ClownTown – Exclusive Interviews with Tom Nagel and Lauren Elise
Staci Layne Wilson
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The movie’s premise is pretty simple. A group of friends get stranded in a seemingly abandoned town and find themselves stalked by a gang of violent psychopaths dressed as clowns. But ClownTown is one of the better indie horror films to come out this year – largely because it was made with the blood, sweat, tears and vision of one person: Tom Nagel. We caught up with the writer-director-producer to find out what it took to bring his first feature film from idea to the big screen.
Dread Central: Clowns are in the zeitgeist right now. I was just reading on Google news about how police are encouraging caution due to a rash of complaints and social media reports of people dressed like clowns and acting suspiciously… apparently last month, some children reported clowns trying to lure them into the woods with money. Those are real. But even onscreen, there’s the “It” TV series and the new Rob Zombie movie, 31. Was this in your mind when you decided to make ClownTown?
Tom Nagel: Well, my brother Brian, and Jeff, our producer, we went through a couple of ideas actually. It’s funny because we just kind of came onto clowns by chance. Of course we had known that Rob Zombie had some sort of clown film coming out at some point but we weren’t sure when and we didn’t know when our film would be done but when we settled on clowns it was just something that excited all of us at the same time. I haven’t really seen a great clown movie since It which I remembered from my childhood. It was just an inspiration to being scary and stuff like that and of all the ideas we had, I just thought it would be the most fun to do a clown horror film and again something that excited us all so that’s what we were going to do and we started putting it together.
DC: How’d you come up with the look of the clowns?
TN: We started with Robert Kurtzman’s Creature Corps and worked with David Greathouse, who is our lead special effects person and for me, I really got him to do something a little different but obviously still make up clowns, I didn’t want him to go too crazy, we call it ClownTown and they aren’t really clowns. We went through a couple different things, we sat down, I researched a lot of different combos online and we did some test shoots, just different textures of makeup, what we wanted. The one thing I know we wanted, I didn’t want silly, goofy clowns, I wanted it to be more like if we cook a serial killer or these messed up people and basically clowns were their MO. They weren’t the big goofy clowns we were used to, I wanted first and foremost for them to be an evil group of people. So through lots of trials and different tests, some of which were ridiculous, we settled on the clowns that ended up in the film, a lot of which we owe to David who designed them after a lot of different tests with makeup. We just went back and forth, yes we like that, no we don’t like that and we settled on our clowns. They weren’t really inspired by any particular clown and that’s what I wanted to do, I didn’t want to just copy a clown, I wanted it to be as original as possible.
DC: Who are your original clowns?
TN: Well, the first clown is David Greathouse, he’s our special effects artist and he was super excited to play the character. He does special effects, haunted houses, so he was ready right away to get into that character. The one thing with his character was he wanted it to be really grotesque, which I thought was a cool idea, I was all for it I thought it was great. So he did his thing and ‘House’ is very tall and lanky so he wanted to have that creepy walk and just this weirdness to him. The other clowns, the two main clowns are Chris Hahn, who is a big guy and a former pro wrestler so I wanted his character to kind of be the big muscle. Quiet, doesn’t say much, just big and menacing and his character we went with more of the classic clown look. He’s just a big, scary guy and his presence and size command that extra bit of fear. The third clown was Ryan Pilz, who plays Crowbar Clown and Ryan naturally is a slower guy and kind of weasel-like so I wanted to take particular actors, their walk, what they naturally have and then accentuate it. Like Ryan, we were inspired by his moments, small, creepy, kind of like a rat. So we had the tall, slithering snake kind of guy, the big brute, and then Ryan, the sleazy little rat. [I don’t know Ryan but I wonder how he feels about being referred to as naturally weasel- and rat-like? Poor guy! lol – SLW] Then of course there were other clowns that came in, like Girl Clown, her big thing was she was kind of goofy, like a kid at heart in a grown woman’s body. And then Al who played Axe Clown, not a lot there you could say, not the sharpest tool in the shed, he’s just kind of gross and dirty and things like that. The point is I really tried to play with something from the actors themselves and try to not make them something they weren’t.
DC: Your movie really does stand out. Can you talk a little bit about how you made sure it didn’t get lost in the sea of indie horror movies that are released every year now?
TN: The big thing for ClownTown is we wanted it to be a little homage to the eighties and nineties. Obviously this is not a two-hundred-million-dollar studio super hero movie but it’s also not a super cheap, low budget, nobody-cares-about film. The team we put together really put all of their heart into it and worked really hard and as far as the film, we really wanted it to pay homage to some of the things that I know I grew up with in the eighties and nineties. Having the hot girl, lots of blood, cool kills, the good missing couple, all that stuff and we wanted to have fun with it. The biggest thing ClownTown is, it’s not slow, it keeps moving, there’s great kills and it’s a fun film. I don’t think you should take ClownTown too serious, but something fun you can watch with your friends or grab some popcorn with your girlfriend and curl up and have some laughs, some scares and some bloody shock scenes that are nice and gory for you.
Lauren Elise, who is now going by Lauren Elise Compton, is a very busy actress in the horror genre. She’s got Depraved, Killer Camera, and Death House – which features Barbara Crampton, Adrienne Barbeau, Tiffany Shepis, Tony Todd, Sig Haig, Bill Moseley, Kane Hodder, and Dee Wallace to name a few – coming out soon. But right now you can catch her on the big screen in ClownTown as she tries to keep murderous jesters from catching her.
Dread Central: What did you think when a script called ClownTown came your way?
Lauren Elise: Well when we began the whole process of auditioning it was called Vigilantes, so it wasn’t called ClownTown, it was called something else. They wanted to keep the title under wraps so we didn’t even get the script. I had no idea that is was ClownTown, I would have had a totally different reaction if I knew it had to do with clowns. But when I found out, I booked the job and did the table read that’s when they were like OK, so we have new information, it’s called ClownTown, and I was like, Oh shit, this is some pretty scary stuff here! Personally, I’m not afraid of clowns, I wasn’t going to have a physical reaction when I saw them, to me it was like wow, I never before been involved in a project with clowns so I thought it was very interesting to go into.
DC: You’re one of the few not afraid of clowns!
LE: I love that other people, most people, are afraid of clowns. I love sharing the project, talking about it, I love seeing people’s reactions. Every time I tweet something or post something on Instagram I’ll get hundreds of comments that say: Nope, nope!, and you know, I think that a lot of them would watch it because people loved to be scared and if they are into horror then yeah, they’re going to love it. But a lot of people are just like, they want to know more about it, that’s probably why our trailer gets so many views. The trailer definitely doesn’t help set aside any of their fears so I think that most people are interested and scared at the same time, which is the exact thing we are going for.
DC: Is the movie based on the spate of real-life menacing clowns showing up in small towns across the country lately?
LE: Very much so. This was based off of some clowns that did the very same thing, I think it was Bakersfield, or some weird abandoned kind of town where clowns were doing this. That’s where our story was set and just recently, clowns were doing it again in another state and… OK, that’s weird. That would really freak me out, seeing a clown just chilling there, that would scare the hell out of me. But yeah, the way these clowns portray themselves, it’s terrifying.
DC: The character you play, Sarah, isn’t just cannon fodder. But she does have to be in peril and horror fans are so used to that… how did you make her seem sympathetic?
LE: I loved playing her, I loved experimenting with my range as an actor and I think all acting is vulnerable, even bad guys and acting is all about vulnerability and honesty in truth and I wanted this character to not be such a victim. I know there is a whole group of victims of their situations but I wanted this character to be stronger. She has a moment where she stands up and just doesn’t take any shit anymore, like when she takes a bat and hits one of the clowns. She finds strength and there is unfortunate circumstance and I try to make that shine through a little more. Bad things happen to good people but good people have strength that they have hidden inside them and that’s what I had to do from an acting point, I had to get really deep inside the character and find out what makes sense, to still be the victim, to still be vulnerable but still be strong, so that was the what I worked on a lot with that character.
DC: Tell us about working with a first-time director on this.
LE: Tom Nagel did a fantastic job, he wore so many hats, I mean he wasn’t just the director. He was putting his own money into the project, he was handling the talent, he was handling the crew, he worked crazy hours, I’m pretty sure he didn’t sleep for a month. He was great, he cared a lot about other people, behind the scenes, in front of the camera, he’s an actor/director so he comes from an actor’s background, he knows how we feel, what we’re going through. He understands that is was freezing cold and we were running around in shorts so he had sleeping bags on site to get us warmer, the cars were always on with the heaters blowing, he really kept things as accommodating as possible and working long hours and late night shoots in the cold, he took care of us very, very well. That’s him as a person. As a director he didn’t do five hundred takes of something, if he got it on the second take, then he got it on the second take. He did a great job, and I’d love to work with him again on another feature.
Clowntown Release Details:
ITN Distribution, Inc., has acquired North American rights to the horror thriller CLOWNTOWN. Written by Jeff Miller (Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan) and directed by Tom Nagel (The Retrieval), the film stars Brian Nagel (Katy Perry’s “Roar”), Lauren Elise (Justin Lin’s Help), Andrew Staton (Relentless), Katie Keene (Union Furnace), Jeff Denton (The Beast of Bray Road), and Greg Violand (Batman v Superman).
CLOWNTOWN will roll out in theaters starting September 30, 2016, and on VOD and DVD on October 4, 2016.
CLOWNTOWN tells the story of a group of friends who get stranded in a seemingly abandoned town and find themselves stalked by a gang of violent psychopaths dressed as clowns. It is loosely inspired by the clowns who terrorized Bakersfield, California, in 2014.
CLOWNTOWN was produced by Jeff Miller, Tom Nagel, Brian Nagel, Christopher Lawrence Chapman, and Ronnie D. Lee. Robert Kurtzman (creator of From Dusk Till Dawn) co-produced. David H. Greathouse (Syfy’s “Face Off,” Tusk) handled the bulk of the makeup FX.
Archstone Distribution is handling foreign sales.
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