The Chilling History of Creepy Clowns

As any coulrophobe can attest, today’s pop culture landscape can be a minefield for anyone with a fear of clowns. Creepy clowns run rampant in movies, TV shows, Halloween costumes and some viral trends.

Why exactly did this trope start? After all, didn’t clowns used to be happy and cheerful? Well, not exactly, according to Benjamin Radford, author of Bad Clowns. “It’s a mistake to ask when clowns went bad,” he says, “because they were never really good.”

Clowns are a type of “trickster,” one of the oldest and most pervasive folklore archetypes in the world, Radford explains. The trickster can be both funny and scary, and he—it’s usually a “he”—makes it hard for others to tell whether he’s lying. Like clowns, Satan in the Bible is an iteration of the trickster. Both have been around for a long time.

One of the most recognizable early clowns is the harlequin, a figure who emerged in Italian commedia dell’arte theatre in the 16th century. The harlequin was known for his colorful masks and clothing with diamond-shaped patterns. He often served as the comical, amoral servant in plays that toured throughout Europe.

These plays also inspired a clownish puppet named “Punch,” who appeared in British shows starting in at least the 18th century. The character would later be written into a popular puppet show called “Punch and Judy,” in which Punch cracked jokes, beat his wife, and murdered his child.

Punch is a “gleeful madcap colorful character, but he’s also this horrific monster,” Radford says, noting that creepy clowns appeal across age groups, from kids to teens to adults. “It’s this strange mix of horror and humor that has always drawn us to clowns.”

Bad—or at least sad—clowns continued to appear in European culture throughout the 19th century. Charles Dickens’ novel The Pickwick Papers (1836) featured an alcoholic clown. In the 1880s and ’90s, both a French play and an Italian opera centered on murderous clowns (one play was accused of plagiarizing the other).

Eventually, complicated clowns made it to the United States, too. In 1924, American audiences met a bitter and vengeful clown in the silent film He Who Gets Slapped. A decade and a half later, a prankster villain named the Joker made his debut in a Batman comic. Emmett Kelly Jr., one of the most famous American circus clowns in the early 20th century, was no villain, nor was he cheerful. Rather, his “Weary Willie” character was a tattered vagabond with a painted-on frown.

But then came a change. In the 1950s and ’60s, American television introduced audiences to a couple of new clowns who were always happy.

“Ronald McDonald being in commercials spread ‘the happy clown’ across the country,” Radford says of the fast-food mascot. “Same thing with Bozo the Clown. There were dozens of Bozos in different regions that were very, very popular during the era. So it was really television that helped propel the sort of default happy/good clown into the public’s consciousness.”

Yet by the late 1970s and early ’80s, the American image of the clown was already shifting again, this time toward something more sinister. One influence in this shift was the media coverage of John Wayne Gacy, a serial murderer who had occasionally dressed as “Pogo the Clown.” Radford notes Gacy was not a professional clown and he didn’t dress up as Pogo very often or use his costume to lure young children (his victims were teenagers and young men). But once in jail, Gacy helped cultivate his image as a killer clown in the media by drawing self-portraits of himself as Pogo.

Then came IT, the Stephen King novel about a scary, supernatural clown who lurks around the suburbs and murders children. The plot mirrored a broader shift toward scary suburban scenarios in the horror genre. After the novel came out in 1986, it was adapted into a TV movie starring actor Tim Curry as Pennywise the Dancing Clown.

Once again, television brought a new clown into people’s living rooms—a threatening, child-harming one—that recent creepy clown panics suggest viewers have not shaken since. In 2013, residents in Northampton, England, were alarmed by a man who wandered around town wearing a mask reminiscent of Curry’s Pennywise and occasionally yelled out lines from the movie (it turned out to be a 22-year-old prankster). In 2016, creepy (and fake) clown sightings spread across the United States and other countries, creating a kind of viral clown panic that was reminiscent of IT.

Taking note of the creepy clown craze, Hollywood studios jumped at the chance to deliver frightening fun. Art the Clown emerged from the Terrifier movie franchise, which began in 2016 and has a fourth installment in development.

Pennywise has also taken to the silver screen. Both It and It: Chapter Two were among the top 20 highest-grossing films in the world when they released in 2017 and 2019, respectively. Now, actor Bill Skarsgård is taking a turn as Pennywise in the 2025 HBO series “It: Welcome to Derry.”

King certainly didn’t invent the evil clown. But he might have helped make Americans paranoid that one could be lurking outside their doors.