The great clown panic of 2016: ‘a volatile mix of fear and contagion’
A magic combination of childhood fears, social media and psychology has powered the spread of clown ‘sightings’ around the world. But will Halloween mark ‘peak clown’? And what should you do if you are confronted by one?
Clowns to the left of me ... strong feelings from our childhoods are contributing to the phenomenon’s endurance. Photograph: Juan Carlos Cardenas/EPA
Steven Poole
Monday 31 October 2016 15.02 GMTLast modified on Monday 31 October 2016 17.22 GMT
It began in the UK on Friday 30 September. Police in Newcastle received reports of someone dressed as a “creepy clown” leaping out of bushes to scare children. Over the next few days,
half a dozen such clown incidents were recorded. A teenage clown was arrested in possession of a “bladed article”. On 5 October, the tabloids announced that a “terrifying clown craze” had hit these shores. And so it began to spread.
The first named victim was
17-year-old student Megan Bell, who has a “lifelong fear of clowns” and was chased down the street by one at night. Soon, more clowns began to pop up: in Wales, Manchester, Sheffield and Liverpool. Then just about everywhere. Concerned parents made Facebook pages about clowns, thus inadvertently helping to spread the meme. The Metropolitan police advised schoolchildren to call 999 if they saw a “killer clown”. Some observers spoke knowingly of a classic “social panic”, since only a very few of the clown incidents involved actual physical assaults. But being chased down the street at night by a clown, or anyone else, is frightening enough for adults and children alike.
As Met commander Julian Bennett pointed out: “Antisocial behaviour can leave people feeling scared, anxious and intimidated, and I would urge those who are causing fear and alarm to carefully consider the impact their actions have on others.” These stories were surreal news fodder, but not, when you thought about them, actually funny. But why clowns? And why now?
The current craze started, as crazes often do, in the US, where, since the beginning of August, people dressed as clowns had been popping up creepily all over the country. There was speculation that it was all a PR stunt for the upcoming release of a movie version of
Stephen King’s 1986 horror novel It, which features a famously eerie clown called Pennywise. In fact, the earliest reported incident, a creepy clown standing in the street holding black balloons in Green Bay, Wisconsin,
was a marketing ploy for a short film entitled Gagsproduced by a local, Adam Krause. But subsequent clowns began to terrorise children and sometimes attack people, while commentators spoke of panic and hysteria. In Pennsylvania, a teenager was murdered by someone in a clown mask. Two weeks ago,
a clown stabbed a teenager in Varberg, Sweden. There are, we are told, “creepy clowns” or even “killer clowns” everywhere. Last weekend,
the NSPCC said that Childline counsellors had received hundreds of calls from children worried about clowns. People call it the great clown panic, or clown uprising, or clown invasion, or clown craze, of 2016. And so far it shows no sign of abating.