Director, Victor Salva wound up serving three years in prison for molesting the 12-year old star of Clownhouse (1989) during the film's production. This criminal backstory of auteur-as-real-life-predator converges with the story itself - about a trio of clowns stalking three young teen boys - to form a kind of post-modern, novelty horror object of peerless perversity. Until the day that Stephen Spielberg comes out of the closet as a Great White Shark or you can stumble upon a Tobe Hooper E-Bay store selling furniture crafted of human flesh, Clownhouse connects the metaphorical monster with its auteur to a degree that has no cinematic corollary of which I'm aware.
Like It and Stand By Me, the scary stuff share as much of the focus as the character-driven coming-of-age elements. Playing the preyed-upon brothers, Nathan Forrest Winters, Brian McHugh, and Sam Rockwell ably spout off Salva's lived-in potty-mouthed dialog and conjure a believably good-natured but ragged brotherly rapport. As the dickish older brother character, Rockwell portends the bravado and restless energy of his adult career. In eliciting such spirited performances, Salva shows genuine affection and curiosity for the young characters and actors, but his lens' gaze is fraught with the abuse he perpetrated offscreen.
In staging the hide-and-go-seek between the brothers and the clowns, Salva proves himself a confident, exuberant analog horror technician and demonstrates the qualities that understandably attracted early patron, Francis Ford Coppola's attention and financial backing. Capturing the heart-in-throat suspense of home invasion classics like Halloween and When a Stranger Calls, Salva earns jump scares by relying as much on exacting framing and clever makeup design as crashing music cues and abrupt cutting. The savvy interplay of light and space as one of the killer clown stalks a character from outside a sliding glass window predates Wes Craven's similarly nail-biting setup during the Drew Barrymore opening sequence from Scream.
In spite of the R rating, Clownhouse feels decidedly PG-13. The clowns, while sinister, are mostly bogeyman as opposed to agents of sadism inflicting harm against the protagonists. An illogically staged climax deflates much of the film's hard-won tension, and in combination with the overall anodyne approach to violence, a hokey, even Nickelodeon tone predominates the last chapter of the film. If the clowns preying on young teens can be read as Salva stand-ins, then what to make of the film's retreat into Are You Afraid of the Dark-style cheesiness where nothing feels at stake so much as a bad nightmare? The muting of the clowns' violence then function as Salva reassuring himself, mitigating his own nastiness, and leaving the very worst of his demons un-exorcised and offscreen - where they apparently could and did fester.
In spite of the R rating, Clownhouse feels decidedly PG-13. The clowns, while sinister, are mostly bogeyman as opposed to agents of sadism inflicting harm against the protagonists. An illogically staged climax deflates much of the film's hard-won tension, and in combination with the overall anodyne approach to violence, a hokey, even Nickelodeon tone predominates the last chapter of the film. If the clowns preying on young teens can be read as Salva stand-ins, then what to make of the film's retreat into Are You Afraid of the Dark-style cheesiness where nothing feels at stake so much as a bad nightmare? The muting of the clowns' violence then function as Salva reassuring himself, mitigating his own nastiness, and leaving the very worst of his demons un-exorcised and offscreen - where they apparently could and did fester.
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