Clown

When the clown booked for his son Jack’s (Christian Distefano) birthday party cancels, estate agent Kent McCoy (Andy Powers) steps in himself – in an old clown costume. The party is a success, but afterwards the costume will not come off: it seems to have grown into his skin. While his wife Meg (Laura Allen) desperately searches for a solution and a mysterious man named Karlsson (Peter Stormare) tells of an ancient curse, Kent changes more and more – and an eerie hunger awakens inside him. The film goes back to a fake trailer that Jon Watts and Christopher D. Ford posted online in 2010, supposedly from “the Master of Horror” Eli Roth. Roth liked the idea, got in touch with the pair and produced the feature version. Watts’s debut feature takes its cue from Universal’s horror classics of the 1930s and from body horror such as David Cronenberg’s “The Fly”: from an almost absurd premise he develops a dark, increasingly graphic chiller about a family man turning into a monster. Not every scene sustains the suspense, but the finale is uncompromising. Watts went on to direct “Spider-Man: Homecoming”.