Is it the goofy red smile? The orange hair? The big shoes? What is it that makes my stomach do flips every time I see a clown on TV or at an amusement park?
I’m not alone in this. Coulrophobia, the fear of clowns, is one of people’s top ten phobias. The term stems from the Greek koulon, meaning limb, and refers to clowns and circus performers who walk on stilts. Coulrophobia sufferers experience symptoms ranging from mild anxiety to outright panic attacks when faced with people in clown outfits or even just makeup. Serious coulrophobia can extend beyond clowns to abject terror of anyone with a costume or an altered appearance.
But why? What makes the clown, which is supposed to be a symbol of happiness and fun, so terrible to so many people?
Get ’Em While They’re Young
The most popular theory about coulrophobia is that it stems from a traumatic event in childhood. When we’re very young, even the most mundane things can be very frightening because we don’t have a larger context in which to place them. Though you’d think the circus would be a great place for children—with its popcorn, cotton candy, bright colors, and games—the sensory overload can be extremely upsetting to them.
That was certainly my experience as a child—I hated the loud sounds of the circus, but even more frightening was the clowns’ slapstick comedy, in which they intentionally hurt one another with their pranks. It unnerved me so much that my mom carried me home in tears. To this day, that comedic routine remains a reason for me to be leery of clowns. Their ability to inflict and endure physical pain while maintaining huge, painted smiles means there’s more evil to Bozo than meets the eye.
Reality Is Scarier Than Fiction
For those of us who’ve had bad experiences with clowns, the terror becomes realer than any other. After all, fear of clowns is based in reality, rather than in fantasy. Vampires, werewolves, and zombies are horrifying in the abstract, but we don’t expect them to actually come staggering off the big screen and into our everyday lives. Clowns, on the other hand, are all too real.
Even if we avoid circuses and children’s birthday parties and never come face-to-face with clowns for the rest of our lives, our fear of what they represent remains intact. The idea that you can’t trust appearances, that evil lurks beneath apparently benign surfaces, is a danger we face every day. After all, most violent crimes are committed by people the victims know. Is that stay-at-home mom really an axe murderer? Is your pizza delivery boy actually a serial rapist? Does your boss mutilate cats in his basement? Clowns remind us that we can’t ever really know—all we see of others is a painted exterior that could be concealing a seriously dark side.
A Cultural Phobia
The media, of course, has done its part to both capitalize on and feed this widespread phobia. The most common image of a clown in movies, television, and literature is a menacing one. Just think of the chilling and child-killing Pennywise in Stephen King’s 1986 novel, It, or the murderous clown in the classic horror film, Poltergeist (1982).
It’s not a coincidence that both of these examples are from the 1980s—it was a big decade for clowns, especially scary ones. At the same time that just about every nursery was decorated with them—including the terrifying (to me) Peek-A-Boo Crib Clown, which threatened infant children while they slept—movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Friday the 13th (1980), and the Halloween sequels were rampant, featuring villains with disfigured or masked faces: Freddy Krueger, Jason, and Michael Myers. In music, we have KISS, whose members’ grotesquely painted faces were popular throughout the 80s. And these are just a few examples.
