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Clown party – a really bad idea

Some things immediately strike you as a bad idea. And sometimes it is such an obviously terrible idea that it strikes you upside the head. Take the “Clown Party” for instance. Worst idea ever!
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Some things immediately strike you as a bad idea. And sometimes it is such an obviously terrible idea that it strikes you upside the head. Take the “Clown Party” for instance. Worst idea ever!

You may have heard that there’s a new movie coming out called IT. IT is an extremely scary and unsettling novel by horror-meister Stephen King about a really evil clown called “Pennywise”, and it’s been previously made into an equally scary and unsettling TV series. Now it’s a big budget R rated movie and just the promo pictures of the weirdly terrifying white-headed clown lurking in the storm drains and sewer pipes and peeking out from behind red balloons is enough to make you wet yourself a little.

But that’s not all. As ranted about here in this column previously, there has been a creepy phenomenon emerging lately involving ugly clown morons. In various cities in various random parts of the world, these bizarro figures officially known as “Grotesque White-Face Clowns” show up at night on the streets in photos and brief videos and then disappear. Presumably not killing anyone, but scaring just about everybody who sees the pictures.

OK, so — bad combo. You have these disturbing clown sightings all over the place, and then you have a big time Hollywood horror movie coming out in a week or so that is double-dog guaranteed to scare the pants off everyone. This is not good. And guess what — it gets worse.

You see, there is this movie theatre in Texas called the “Alamo Drafthouse Theatre” and it’s becoming famous for staging theme parties when it screens movies.

For example, the theatre ran the famous shark movie Jaws using a large drive-in type screen at a beach. And the beer-drinking movie-goers watched the terrifying movie about sharks munching on people’s dangling legs whilst lounging on inner tubes and other floatation devices and dangling their legs in the water!

And then it held an all-woman screening of the Wonder Woman flick, and for some reason this was even more controversial than the Jaws party. But now, of course, in a certifiably insane idea, it’s all about the clowns. Send in the clowns.

That’s right. In order to attend the Alamo Theatre’s special screening of the movie IT Sept. 9, you have to dress as Pennywise the world’s most menacing evil clown. The theatre will have a bar (of course), along with raffles and prizes and “face-painters available for clown ‘touch-ups’”. Oh, and also a photo booth. Yikes.

This really seems like a very bad idea, doesn’t it? I mean, how many actual psycho white-faced street-lurking evil clowns will be in attendance? And just what does a blood-lusting multi-clown massacre look like? And aren’t you just so very glad that you’re not in Texas next week?!

As the Alamo’s website states: “IT brings the real terror, true skin-crawling tension and fright that will have you screaming in your seat… and then checking under your bed before you go to sleep. You think you’ve seen scary clowns? You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

And everybody thought electing an egomaniacal reality TV star as President was a bad idea. But then, that’s a different kind of Clown Party. But every bit as scary.

Harley Hay is a Red Deer writer and filmmaker.