Alien invaders: Clowning as metacultural performance in Stephen Chiodo’s Killer Klowns from Outer Space

Abstract

Stephen Chiodo’s Killer Klowns from Outer Space transposes a long-standing tradition of transgressive performances and its semantic resources to new cinematic settings, the teen pic and the horror film respectively. The article will examine how cinema came to draw extensively on the transgressive potential that circus as a highly coded meta-cultural performance holds in store. It argues that Chiodo’s Killer Klowns emerge from the transformation that the circus as well as the circus film have undergone as popular forms of entertainment form the 1950s onward. While drawing on a traditional character design, Killer Klowns from Outer Space have helped add, one might argue, a new variety of clowns to the cultural imaginary. No longer part of the circus and its routines, clowns grow into increasingly disquieting characters. Coming from the eponymous 'outer space', violent clowns perform their own kind of cultural reflexivity that seems all the more radical as its origin is literally hard to place.