A Guided Tour of ‘Clown in a Cornfield’ with Creator Adam Cesare
Five years ago, before director Eli Craig tackled Clown in a Cornfield, the movie, there was Clown in a Cornfield, the novel. Released in 2020, the book was a breakthrough for novelist Adam Cesare, winning the Bram Stoker Award for Best Young Adult Novel and launching a series that already includes three books, with more on the way.
Now, with the film version of Cesare’s story releasing today, Clown in a Cornfield is an established multimedia horror franchise with a built-in fanbase and a concept that feels ready-made for the big-screen, but then, it was just an idea with the potential to move Cesare from indie author to major publisher success story. So, in celebration of Clown in a Cornfield‘s theatrical debut, Dread Central sat down with Cesare to talk about how it all started, what inspired the story, and what might come next.
From Humble Beginnings
Speaking from his home in Philadelphia, surrounded by horror movies and memorabilia, Cesare is an animated, affable ambassador for the horror genre. Though he can talk obscure slashers and cult classics with the best of them, Cesare’s gift, one which helped Clown in a Cornfield garner a wide audience, lies in distilling his love of the genre and all its gory details into something that both delivers the goods for seasoned fans and welcomes newcomers. It’s a big part of Clown‘s appeal, but to hear Cesare tell it, the book started as something more like a dare to himself.
“It’s that idea of this title and ‘You can’t really call a book Clown in a Cornfield, can you?’ And then it becomes a game. I like subverting people’s expectations,” Cesare explained. “It’s a big part of who I am as a writer and who I am as a creative. I like that people come to, especially genre, especially genre fiction and genre film, with all these preconceptions about what a story does or what a story in a specific subgenre has to do. And then just being like, ‘Well, let’s mess with that a little bit.’ So this is the ultimate articulation of that, where you begin with something called Clown in a Cornfield, where this sounds like a joke. And then the question becomes, ‘Well, how do I get you invested and how do I make whatever just filled your head when we said Clown in a Cornfield?'”
The game of playing with expectations, especially around such an evocative title, might have been a starting point, but it wasn’t the only one. Cesare was also keen to explore modern American teenage life with the book, something fueled by his work as a teacher at the time.
“I wanted to write a slasher because I knew I wanted to write a young adult book. I was a teacher at the time I started writing this series, and I was a teacher for a long time while I was writing and publishing adult horror fiction. And I looked at the kids around me, and they were so interesting and so compelling and such, honestly, better characters than most adult horror characters. And it’s like, ‘Why don’t I write something they can read and enjoy and reflect their experience?’ Well, I’m a horror guy, I want to write a horror book, what’s the sub-genre that does that best? Slashers.”
The World of Clown in a Cornfield
In keeping with Cesare’s desire to play with expectations while, as he put it, “playing fair” with genre conventions, the author began Clown in a Cornfield with a trope virtually everyone will recognize: The new girl in town. The novel and the film both center on Quinn Maybrook (played by Katie Douglas), a teenager from Pennsylvania who, along with her father (Aaron Abrams), moves to the small town of Kettle Springs, Missouri, for a fresh start after the death of Quinn’s mother.
To craft Quinn, a smart young woman frustrated by her move to Missouri yet still feels a responsibility to care for her scatterbrained and often flustered father, Cesare dove deep into the well of slasher cinema, watching “something between 150 to 200 slashers” to study the structure of the subgenre and look for the commonalities in protagonists. What he found was a combination of inspiration from the films and inspiration from the kids he was teaching at the time.
“Tragedy is something that a lot of teens have to go through. We talk about ‘Do they have a support system?’ A lot of teens, when I was teaching, were the support system. So I think that’s kind of the key difference with Quinn in regards to your archetypal final girl. She exhibits a lot of those characteristics. She subverts a lot of the characteristics, but that’s my general thought on her. And then she just kind of grew as a person and as a character as I was writing her.”
Taking a character like Quinn and placing her in a small town like Kettle Springs—which Cesare likens to a “messed-up version” of Stars Hollow from Gilmore Girls—offered plenty of drama, but it wasn’t the end of the equation. For that, Cesare needed to unravel the clown of Clown in a Cornfield, a corn syrup company mascot known to the locals as “Frendo.” The idea of a person in a clown mask terrorizing local teenagers is evocative on its own, but Cesare dug far deeper than the visceral thrill of the image, looking at corn and its products as a key piece of Americana that has, in many parts of the country, moved on from its glory days.
“It represents something about the world and about America specifically, this product and the fact that this town runs on this product. If you take it away, if the town can’t make the thing that it makes that is delicious, but also kind of poison, what does it do to the town?”
For Frendo himself, Cesare did a deep dive into clowns used in advertising, giving Frendo’s look a very vintage feel while also allowing him to play with the idea that, especially for the older residents of Kettle Springs, Frendo is not a villain, but a beloved local icon.
“I want Frendo’s masks to be able to feasibly have been mass-produced by people in a small town,” Cesare explained. “So let’s turn off a million of these, and then you’re using one of them as the killer’s mask. And what could you do to that over time, because I like sequels. You can bust out some teeth. I like that idea of evolving a mask and evolving what a mask means throughout a slasher franchise. So all of that to say, I did a lot of really nerdy thinking about both clowns and cornfields and masks, and then you got Frendo.”
Frendo on the Big Screen
Though Cesare was certainly involved in the big-screen translation of his novel, he left the adaptation up to Tucker and Dale vs. Evil filmmaker Eli Craig, who directed the film and co-wrote it with Carter Blanchard. That left the author in the position of watching someone else shift his story around to make it play in 90 minutes for a theatrical audience. While some authors might bristle at such things, the cinephilic Cesare is not one of them.
“The biggest change is tone,” Cesare said. “Eli’s tone, this is a funny movie. It’s a horror movie first, and it is a horror movie with strong comedic elements and jokes that come out of character. But it’s way funnier than my book. My book is kind of a little bit of a bummer [laughs]. But to take that exact story and still be able to put his POV and his sense of humor into it, I think, is a miracle. I’m like, wow. It’s amazing that it works so well, to me, and as a film fan, I like it.”
For some horror fans, the Clown in a Cornfield film will be their introduction to Frendo, which will send many of them out to buy Cesare’s book. Fortunately for those fans, there are already two sequels—Clown in a Cornfield 2: Frendo Lives and Clown in a Cornfield 3: The Church of Frendo—with more on the way. Does that mean film sequels are coming? Whether it happens or not, Cesare is happy to have two versions of the same world to play in.
“Selfishly, I like it as an author because I still get to do my shit,” Cesare said. “I’m writing Clown in a Cornfield 4, so the almost hermetically sealed Kettle Springs of the books gets to just exist. It gets to be around, and I get to still write in it, while at the same time enjoying Eli’s film and hoping for more. I really hope people go to the theater and support this film because I know everyone involved would like to do [sequels]. Outside of the obvious, yeah, it would be great to have another job kind of thing, it’s just like, we like it. I think we really like the movie and these characters.”
Clown in a Cornfield is in theaters now.
Categorized:Interviews
