Tucker & Dale vs. Evil director Eli Craig is back in the realm of slashers with Clown in a Cornfield, the adaptation of author Adam Cesare‘s young adult slasher novel. This time, the filmmaker is taking a much more serious approach that showcases suspense with the gory kills. Clown in a Cornfield slashes into theaters on May […]
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Craig, who also helmed the comedy-horror movie Little Evil and the pilot of the “Zombieland” TV series, put a lot of thought into the film’s tone, which has much more lighthearted humor and quips than Cesare’s novel without veering too far into comedy territory.
“Well, I’ll be honest. In a way, the straightforward horror is less of a challenge than comedy,” Craig reflects of the film’s balance between horror and humor. “People don’t understand how hard comedy really is, but it was a challenge to wrap my head around like, wait a minute, I’m ready to do a horror film? Even after I’ve dismantled all the horror tropes in the world. I’ve already poked fun at them all, so now how am I going to embrace them and be okay with embracing these tropes?
“I think I figured out the way to do it because the way I do it here is I embrace the tropes up to a point, and then I reverse them, and I change them all up. I make sure that we’re doing new and original things within the framework of a horror film. And I get to add a little bit of comedy too.“
Courtesy of RLJE Films & Shudder. An RLJE Films & Shudder Release
He elaborates, “For Tucker and Dale, I always wanted the deaths to be the funniest part of the film, so when it was gory, you should be laughing. For this, it was really the opposite, and I wanted to be very careful that the action and suspense and the kills were not humorous. There’s then a release valve that happens after where there’s some humor, and so I was really targeted by this one. I want the humor to be right here but not here, and I want to drive the suspense and these horror elements home.
“It’s weird though because a lot of people forget how much good horror films have elements of comedy in them, and even films that people think, ‘Oh, that’s just straight horror.’ Poltergeist [and the like] have all these really funny moments in them that get a crowd to laugh. To me, this is a horror film, and a good horror film to me just has breakout moments of comedy.”
At the center of the horror is Quinn, a final girl with grit and the complexities of being a teenage girl, from romance woes to conflict with her dad. Oh, and a killer clown on the loose. Douglas brought a lot of herself to the role, but she’s quick to credit the novel’s author for her tough final girl role.
Courtesy of RLJE Films & Shudder. An RLJE Films & Shudder Release
“Before I got there and we started filming, Eli and I talked a lot about her character,” Douglas tells BD. “Essentially, he had the idea where I actually know all about what it’s like to be a teenage girl, so he really just wanted me to bring a lot of myself to the character, which was something I was happy to do for this one. But Adam, who wrote the books, is surprisingly very, very good at writing a contemporary teenage girl. He was a teacher and decided that he wanted to write for the youth, and he did exactly that, and I think a lot of the dialogue is actually Adam.”
For his part, Cesare has a lot of experience around teens, but is just as quick to throw credit back to the young actor breathing new life into his novel’s character.
“I was a teacher for a long time,” Cesare explains of how he’s so tuned into adolescents. “I think the idea of living your life with empathy and trying to understand what people are going through and where they’re coming from should be a baseline humanity thing. Now, I’m about to sound super cynical, but it makes you a better writer. If you just pay attention more and you try to understand what people are going through and where they’re coming from, you’ll pick up on it and I’ll get zinged once or twice for people. I’ll try to use slang or try to use a new concept that already becomes outdated once you get it in a book because books take forever to publish.”
Cesare continues, “But the idea, the core of these characters, I think I’m pretty good at that. I’m pretty good at writing teen characters, regardless of gender. But I also think Katie’s selling it a little short there, too, because I think Eli will tell you Katie was rewriting scenes for herself. Not in a ‘I’m taking over the set’ way. She wasn’t like Klaus Kinski. She was fine-tuning, and she has an incredible ear for authenticity. She has an incredible ear for performance; for her own performance and control of her own performance. I was only on set for a day, but you could see it. The proof is in the pudding, the proof is in the film, and then you talk to her. I’ve gotten to talk to her at a lot of these events, and just she’s just cool as shit and just knows her stuff. She’s a student of the genre.”
Courtesy of RLJE Films & Shudder. An RLJE Films & Shudder Release
With the tone settled and a worthy final girl for a new generation in place, that leaves the most important slasher element: the kills. The director has a keen understanding of how important this is to a slasher and aims to deliver. “We embellished the kills,” he confirms. “I think if anything’s very different about the book, it’s not that people are dying. It’s just exactly how they die. These moments are really playful moments for me to figure out. What can we do with the budget we have to make it awesome, to make people just gasp? That’s the moment I’d want people to sometimes scream out, sometimes gasp. I think it’s one of the most important things in a horror movie.
“Obviously, a slasher horror movie is not just about the deaths but how people die and what is the tone when they die. And for me, it’s like walking this fine line of fun but real, and so I keep trying to play with that tone.”
