Super Happy Fun Clown had its world première at Panic Fest, 1 Apr 2025
Those reared on the various versions of Stephen King’s It , on Jon Watt’s Clown (2014) and on Damien Leone’s Terrifier 1, 2 and 3 might naturally suppose that a film with the heavily ironised title Super Happy Fun Clown will be exploiting a certain coulrophobia, but in fact the film begins with text highlighting a different kind of pathological fear: “Atychophobia: the fear of being unsuccessful.”
“We know who you are, Jennifer Sullivan!” yells Detective Marshall (Nicole Hall) as she trains her police revolver on the woman (a mercurial, highly versatile Jennifer Seward) in clown makeup who is holding Detective Barnes (Matt Leisy) as a human shield with her own gun aimed at his head. Although this is the opening scene of Patrick Rea’s latest feature, chronologically it comes near its end. “That’s my mum’s name!” responds the clown with palpable rage – and so as the film rewinds to two decades earlier in 2004 when Jenny was just 10 years old, we already have an idea that this girl has Norman Bates-like mummy issues.
Indeed while young Jennifer (played by Rea’s daughter Violet) is a precocious little girl and full of promise for the future – top of her class, early to menarche, already starring in a TV spot filmed in her neighbourhood – she is held back by her disapproving, undermining, physically abusive mother (Deborah Madick) who teaches her not to care about other people, and by her resentful, dismissive older sister Britney (Brooklyn Funk, and as an adult played by Rachael Feeley). Jennifer loves clowns and wants to be one, but this desire is starting to curdle with her nascent interest in horror and serial killers. Asked by Jennifer who ‘killer clown’ John Wayne Gacy was, her mother admits that she does not know, but adds approvingly, “John Wayne was a famous actor though.” Already the groundwork is being laid for fame as an ultimate goal, no matter the method of attaining it or indeed the collateral damage. Meanwhile Jennifer’s school teacher (Tiffany Michelle) is, for one, clearly worried about the monstrous, murderous motifs that have been finding their way into Jennifer’s drawings.
20 years later, the adult Jennifer has failed to live up to her potential. Despite a degree in philosophy, she has a low-paying, mind-numbing office job where only her co-worker Ryan (Tim Shelburne) is ever nice to her – and she makes chump change doing the one thing she loves, dressing up as Jenn-o the Clown to entertain children in the park. Less entertained is Jennifer’s appetitive husband Steve (Dan Daly), a former lawyer disbarred for soliciting minors, and now stuck at home doing his best to ignore Jennifer and her needs, or even expressing his disdain by throwing food at her. Jennifer is about to lose the skip in her step, as a bitter anger long gestating inside her finally snaps – in much the same way that it did in the proof-of-concept short film of the same name which Rea made in 2023, also starring Seward and also written by Eric Winkler. Yet in this substantially expanded feature, a simple act of domestic murder and subsequent cannibalism will turn into a town-wide killing spree over one long Halloween, with Detectives Marshall and Barnes racing to keep track of the body count and to make sense of the unfolding craziness that we already know will end in a three-way standoff.
There is a scene in Super Happy Fun Clown where Ryan, flirtatiously trying to get to know his work colleague over lunch, asks Jennifer to list her three favourite modern movies. Her choices are Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer’s 2014 Starry Eyes (about “realising your dreams at all costs, even if it means selling your soul to the devil”), Fred Dekker’s 1987 The Monster Squad (“it’s basically the Goonies fighting the classic movie monsters”) and any film with Dracula (for “the idea of acquiring power through consumption, even if it means taking it from what you love”). In fact this is a tangled menu of her own motivations – for she will feed on the ones she loves (as well as others she does not even know) in her pursuit of fame, and eventually face all her demons, including herself, in a movies-based Halloween haunt filled with hapless actors disguised as Universal monsters. Jennifer is final girl in her own movie-inspired psychodrama.
There is something of Terrifier’s Art the Clown about Jennifer, especially in her macabre mix of miming and mercilessness, as well as in the performative manner in which she keeps reaching into her bag of tricks for the next ordinary household item to be randomly repurposed as a murder weapon. Yet despite the ruthless sadism of her killings, increasingly perpetrated against total strangers, Jennifer is not a mere killing machine (with a sideline in clowning), but a fully realised human character who, for all the unconscionable deeds that she executes, somehow retains the sympathies of viewers who have seen how this sweet-natured little girl has grown up to become a deranged slaughter queen. This brings Super Happy Fun Clown close to being a regendered version of Todd Phillips’ Joker (2019): a study in mental illness and societal oppression, with its protagonist transforming such weighty issues into an uncomfortable entertainment. It can hardly be a coincidence that the place where Jennifer likes to do her clowning is called Penguin Park, named for another villain from the Batman universe.
Perhaps, though, what is most telling here is the T-shirt that Jennifer wears for the film’s last third, emblazoned as it is with the word ‘Misrepresented’. For this portrait of a woman pushed way over the edge and fully embracing the kind of notoriety once reserved for a John Wayne Gacy, is far more challenging and multi-faceted than your average Halloween slasher. Jennifer may seem manically super-happy as she engages in a series of unspeakable, incomprehensible acts of atrocity, but her final facial expression, once the clownish mask has dropped, tells a different, more nuanced story of private resignation and weary sadness, in what is in the end an avoidable tragedy of familial lovelessness and unchecked psychological decline.
strap: In Patrick Rea’s Halloween psychodrama, a put-upon young woman cosplays her shadowiest fantasies and out-monsters her own demons
© Anton Bitel
