Apparently, I'm not afraid of clowns

I mean, they’re not pleasant and I can see why people are afraid of clowns but I just don’t think they’ll be showing up in my nightmares.

It was very good. It was very engrossing, the cast was pretty good, and the scares were inventive, relying not just on clowns but on the even scarier adults abusing their kids in various ways. It was scary but it wasn’t something that will affect me and I didn’t feel any raw dread or terror like I sometimes get in horror movies. I did like the slideshow scene when the mother’s red hair shifted frame by frame into Pennywise’s hair. (I think image doctoring is effective in horror, like when someone finds an old wedding photo and oh my God, is that the killer’s face in the background?!)

So clowns are creepy and all that but I just don’t have coulrophobia. I think some of this is because I wasn’t there for the original It. I didn’t read the book and I only recently saw the miniseries so Pennywise was not a part of my childhood or anything. As an adult seeing it for the first time, I thought Tim Curry was funnier than anything else. I can definitely see how children watching this would have been horrified and developed a lifelong fear of clowns. Even if I’d seen the miniseries when it came out, I was 16 at the time, so I don’t know how scared I would have been. You develop fast in those years so there’s a big difference between ages 12 and 16. I think if you’re not there for some pop culture at the beginning, you’re never going to get it like other people do.

I definitely am not afraid of the clowns in American Horror Story: Cult. Part of that is because the show mixes horror with a hefty dose of camp and snark, to the point where I can’t tell which is which or even if what I’m watching is any good. Ally’s over-the-top screaming at the clowns mostly strikes me as funny. I wasn’t scared of Twisty the Clown in Freak Show, either. His background of hurting kids was definitely disturbing but the grease paint and red nose didn’t bother me. For some scenes, it seemed like they told the actor, “Just stand there. You don’t even need to do anything; the appearance of a clown is scary enough.” Not for me, not really.

Anyway, It was very good.