The Science of Stephen King

With every joyous clown, intent to evoke smiles, there seems to be a contrasting evil clown. These clowns may dress and paint their faces with the same vivid colors, yet their intentions are far more nefarious. In 1940, Batman villain the Joker was introduced to comic readers across the world. Like Pennywise, the Joker has become an American icon, appearing in numerous TV shows and films. In all his iterations, he retains the Auguste aesthetic, yet is murderous to the core. In 1982, a clown toy terrorized children in the film Poltergeist, not long after the apprehension of the real killer clown.

John Wayne Gacy, one of the most notorious serial killers of the twentieth century, was caught in 1978 after a reign of terror that shocked not only his local Chicago suburb, but the world. Convicted of thirty-three murders, Gacy had hidden twenty-six of his victims in the crawl space of his home. His victims were all male, many of them teenagers. At a time when serial murder was rather a new concept, the notion that Gacy was a successful businessman and community volunteer made the reality all the more terrifying. And on top of it all, the images of Gacy as “Pogo the Clown” brought goosebumps. Gacy enjoyed performing for children as Pogo, dressing in the typical Auguste style with his signature triangular eye paint. Along with the Joker and Pennywise, Pogo has joined the pantheon of evil clowns, all the more horrendous, as he did not spring from the imagination, but is the real thing.

In the winter of 2017, before It hit theaters, researchers published a study in the European Journal of Pediatrics. Their aim was to discover if children in pediatric wards were scared of medical clowns, and if so, why. Medical clowns have long been a hospital tradition, think Robin Williams’s wacky character in Patch Adams (1998). The researchers used a sample of over one thousand children, and involved the medical clowns in the study. After the clowns entertained the children for about ten minutes, with the typical tricks and prop gags, they filled out a form about how many of the young patients experienced coulrophobia, or a fear of clowns. Children and parents voiced their opinions as well.

Out of the 1160 children, only 14 children experienced coulrophobia of any severity (1.2 percent). The average age of children experiencing coulrophobia was three and a half years (range one to fifteen years). Most of the children who experienced coulrophobia were girls (twelve out of fourteen). Of the fourteen children experiencing coulrophobia, six had it in a severe form (43 percent) responding to the clown’s visit with significant fear, crying, and apposition behavior. The rest of the patients exhibited moderate fear (eight children, 57 percent). Based on the a-priori determined criteria, none responded with mild coulrophobia. The anxiety responses observed by the research assistant were variable: crying, anger, standing still, and holding on to the caregiver. Eight out of the fourteen participants in the coulrophobia group responded with crying during the medical clown visit. Out of fourteen participants in the coulrophobia group, twelve were reported as trying to avoid further contact with the medical clown (hiding, staying in the room, etc.)4

This led the researchers to conclude that it was a relatively low number of patients who had actual coulrophobia. Their reasoning was that evil clowns were not as prevalent in the media as they had been in the 1980s. Also, the medical clowns in the study wore little makeup, which may have been a contributing factor. We have to wonder, with the advent of the two new It films, if the study would have different results now?

In 2016, there were over one hundred suspicious clown sightings in the United States which led to some arrests.

One reason clowns may bring us unease is the concept of the uncanny. German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch first coined the term, with Sigmund Freud further developing the idea. The uncanny essentially refers to something familiar though mysterious. Clowns are humans, yet their makeup, dress, and behavior are in contrast to what we expect. Freud wrote:

Frightening things would then constitute the uncanny; and it must be a matter of indifference whether what is uncanny was itself originally frightening or whether it carried some other effect. In the second place, if this is indeed the secret nature of the uncanny we can understand why linguistic has extended das Hemlich (‘Homey’) into its opposite das Unhemlich; for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something that is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it through process of repression.5

While this concept may sound esoteric in the writings of Freud, it really comes down to the unnatural feeling we often sense around humanlike robots, dolls, and those pesky clowns.