Bunny that a friend of my father’s gave me. I screamed so much they eventually gave it away. So I asked a friend who I know suffers from coulrophobia, (that is fear of clowns, lol.) for her story and combining with the news reports I wrote you this.
Scary Clowns
Performing clowns can be very funny
they caper crazily to earn their money.
The feelings of children are rather mixed,
while others with terror stand transfixed.
Now killer clowns threaten our lives
posing for pictures with sharp knives.
Do they think it is some kind of clever joke?
I fear our sense of humour has gone up in smoke.
Scary clowns, now you take special care
We’ll find you and then you best beware.
Author bio Giselle Marks
Giselle Marks is an English writer, poet and novelist, born in London, who has been writing in many forms most of her life. Currently Giselle lives in the beautiful Isle of Man. Her family is grown, contented and expanding. She spends most of her time writing.
Her book ‘The Fencing Master’s Daughter’ is receiving good reviews. Together with her fellow writer and cover artist Sarah J. Waldock, Giselle wrote and illustrated ‘Fae Tales’ an anthology of fae and mythic tales updated to modern times and intended for teenagers and adults. Both books are available. Following ‘The Fencing Master’s Daughter’ she will be releasing ‘The Purchased Peer,’ a Georgian romance at the beginning of November. This will be followed by ‘Princess of Zenina,’ the first in the sci-fi / fantasy Zeninan Saga. She has also completed two more Regency romances, ‘The Marquis’ Mistake’ and ‘A Compromised Rake’ and the first of a Regency gypsy series, ‘Jessica’s Tale – Book One, The Gypsy Countess series,’ although she is considering alternate titles.
Other long- term projects include a possible book of her poetry. Her poems have been published in Female First and she has entered two of their contests, scoring a win and a commendation. Giselle has had short stories published in a number of anthologies.
@GiselleMarks1
http://ginafiserova.wix.com/gisellemarks
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7304857.Giselle_Marks
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Some people will have you believe babies born between midnight and 1 A. M. have the power to see ghosts. So does the seventh child of the seventh child. Further superstitions include A baby that is born feet first will have healing abilities. Firstborn children are protected from witchcraft.
What if you were born with special powers, that you could see things others couldn’t. Imagine if you could see the dead.
Take for example Sally Cudmore, a trainee nurse who claims when she working in a special care unit, she was able to predict when someone would die. With nature of her job she was accustomed to death, but what made her job unattainable was the fact that those who died came back. Sally traces her special talent to when she was eight years old, when she began to see the spirit of a young girl. Her gift lay dormant until she began her career as a nurse and she was able interact with those from the spirit world.
She had her own warning signs when somebody was about to die, as she puts it “I knew someone was going to die when I saw red and black surrounding them and it became really upsetting.”
She claims that she was able to pass on messages to grieving relatives from their love ones.
After a point she decided to make a change of career from nurse to medium.
Ever heard of Bulgaria-born Prophetess Baba Vanga, I came across her earlier in the year, her story is both fascinating as well as unnerving. She has been dubbed the “Nostradamus from the Balkans” and has an 85 per cent accuracy with her predictions. Some of her predictions include 9/11, the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the Fukushima nuclear spill and the birth of ISIS. Scarily for me, (living in Europe) she predicts Europe as we know it will “cease to exist” by the end of 2016 following the systematic elimination of entire populations, leaving the continent “almost empty”, a “wasteland almost entirely devoid of any form of life”.
Up until the age of twelve she had led an ordinary life but following a massive storm she mysteriously lost her eyesight. She was missing for several days before being discovered, her eyes being covered with dirt and dust. It was during this time her great talent surfaced, that she could not only heal people but predict the future.
She even predicted Barack Obama’s election as president, saying the 44th president of the United States would be African American. Intriguingly she also stated that he would be the “last US president”. This does not look out of the question with Hillary and Donald, offering the world little hope as they spar for the presidency.
Her predictions go as far as 3797 when the world will finally die. However, human civilization will be advanced enough to move to a new star system. As to this prediction I feel she is being quite optimistic, the way things are going at the moment.
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Ever had that terrible feeling that somebody is following you? Perhaps you have caught a late night train and while you are walking home, the streets are deserted. Suddenly you are aware of footsteps. You want to turn round to see who is behind you, but your growing anxiety prevents you from doing so. You increase your pace in the hope that you can lose this unknown person who you perceive to be following your trail. When you finally get home the relief is palpable.
In my book of short stories, Flight of Destiny, at the end of my story called “Cast from Hell” , there is a similar situation to the above scenario.
The train arrived late in the evening at the station nearest my parents’ house. It was dark and deserted, and I felt truly alone. I breathed a sigh of relief and began dragging my case down the dark road to my parents’ house. Wisps of fog slowly crept in, obscuring the stars, then the moon, and finally the local scenery. A few moments later, it began to drizzle.I heard a twig break behind me, followed by the repetitive click of heels on tarmac. I didn’t immediately panic, but I recall feeling increasingly uneasy. I picked up my pace, only to hear the sound of the footsteps behind getting closer rather than more distant. I turned abruptly to try a gain a cursory look at my stalker, but the combination of darkness, fog and drizzle, made it impossible to see anything more than a foot away. I turned and further upped my pace, but my effort was frustrated by having to drag the case. The dense fog parted momentarily and turned and caught a glimpse of a person not far behind me, the face shadowy and undefined. The fog immediately re-engulfed the elusivefigure. The person appeared to be wearing a hooded cloak and riding boots, which would account for the pronounced clicking noises that eerily reverberated along the road. The footsteps behind me slowed, crunched some slushy leaves, then resumed moving at a faster pace.My sense of dignity stopped me from calling out for help, but I nonetheless discarded my luggage and ran, hampered this time by the high heels I was wearing. I couldn’t shake off my pursuer, who, to my horror, was now almost within touching distance of me. I became aware of my pursuer’s labored breathing, and for a moment, I could swear I caught the briefest whiff of perfume. It even seemed familiar,but in my anxiety, I wasn’t able to place it. My body froze when a hand touched my shoulder, and I turned to face the grey specter in what seemed like slow motion.
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I wouldn’t describe my book as all out horror, but there are certainly some dark moments. The first story in my book is about a man who is obsessed by a name of a person he cannot place. He becomes obsessed as well as paranoid about what the man whose name he can’t place might do to him. His partner goes out for the evening leaving him a state, in which he imagines the worse possible scenarios.
Things come to a head when he imagines an entity is forcing its way out of his stomach, not unlike the famous scene in “Alien”.
Here is an exert from this story.
Writhing on the bed, screaming in agony, the buttons of his shirt
popping off as his stomach continued distending, his last cohesive
thought was that the force inside him was seemingly poised to make a
decisive thrust to exit his belly. Something jostled inside him and he
watched with horror, the seam of his belly split open like a sliced ripe
watermelon. Blood, the deep red of mature geraniums, abruptly began
pouring out, soaking the beds heets and dripping onto the floor.
As he watched in stunned astonishment, a pair of wrinkled, baby sized
hands appeared from within the opening, followed by a
grapefruit-sized, shiny bald head. The two hands grasped tightly onto
either side of the ragged incision and began pushing and stretching the
cleft open until the head popped out. The head however was fully
developed, like a man who’d almost reached his twilight years, replete
with age-lines, wrinkles, and sagging features, the eyes turned and
stared at him blankly, without recognition, as if the man had awakened
from a long deep sleep.
The entity pushed the rest of its body from Branden’s, fell limply
onto the bed, then dropped with a thud onto the floor, where it began a
process of stretching and enlarging itself to that of a full-sized fully formed
man. Branden heard the man groaning and panting, and, as he
continued to unfold, saw him become more animated. The last thing he
saw as he slipped from consciousness, was the triumphant look of the
being, which had accomplished its sortie.
The second story in my book, involves any parent’s worst nightmare. Imagine if you were a man, trying to give your wife a rest, by taking you recently born baby out for a stroll in the park. Nothing could go wrong…could it? In this story the man returns home, however minus the infant. The story is called Snatched. His wife is quite naturally increasingly bitter towards him. There is no sign of the baby, until one day his wife tells him that “Baby” has returned. Naturally the man wants to see Baby…however his wife is adamant under no circumstances can he see baby siting his major fault of mislaying the infant while walking in the park. His wife gets more and more irrational as well as the fact that inexplicable occurrences begin to occur in the household.
In the coming days, Renton would discover other inexplicable
things: another pile of bones that looked like they had been mauled,
empty jars of baby food piled against a wall. He also noted the food
bill rising. Mother and Baby, it seemed, were consuming food at an
increasingly alarming rate, to the point that Renton began wondering if
she might be keeping more than one baby upstairs, and he began
dreaming of many babies, each one taking a turn clamping onto one to
his wife’s breasts and sucking her dry, only to move on to huge
quantities of succulent meat when she could provide no more milk.
Things were also being inexplicably moved around. He discovered, for
instance, a family photograph album, that included pictures of Baby,
just after his birth, some scribbled on, some torn to shreds. It was as if
an unseen entity had come to live with them in the house.
The last story in my book has a particularly gruesome passage. A reject from Hell returns to earth to wreak havoc, only to find herself the victim of a particularly nasty bit of revenge.
My body froze when a hand touched my shoulder, and I turned to
face the grey specter in what seemed like slow motion. A white light
flashed in my eyes, and I felt a watery splash on my face followed by
excruciating pain. I began to scream at the sound of flesh my own
flesh sizzling. Trickles of liquid ran from my face into my hands,
which instantly began sizzling and dissolving, adding further to the
pain. My legs buckled and I fell to the ground, writhing in agony,
screaming until my voice went hoarse. My assailant, whoever it was (I
would never be able to identify him or her, having been instantly
denied my faculty of sight) hovered over me for some time, no doubt
to witness my agony and relish the results of the effort.
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Francis H Powell author 