When AMERICAN HORROR STORY: FREAK SHOW debuted this month, strong ratings gave the show one of the biggest premieres. Ever..
But the theme of the show was unsettling to some who enjoy the finer things in life. Such as clowns..
According to various reports now, the 'pro clown' community is freaking out over the freak show. While it is strange to even comprehend an entire community of people being pro clown, it appears to be the case..
The show's scariest character is killer clown. In all actuality, the role in the show actually has people truly freaked out.. People are scared .. and real life clowns are lamenting the bashing of their cherished trade.
Clowns in pop culture are nothing new.
When I was young, Pennywise the Dancing Clown appeared in the television adaption of Stephen King's IT. Tim Curry's role as the dancing clown was haunting and effective. Until FREAKSHOW, Pennywise may have been the scariest clown to grace our society..
Michael Myers is also a bit of a clown--the blank face of pale death is reminiscent of the appearance of the zany circus actor. Even professional wrestling tried the clown role with "DOINK and Dink" in the 1990s--of course he was a good guy at first and then took on the role of a villain.
Why are clowns scary?
You may want to check out an truly amazing and listenable GROUND ZERO WITH CLYDE LEWS radio program from the other evening he called "MEDIEVAL CARNIVAL 666." Lewis did he best to track back the origins of the pale white figure to the Middle Ages, when clowns were introduced to the masses dying from the Bubonic Plague. The clown's appearance was devised to mock death--the embellished aspects of a clown all had a meaning to represent some part of the process of the body decomposing.
In a 1989 PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER article, the paper profiled a fiction play --based on reality-- in which the church employed a squadron of clowns to entertain the dying. But clowns could be traced back even further than the dark times of the middle ages.. Some say they can be found in ancient Egypt in 2400 BC. The ghostface appearance came somewhere in the 1800s..
Film and literature always made them seem scary..
And the fear of clowns blossomed into the phobia it is today.
Even the SMITHSONIAN studied the reasons why clowns were so frightening in a 2013 report. They conclude that people have been fearful for centuries of the appearance of a clown.
Recent news has given us more reason to be unsettled.. Only days ago, parts of California were haunted by the appearance of a clown at night named Wasco. Some reports actually had children claiming that clowns were chasing them around the streets at night with an ax.
The notion of a clown showing up at a time when reality has become unfathomably scary is frightening in itself. Imagine the planet suffering through deadly disease, a possible upcoming food crisis, droughts and plagues, and beheadings across the Middle East, and a clown shows up to sit on your local park bench. Armed with the persistent smile, balloons.. or an ax to chase a child across town..
Goosebumps times 50...
Some disagree that clowns represent death--as we see from the outcry over AMERICAN HORROR STORY, the pro-clown posse is existent.
I argue, though, that they do. Or they at least represent the attempt to mock death--the wild actions and bizarre makeup do have corpse-like features. And more, their mischievousness is tame at face value but also disturbing in a deeper way. Perhaps that is why children jump in fright so often when they initially come in contact with a clown.. especially a clown out of the element, a place such as a bus terminal or under a street light in the middle of the night..
We all seem to be a little unsettled by a clown..But we also latch on to staring at them when we see them. That may explain the amazingly high ratings of AMERICAN HORROR STORY..
So while the clown troupe is annoyed with the representation of their job, perhaps another group is going to get angry at the latest FREAKSHOW.. In the latest episode, conjoined twins played by Sarah Paulson disturbed viewers even more with the singing of the song CRIMINAL by Fiona Apple.. Let the outrage over that begin.
