‘Clown Panic’ Trailer Takes Hulu Back to the 2016 Clown Scare

Hulu has released the first trailer for Clown Panic, a feature-length documentary about the creepy clown sightings that spread across the United States in the fall of 2016. The film premieres October 12 as part of the streamer’s Huluween lineup, on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+ in the U.S. and on Disney+ internationally. Deadline debuted the trailer on Tuesday.

It has taken a decade, but the strangest horror story of 2016 finally has its documentary.

What the Trailer Shows

The two-minute cut is built from the raw material of that autumn: local news reports, phone footage of figures in clown masks standing at the edge of the woods, and the viral videos that turned every sighting into a national event. Between the archive clips are new interviews with witnesses, police, cultural commentators and, in the trailer’s best decision, the professional clowns whose bookings evaporated once the panic set in.

One of those clowns gets the line of the trailer. “I don’t know any clowns that wanna go and kill a bunch of kids,” one says. “I mean, that’s your customers.” An official on the other side of the story sums up how quickly things turned: a single clown sighting would not have troubled him, but then there was a second one, and the question became how many more were coming.

Bloody Disgusting notes the cut also includes a clip of Pennywise charging on horseback, which is a reminder of what the panic was feeding on. It was less than a year from theaters at the time, and Stephen King himself took to social media that October to ask people to cool the clown hysteria. Hulu is billing the film as darkly funny, unsettling and unexpectedly emotional, and the trailer supports at least the first two.

How a South Carolina Apartment Complex Became a National Story

The doc starts where the panic did. In late August 2016, children at an apartment complex in Greenville County, South Carolina told their parents that clowns had tried to lure them into the woods. Greenville police never confirmed a single sighting, but the story was on cable news within days, and copycats did the rest. By October, sightings had been reported in dozens of states, schools went into lockdown, arrests were made for hoax reports, and McDonald’s quietly benched Ronald McDonald for the season.

Very little of it was real, which is exactly what makes it a documentary subject. Clown Panic is pitched as an examination of what happens when fear, social media and a jumpy national mood collide, and the 2016 clown scare is about as clean a case study as the internet has produced. It also sits in a long tradition: readers who followed iHorror’s look at how the internet builds a boogeyman will recognize every step of the process.

There is a genre footnote worth knowing, too. As Dread Central points out, the crew behind Terrifier, Fuzz on the Lens Productions, staged the viral Staten Island Clown sightings in 2014 as a marketing stunt, two years before the real wave hit. Whether Clown Panic gets into that is not yet known, but Art the Clown’s producers were spooking neighborhoods before it was a national pastime.

The Filmmakers Behind It

Ed Perkins directs. Perkins earned an Academy Award nomination for the 2018 short Black Sheep and went on to direct Tell Me Who I Am for Netflix and The Princess for HBO, so this is a filmmaker who has spent his career on stories about how people process trauma and spectacle. Lightbox’s Jonathan Chinn and Simon Chinn produce, and Suzanne Lavery is executive producer. Simon Chinn’s credits include Man on Wire and Searching for Sugar Man, both of which won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

Per Deadline, Clown Panic marks a move into horror for Lightbox. The London and Los Angeles based company’s recent slate includes Twisted Yoga for Apple TV, Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time for Nat Geo and The Diamond Heist for Netflix.

Clown Panic joins a Huluween slate that also includes American Horror Story: 13, Coven Academy, Soulm8te and Hokum. For everything else worth streaming on the service this month, see iHorror’s guide to the best horror movies on Hulu.