Make America Hate Again

Trump-Era Horror and the Politics of Fear

Victoria McCollum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138498280
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351016490
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Horror films have traditionally sunk their teeth into straitened times, reflecting, expressing and validating the spirit of the epoch, and capitalising on the political and cultural climate in which they are made. This book shows how the horror genre has adapted itself to the transformation of contemporary American politics and the mutating role of traditional and new media in the era of Donald Trump's Presidency of the United States. Exploring horror's renewed potential for political engagement in a socio-political climate characterised by the angst of civil conflict, the deception of 'alternative facts' and the threat of nuclear or biological conflict and global warming, Make America Hate Again examines the intersection of film, politics, and American culture and society through a bold critical analysis of popular horror (films, television shows, podcasts and online parodies), such as 10 Cloverfield Lane, American Horror Story, Don't Breathe, Get Out, Hotel Transylvania 2, Hush, It, It Comes at Night, South Park, The Babadook, The Walking Dead, The Woman, The Witch and Twin Peaks: The Return. The first major exploration of the horror genre through the lens of the Trump era, it investigates the correlations between recent, culturally meaningful horror texts, and the broader culture within which they have become gravely significant. Offering a rejuvenating, optimistic, and positive perspective on popular culture as a site of cultural politics, Make America Hate Again will appeal to scholars and students of American studies, film and media studies, and cultural studies.

Part 1
“Drain the swamp … we all float down here!”

The evil clown archetype, Trump’s circus of cruelty, and the freak show of US politics in American horror

1
“Let’s put a smile on that face”

Trump, the psychotic clown, and the history of American violence

Scott Poole

Two months before the election of Donald Trump, the clowns began appearing at the edge of the woods. In the last hot summer days of August 2016, children living at the Fleetwood Manor apartment complex in the deeply conservative city of Greenville, South Carolina, told their parents about figures in face paint with bulbous red noses attempting to lure them into the woods. Local police found nothing and no one. But the painted phantoms kept coming for the children in a rumour panic that spread across the nation, with particular resonance in deeply conservative states that Trump won decisively in November.

A clown can get away with murder.

John Wayne Gacy

I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose voters.

Donald J. Trump, January 24, 2016

The age of Trump has seen the apotheosis of the clown as archetype, symbol, and nightmare of folklore and film. Pundits and cultural critics have repeatedly used the image to describe his demagogic buffoonery, chaotic governing style, and aimless malice. The first year of his regime included the longest and most widespread phantom clown scare in American history, a remake of the made-for-television horror classic It for the big screen, and Ryan Murphy using clown horror as a central trope in American Horror Story: Cult, a series that opens with a montage of clips from the 2016 election.

The clown in horror narratives, with its obsessive appeal and dangerous terror, offers a key to understanding Trump’s own politics of horror. An examination of films that traded in clown horror from Reagan’s America to their massive resurgence after 9/11 reveal their tendency to explore two themes central to understanding right-wing nativism. First, the films examined here engage in a brand of poisoned nostalgia for small town America imagined as facing a dire threat. Second, most cinematic representations of clown horror depend on a sense of aggrieved masculinity that explodes in chaotic violence. The inhuman face of the psychotic clown acts as a symbol for the American acceptance, indeed its obsession, with unexpected and unpredictable violence. It’s the same face worn by the 45th president, silly, pathetic without being exactly sad, and seemingly masking a bottomless potential for social, cultural, and geopolitical mayhem.

The frightening clown image runs deep in the global history of cultural symbol and performance. Although there’s no space here to elaborate the long history of the figure in myth and theatre, Benjamin Radford has already provided the most detailed account of the longer genealogy of clown horror in his book Bad Clowns. Radford (2016) points out that “It’s misleading to ask when clowns turned bad for they were never really good” (p. 20). He shows us Christian bishops worrying about clown antics in late antiquity, the Harlequin figure in early modern performance that combined doltishness and violence, and the 19th-century’s “Mr. Punch” of Punch and Judy fame, a character whose clownish personality supposedly gave a darkly humorous edge to the extreme violence he prosecutes on his wife, children, and bystanders. “That’s the way to do it!” he screams maniacally as he delivers skull-crushing blows with his signature blunt weapon.

The horrific and violent clown made an early appearance in the silent film era. Lon Chaney played a vengeful prankster in 1924’s He Who Gets Slapped. Chaney portrayed a mild-mannered scholar whose research, and wife, are stolen by a wealthy patron. He becomes a sad clown whose act revolves around being slapped. By the film’s end, he murderously slaps back. Paul Leni’s The Man Who Laughs (1928) gave us the deformed, and maniacal, jester in Conrad Veidt’s performance. Jack Pierce’s makeup, seeming to disfigure Veidt with a permanent rictus grin, provided direct inspiration for the Clown Prince of Crime himself, the Joker. Veidt’s “Gwynplaine” suffers a lifetime of abuse and his rejection by an upper-class love interest turns him into a serial killer.

Lon Chaney famously said that “a clown is funny in the circus ring, but what would be the normal reaction to opening the door at midnight and finding the same clown standing there in the moonlight?” Chaney understood that the uncanny nature of the clown deeply unsettled even those who went to them for entertainment. In fact, Benjamin Radford notes that Jack Nicholson echoes Chaney’s comment about the clown in moonlight in his gaudy Gothic performance of the Joker in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman. “Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?” Nicholson’s viciously violent Joker asks his unlucky victims before they die (p. 21).

Most clown horror films are falsely categorised, and dismissed, as “cult” films, films that supposedly avoid serious issues, combine high concept with low budgets, and seek to appeal to a niche audience. However, Fredric Jameson’s idea of “the political unconscious” underscores how the highly symbolic nature of clown horror makes it a particularly pungent variety of political commentary (Jameson 1981). Jameson writes that, “the production of aesthetic or narrative form” works as “an ideological act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal ‘solutions’ to unresolvable social contradictions” (p. 79).

Mark Shiel has offered a powerful caution to thinking of cult films in such terms with a particular focus on the countercultural biker film of the 1960s. He questions the use of terms like “trash cinema” or “paracinema” that tend to dehistoricise film, assume that even oppositional narratives are easy to commodify in postmodern capitalism, or that ignore the “historical-materialist” conditions that produced a film in favour of the privatised obsessions of self-consciously “cult” fandoms (Shiel 2003).

Historicising, rather than universalising, clown horror in American life urges us to look at a particular trajectory of the psychotic clown that reveals the underground cultural forces that emerged in Trumpism and the Trump regime. Looked at in this way, the story of a new kind of clown horror film begins, not in the electoral maelstrom of 2016, but in the 1980s. Since that decade, “phantom clown” sightings and evil cinematic jesters have been highly dependent on one another for specific tropes and broad thematic elements. Although the most significant phantom clown panic in American history appears to have started in the months preceding and the year following Trump’s election, the first rumour legends date back to the early 1980s, the decade when frightening cinematic clowns began to fill the screen.

These expressions of clown horror suggest that Trumpism may be aberrant, but is not an aberration, in America’s deeply violent history. Its roots run deep in the violent settler societies from which the United States emerged but has gained a special pungency in the 50 years that preceded, and in some respects prepared the way, for the rise of Trumpism. The clown, in its uncanny powers, monstrous intentions, and its alchemy of violence and nostalgia, reveals the social machinery of power in post-industrial America: Trump’s America.

Phantom violence and the violence of phantoms

In the late summer of 2016, in the days following the first alleged sightings, menacing harlequins appeared all over Greenville County, South Carolina. Fleetwood Manor apartments sent a letter to residents on August 24th about “a lot of complaints” concerning “a person dressed in clown clothing taking children or trying to lure children in to [sic] the woods.” Obviously, a clown “taking children” constitutes a rather different situation than someone, maybe, trying to “lure” children. But the language of the letter replicates the nature of the panic that emerged in the South Carolina summer and swept the country. The public coined supposed clown sightings into rumour legend. Sightings became “attacks” and “killings.” Rather well-armed South Carolinians turned the emerging panic into a situation of actual danger. A Greenville sheriff’s deputy made one of the department’s numerous visits to the Fleetwood apartments after “a report of gunshots” that had as their source in “men from the complex… who fired shots into the woods” after thinking they had “heard something” (“To The Residents of Fleetwood Manor”; LaFleur 2016).

Pranksters acted out the rumour legend by dressing as clowns or setting up threatening online profiles. Folklorists such as Bill Ellis call such behaviour “ostension,” the actual performance of a rumour legend (Ellis 2000). These incidents ran the gamut from tedious but harmless behaviour like teenagers in Texas wearing clown masks at school to activities that border on domestic terrorism. In Alabama, police investigated and eventually charged a woman and two juveniles for making online threats concerning a local high school using the persona of “Shoota Clown” or “Floma Klown” (Stokes 2016).

A number of cultural critics made connections right away between the emergence of Trumpism and the clown panic. Trump had already been widely criticised, and sometimes unwisely dismissed, as a clown in a large number of outlets, including the more traditional conservative media. National Review, once the flagship publication of the American right before the Fox News/Breitbart era, called Trump “the foul-mouthed clown” after his nomination. The late conservative op-ed writer Charles Krauthammer called him “a rodeo clown” (Noonan 2017; Schwartz 2015).

Mary Valle, writing in The Guardian in October of 2016 interpreted this language with razor-sharp precision. She called Trump “a gigantic killer clown” who used his supporters’ “despair and hopelessness against them.” Valle suggested that maybe the time had come “to panic over imaginary clowns” (Valle 2016).

But, Valle added some important nuance. Perhaps the psychotic clown had long been preparing the way for Trump’s American horror story. She noted that Ronald Reagan “with his molded, strangely too-dark hair, rouged cheeks, and permanent smile” had successfully sold his act to Americans while children of the ’80s worried perhaps more than any generation since the 1950s about nuclear annihilation. These worries ignored the fact that America’s massive military build-up and increased tensions with the Soviet Union began during the Carter administration. Still, Reagan’s tough guy rhetoric, his proclivity for joking about doomsday scenarios into hot mics, and what Valle calls his “sadistic Santa Claus” persona magnified these fears for kids who came of age watching The Day After (1983) on network TV.

Even during the ’80s, the shadow of the clown could be seen behind the happy-go-lucky figure of Reagan. Los Angeles Times cartoonist Paul Conrad drew Ronald Reagan as a clownish figure, occasionally very specifically as the “sad-clown” archetype. Reagan’s film Bedtime for Bonzo (1951) influenced the Dead Kennedy’s protest song mocking Reagan, “Rambozo the Clown,” that appeared on their 1986 album Bedtime for Democracy. Finally, an enormous number of mass clown sightings first occurred during Reagan’s two terms, sightings that found their counterpart in the first clown horror films since the silent era.

The summer of 1981 apparently saw the first conflation of clown horror with tropes of “stranger danger” that had roots in the 1950s. On May 5, elementary school children in Brookline, Massachusetts, claimed two men in clown suits had tried to lure them into a black van. The next day, Boston police responded to complaints of similar incidents in Roxbury and Jamaica Plains in Boston, both dismissed by authorities as “hysteria” growing from the garbled accounts of young children. In the next two months, both Pittsburgh and Kansas City experienced similar panics. In every case except for Brookline, the panics occurred in overwhelmingly working-class African American neighbourhoods. This trend continued with a phantom clown seen in the largely African American Congress Heights neighbourhood of Washington, DC, and in numerous sightings on Chicago’s South Side in 1991 and again in 2008 (Dessem 2016).

The role of race and the racist structures of American life have generally been ignored (or simply dismissed) in relation to the phantom clowns of the 1980s and 1990s. Extraordinarily, no real attention has been paid in the research on the moral panics of the 1980s to the Atlanta child murders (1979–1981). During those two years, no less than 28 murders of African American children and young adults occurred. The murders ended in May of 1981, precisely when phantom clowns began to appear in black communities across the country (Renfro 2015).

Film joined the phantom clown sighting at the nexus of American racism, nostalgia for the past, and the fear and fascination with violence. The horror narrative of the psycho clown dawned with Reagan’s “Morning in America,” his hymn to the golden age of small-town life performed even as his administration openly contemplated a winnable nuclear war, systemically terrorised black neighbourhoods by militarising the police, and armed death squads in Latin America. The children’s nightmares born on increasingly bleak city streets began to appear in American film.

“Some men just want to watch the world to burn”

Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988) became the first decade of phantom clown sighting’s flagship film. The Chiodo brothers, Edward, Stephen, and Charles, made the film on a tiny budget, grounding it in the most frightening image Edward Chiodo could think of: driving on a dark highway when your headlights suddenly reveal a passing car driven by a clown. The brothers used this image as an origin point for their effort to pay tribute to the science fiction films of their childhood. The Killer Klowns are a deadly alien race who not only look like gruesome clowns but seem to have a culture based on elements of the circus; they land in a saucer that looks like a carnival tent, they enshroud their victims in cotton candy, and throw acid pies. A popcorn-shooting bazooka became the film’s most expensive prop.

The ridiculous premise worked, partially because of the uncanny nature of clowns themselves. Frequently films and folklore do present them as something o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Foreword
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART 1 “Drain the swamp … we all float down here!” The evil clown archetype, Trump’s circus of cruelty, and the freak show of US politics in American horror
• PART 2 “A (nasty) woman’s place is in the resistance!” Trump’s war on women, “pussy” grabs back, and queer horror steps out of the shadows
• PART 3 “We all bleed red!” Of God and monsters, targeted bodies, and metaphorical walls in Trump-era horror
• PART 4 “You’ve been Trump’d … get out (of the White House)!” Animated alternatives and horror-centric parodies and podcasts, reimagined à la Trump
• PART 5 Now you’re in the sunken place … with a damn fine cup of “covfefe”: the dangers of nostalgia and the darkness of future past in the age of Trump
• Index