Why are clowns so scary they become fictional monsters?

The following is from one looking at this problem from the outside in so there's bound to be a lot of hypothesizing. Personally, clowns aren't all that scary but they can be a little intimidating at times but mainly for the big unknown man aspect rather than anything else. That does not stop me from being stubborn though. If this childhood story of mine is the truth. I only remember flashes of this so most of this story is second hand. Apparently there was a birthday party (don't remember who for) where all the kids were assembled on the grass and there was a clown up front. You know, the typical scene. But we were all around four or five rather than sniping older kids prone to bullying the clown. So, the clown says "sit down everyone" and all the kids sat down and quietly stared up at him (this is a flash of memory). Except me. Apparently I stood there in the midst of the pack of kids and refused to obey orders. Even from a stranger wearing in what is effectively a mask. Stubborn, no?

So clowns aren't too scary for me. Thus the question. Why are clowns scary? Why are they scary enough to become fictional monsters? Why are they cast as fictional serial killers or maniacs? Why are they shot before questioned in police dramas? Why are they depicted as drug crazed? In fact, are we scared of clowns or do we just hate them? There's probably a little of both feelings involved, as is usually the case when people are afraid. Hate what you're afraid of because it dared to make you afraid. Kill it so you never have to be afraid again. That sort of thing.

Still, fear seems integral to all the emotional responses we have to a clown. So, why do we fear clowns? Here's some I can understand, some that could also be sneakily drawn on to create a really scary clown.

The masked man
His or her real features are almost unrecognisable under the wig and makeup and strange puffy clothing. You're unlikely to be able to identify him or her on the street afterwards unless they were a relative. I believe the fear of the masked one response is a fear mainly induced by male clowns rather than female ones. Possibly for the lower voice, height, build and large hands. Females tend to be less threatening even if they are of heavier build or quite tall as they tend to be softer, rounder, have smaller hands, a higher and more normal voice to a child (children's voices are all high) and it is possible they colour coordinate a little better merely from intense and long lasting practice.

The stranger
The clown is likely to be someone you don't know at all. Add to that, you can't see what he or she really looks like so there's no real way of identifying the person or anything about them. Stranger danger isn't always taught. Sometimes - I'd actually say quite often if I could get away with it - it is instinctual for a child to fear someone unknown.


Our early facial recognition abilities see them as mutants or other
The lines on their faces are in the wrong places, are the wrong shape and over emphasis or enlarge features beyond easy recognition. We have to consciously look past the paint in order to see the person beneath but that is something learnt. It isn't an instinctual skill at all and so the younger the child the more likely they are to see the painted face as the clown's real face. Now, I don't care how nicely you curve those lines and how big and shiny your eyes are made out to be, if you don't look near human you're going to come across as quite scary to some young children. Purely because they can't see past the paint. Clowns can become aliens and monsters because of their paint.


The inability to predict their actions
As the facial features of a clown are covered it is very hard to tell whether they're frowning, laughing, crying, glaring etc. So you don't know if they're annoyed or upset. And if you don't know then all those quick movements can be read anyway you instinctively do. They could be signs of aggression which would induce fear. That's pretty natural. Also, because you can't properly see any of those emotional indicators you find it hard to tell just what that clown is about to do. Will they grab you? Or will they try to play a trick on you? Do you need to run away from them yet? Why not run now to get out of harms way so as to save worrying about it?

They invade your space
A clown is desperate to entertain at times and will bound up to a small child in hope of a good response or just call out to them and demand a response of an unprepared child. Meanwhile the small child feels suddenly dwarfed and threatened, resulting in tears and cries for a parent. And as you know, some childhood traumas stick. Alternatively, something like stage fright can hit as the child struggles to comprehend just what's being asked of him or her. Especially if the eyes of other children and parents are on them, waiting.

They're loud and boisterous when you aren't and often demand you be too
This means they're likely to call upon you if you're not responding properly, on their part purely to pull you into the game and entertain. Also, because they're loud and boisterous they seem to be even more incomprehensible than when just standing about in heavy makeup, bright puffy clothes, strange shoes and a bright wig. Why are they jumping about all of a sudden? Why are they yelling? What's so exciting? What's going on? In all, it is an unpleasant overload of the senses that confuses the mind.

They perform tricks you can't understand
If being incomprehensibly loud and boisterous wasn't enough clowns also perform tricks you just can't understand and rarely do they explain them to you. This leaves you confused and befuddled (or confuddled) and struggling to catch up with just what's happening before your eyes. On top of that, it seems they are disobeying all the rules of the world you'd learnt up until then. Things don't appear out of thin air just because you wished for them. You'd already learnt that when wishing for cake and ice cream and even your mother had said "No, it'll rot your teeth". Not to mention what happens when you forget to tell someone you lost a tooth and your tooth is still there in the morning even though you were wishing for money, money, money so you could buy a lolly from the school canteen. It just isn't right that the clown's pulling coins from nowhere without losing his or her teeth! They must be fearfully strong magic wielders who want to keep all their secrets to themselves. Enter a little hate along with that fear.

They're laughter is spooky
This is because a clown often has to laugh even after a kid has kicked him or her, or a kid has destroyed the show and reduced their pay, or a parent has become loud and aggressive during the show. The laugh is false. They aren't happy. Yet the makeup says they're still smiling and wide-eyed happy. The problem here is that children can tell when laughter is faked even if they can't say just what the problem is or why they feel suddenly creeped out or scared. This is where the creepy clown laughter that's become so famous comes from. Forced, false and possibly evil laughter from a strange unreadable man (generally) wearing a mask who's intent on getting your attention no matter what and in doing so grabs you and draws you into his game.

I think I'm beginning to see why people are scared of clowns and why clown trauma seems to be a lasting one. And that's just with normal clowns, the average kiddy garden party variety.

Think Pennywise is scary?

He's just fictional. Nothing to worry about.

You can just change the channel or hit stop on your remote.

This guy is scary. Be very, very scared.

He's John Wayne Gacy and he's a real serial killer.

Also, strangely noted as one fact about his clown costume, he's of the rarer 'friendly' clown sort where the lines on his face are pointed, a feature usually only created for evil or scary clowns. I think it is a tad telling...

Then comes things like real serial killers dressing as clowns to pick victims, clowns as the chosen shapes of fictional monsters, clowns as chainsaw wielding maniacs on television and in the movies, clowns returning from the dead and killing people, dead clowns paired with spooky ice cream trucks playing the ice cream song off key... The clown has a lot to contend with just to make someone laugh. And it seems that we laugh the most when the clown is safely fenced in with the other actors and performers in a circus ring - far from where they can reach us and pick us out from all the rest sitting there watching. We feel much safety in numbers while sitting around a circus ring, more than we ever do while at a garden party.

So, to end this as my clown analysis has become long, I'd like to point out that if you're creating a scary clown character it is easy to make them truly terrifying. Imbue them with real power. Give them strange clown makeup with dulled, worn or unusual colouring. Make the lines on their faces harsh and inhuman. Make their facial expressions barely readable beneath the makeup yet hinting at the opposite of what the makeup suggests (if happy makeup then frowning features, if frowning makeup then an evil grin). Make them laugh in all the wrong way, grab at people, be unpredictable and invasive. Everything that terrifies the child. Because that terror is likely still festering away in your audience, there for playing with.

Pain and creativity

There is much to be said on this topic but I'll keep it short as I'm suffering a bit today.


Pain changes your moods and changes your thought processes. It makes you snappy and you tend to cut to the chase and despise anyone spouting bullshit where otherwise you might have smiled and nodded fairly gently. Pain makes you want to cut parts of yourself away in order to keep the pain-free bits but there's no way you'll do anything as that would cause more pain. And when you're all said and done on pain you jump for the pain killers, which often contain codeine or other relaxants that induce sleep. Knocked out, you feel even less but time flies by and nothing is done in the process. In fact, dreams while you're on painkillers become almost useless as creative material as either you fail to remember anything coherent about then, fail to remember anything at all or have them constantly interrupted by bouts of painful awakenings.


Meanwhile, it is said that popping pills and the like will help creativity. The pain sufferer usually doesn't get such a benefit, losing creative thoughts and even waking moments to mind-numbing pain pills and the sleep that follows.


This, along with other various repercussions of over usage of pain pills, is the reason why, as someone who has suffered pain fairly chronically through half her life, I tend to steer clear of pain pills unless I'm just about at to loose my breakfast, lunch and dinner. Sleep is my main remedy and while I loose time I almost invariably wake up with good creative fodder and a mind clear enough to write it all down, or draw or paint or whatever.

Physical pain is incredibly intrusive on the mind, more than most realise until they experience a good bout of it. But pain is usually temporary, even for the chronic sufferers, as it fluxes and wanes its way through our lives. Our recognition of its impact will vary according to how often we feel it, as will our reactions. Man flu is the reaction to little to no pain through everyday life for rather a long period of time, followed by a sudden onset of various symptoms seemingly unmanageable but actually rather mild. The reason man flu is so annoying to many onlookers is that many of those onlookers suffer far worse on the average day and just want to kick the man flu sufferer for griping over a day that would otherwise be labelled rather good. The tired and unsympathetic reaction is normal for someone normally in pain. As is a depressed viewpoint and an open recognition of physical boundaries, limitations and weaknesses. The pain sufferer might be called a wet blanket as they aren't as bouncy or keen to go do something physically challenging but the reality is, if it is going to make the problem worse then being called a wet blanket is a small price to pay for avoiding more suffering, especially if you hurt yourself again.


Navigating physical pain to work is difficult because of its impact upon our minds. A mind fogged by either pain or pain pills simply can't churn out work to meet a deadline unless there is significant risk riding on not meeting it. And meeting the deadline in such a condition will inevitably run the sufferer into the ground and cause them to need time off later to recover. If the sufferer is lucky they can ride through it once or twice but they will inevitably collapse at some point or another. Forgiving yourself and explaining the situation to those who need to know is the best approach. Just because you feel pain a lot doesn't mean it shouldn't impact you because for you it is normal.


The flip side of this is that chronic pain sufferers can actually become incredibly desensitised to physical pain. Pain can go unfelt entirely if the level of pain a person is used to far exceeds the warning signal pain of a physical problem. If you're used to only feeling pain at the level of "My gut has been sliced open with a knife" then you simply don't feel any minor ache for "My tooth is slowly rotting". You only find out when you visit the dentist and they gasp in shock over the damage done and how you hadn't felt a thing. Desensitisation can impact up creativity too as it can whittle away you sympathy, empathy and understanding of how small, niggling things can change a person. On the other hand, you could write a damned good drama or thriller filled with incredible levels of pain and angst that blows everyone's minds, as long as you managed to make them understand that people can indeed feel this way and you're not over-dramatising (which is oddly what you think when you see someone whining away over a scraped knee or cut finger).


Now, to keep this short(ish) I'm moving on to mental pain. Mental pain is otherwise known as depression or angst or fear or anxiety or heartbreak. In essence the pain comes from either and internal (chemical imbalance) or external source (foods or victimisation), with an instigator that effects the thought process (someone told you you were fat even after you visited a gym for a month and put in heaps of effort). The pain is really the thoughts of a person tearing and ripping apart that person's own identity, self-worth and connection with others. You don't even need to see yourself as much to begin with in order to tear it all to shreds anyway. The mental pain you suffer is highly destructive to creativity as you actively tell yourself you can't do anything well and nothing you do will ever be appreciated all while cutting off sources of creativity through actively destroying relationships in order to justify your own thought processes (often an unconscious action, this one, so if you want someone to snap out of it go gently here while beating the self worth back into them).

As you can see, the problem with mental pain is that it is usually brought on by something uncontrollable or fairly hard to control but heightened by only the controllable. In fact, it is very easy to control your own mind when it is tearing at itself. If you think to do it. The answer is: You tell it to shut up. You repeatedly tell it to work hard to fix the uncontrollable enough so that you can function. And you actively do as you're told. And if necessary you treat part of your mind like a whining child with the other part of your mind that's far more grown up and wise and live your life using the wise side. It is perfectly fine to have an almost split personality if no one notices and it is functioning. Only if your life is badly effected by something does it need fixing. Go back to that rule: If it isn't broken don't fix it. Cracked isn't broken. Cracked is quirky. Broken is dysfunctional.


Mental pain, because of the tearing away of the mind by the mind, also leaves the sufferer with little to no energy to burn on such things as creative thought. It is far too busy destroying itself to care about creating. But sometimes, just sometimes, there is an opportunity for someone suffering mental pain to write it all down as a form of catharsis. By writing some of the emotions felt down, in a fiction story or a biography, the person can burn off some of that excess mental energy, think through some issues and find level ground within themselves. By burning off that energy there's also less energy to spend on tearing oneself apart and so the change can be permanent as long as the person keeps on being creative. The main issue for someone with the potential to write who's suffering pain is that they struggle to put pen to paper as the lack confidence. If you ever run across anyone in such a position then give them a heavy boot in the butt to get them writing. It might hurt a bit at first but they'll likely be better off for it. And if it is you, reading this, then get cracking damnit! Go, write.

In other words. Fix it somehow. Whatever your solution may be, find it and bring it into play so you don't give those you love headaches (at best).

So enough from me. I caught the time while my eyes and thoughts were clear and my hand wasn't shaking to write. Job done. And while my mind goes foggy again I'll be drawing up a cyborg lady. Then I might crash and go to sleep again...


Oh, and good luck. Tisn't a war that ends really. But you can win battles along the way and everyone loves to win.

What makes a good horror story

There are so many ways to tell a horror story and really spook the reader, listener or viewer, depending on the format, that it can become hard to tell what makes a good horror story. In making or presenting a good horror story there is much to consider.

There is also much that affects its reception. There is a little of the personal taste of each audience member, a touch of their interpretations, a lot of the susceptibility of the audience to be spooked, a tad of how familiar the audience is with the storyline and a fair dollop of whether or not the horror story manages to make the audience members laugh or scream.

So what is likely to succeed?
Well, what has succeeded over the years of audience's listening to, reading and watching horror?

The basic principles of horror:

• Tie the story to a moral, whether drawn from religion, folklore or social norms.

• It is preferable that the moral of the tale be delivered in a bloody and/or lethal fashion.

• Focus on issues that affect all humans, such as death, the afterlife, good and evil, the devil and the demonic.

• Use a supernatural being to impart the moral, namely witches, werewolves, vampires, ghosts, ghouls, demons, the Devil or another such creature.

• If the story's twist is that a while everyone believes the one visiting moralistic justice is supernatural then make the deliverer of moral justice entirely human but evil, unstable or misguided.

• Insert Gothic aspects for a bleak view of society and allow this to couch and enhance the darkness of the moral deliverer.

• Gothic aspects help to show either that the society is corrupt, the characters are pessimistic or the world does in fact contain the supernatural. Rules of nature can be bent and broken far more easily using this format.

• Create a new monster or revamp an old one into something more sinister.

• Emotional responses to aim for: fear, tension, dread, shock, disgust, outrage, nervousness, claustrophobia, agitation and to some degree self-criticism (stemming from the moral aspect).

• If these are impossible to incite with the horror story then aim for dark humour. This is equally useful in creating a successful horror story.

• Without a moral aspect to the horror story, use of the chaos principle can be applied. To have the protagonist/s randomly maimed, tortured or killed without apparent rhyme or reason will leave the audience wondering why and whether such a horrific thing could happen to them.

• Another principle to use if the moral aspect is left out is to rely on the twisted, barely understandable yet eerily familiar worldview of the antagonist in creating the reason for the misfortunes of the protagonist/s.

• If a Gothic portrayal of the world is not desirable then a gritty and realistic portrayal will work equally well. The impact of a realistic setting, if a little grim, is that the audience can accept such events as is happening to the protagonist happening to them, thereby inciting the desired range of emotional reactions.

• To have build the most horror, first create empathy, sympathy, affection or a connection. Then move onto suspense leading to tension and dread so that when the protagonist meets the moral or random event the audience feels shock, horror, dismay, outrage, agitation and to some extent denial. Disgust can also be involved but is just a side effect of the event and their recognition of the mindset of the antagonist.

• Another way to build horror is to have the audience sympathise and identify with the antagonist rather than the protagonist. The role reversal forces the audience to reflect of the horrors within their own minds. Used alongside event based horror this is a subtler format with regards to its emotional impact but leaves the audience thinking about the story for far longer.

• Blurring the lines between protagonist and antagonist, with regards to motivations and actions, is effective in creating a psychological impact upon the audience.

• Animals can be used to replace monsters but again monstrous attributes are usually applied. If monstrous attributes aren't then a starkness of the landscape, randomness in attack and an escalation of the unexpected horrific events should produce adequate horror in the audience.

There are likely more principles to making a good horror story but these will help you get started.