It is a truth universally acknowledged that rainy weekends are for horror movies. Two new ones are playing locally as of press time: tongue-in-cheek slasher Clown in a Cornfield, based on the young adult novel of the same name by Adam Cesare; and Final Destination: Bloodlines, the sixth in a franchise that kicked off in 2000. As is gothic tradition, both have plots in which the sins of the older generation are visited upon the younger.
With its self-aware title referencing both coulrophobia and the shlock classic Children of the Corn, Clown in a Cornfield might be the ideal drive-in movie — especially if your rural drive-in has a border of scraggly corn stalks. The setting is Kettle Springs, Mo., where a factory looming over the titular fields once produced Baypen corn syrup to feed the nation.
Nowadays, the factory is a charred husk where the local teens shoot viral videos in which they pretend to die bloodily at the hands of Baypen’s clown mascot, Frendo. Newcomer Quinn (Katie Douglas) is bemused by the town’s traditions and the creepiness of its adult authority figures, but she’s eager to get closer to the mayor’s son (Carson MacCormac) and his band of merry YouTube pranksters. Then her new friends start dying for real, and the culprit appears to be Frendo himself.
Director-cowriter Eli Craig also made the clever parody Tucker and Dale vs Evil, so it’s no surprise that the strongest aspects of Clown in a Cornfield are its dark humor and knowing plays on horror tropes. If you might enjoy an extended gag in which someone mistakes a real severed head for a prop one, this movie is for you.
Clown in a Cornfield isn’t especially scary, despite some tense and well-shot passages, and the characters are familiar types. Still, the kills are semi-inventive as slasher movies go, and the screenplay has at least one genuine twist.
The movie also reminds us that slashers have a knack for reflecting the political turbulence of their times. When a town elder extols the virtues of Kettle Springs, then adds acerbically, “or what’s left of it,” we hear a self-conscious echo of the same rhetoric about the demise of America’s manufacturing heartland that put us in the current trade war. For the record, this version of the heartland was shot in Winnipeg, Canada.
Final Destination: Bloodlines is also about how the past poisons the present, featuring an antagonist even more daunting than a symbolically loaded clown mascot. As in all the Final Destination movies, Death itself stalks the survivors of a narrowly averted disaster, fulfilling the apparent dictates of fate by claiming their lives one by one.
The sixth installment’s opening sequence qualifies as a brilliant horror short — think “The Twilight Zone” with slapstick and CGI. In 1968, young Iris (Brec Bassinger) attends the grand opening of the 450-foot Skyview restaurant with her boyfriend. With its balky elevator, over-capacity crowd, and glass dance floor, the space-age tower is primed for premature destruction. Along with Iris, the audience perceives every vector of danger, from a fallen chandelier crystal to a carelessly tossed penny. But no one else heeds the peril — until it’s too late.
Or is it? When the narrative jumps to present day, the carnage we just witnessed turns out to be merely a recurring dream plaguing college student Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), who happens to be Iris’ estranged granddaughter. She seeks out the older Iris (Gabrielle Rose), now a recluse living in a rural fortress that any prepper would envy.
In 1968, we learn, a premonition of the Skyview’s fiery demise enabled Iris to avert the catastrophe. But Death doesn’t take kindly to being cheated, and since then, almost everyone who should have died that night has perished in a bizarre accident, as have their descendants. Only Iris and her progeny remain — for now.
Don’t ponder why all-powerful Death didn’t just give all the Skyview survivors an instant fatal aneurysm, choosing instead to scythe them down over nearly six decades in a predictable order, as if it were keeping a spreadsheet. In this franchise, what the Grim Reaper lacks in efficiency it makes up for in creative fervor.
The main attraction of Final Destination movies is the set pieces in which an elaborate causal chain produces an unlikely demise. Just as Death toys with its prey, so the filmmakers toy with the audience, keeping us guessing about which seemingly innocent object — a blender? A trampoline? A vending machine? — will deliver the next fatal blow.
This installment doubles as a metaphor for how the pathologically anxious view the world — bristling with ways to die. As Stefani uncovers Death’s design, she also learns that her mother and grandmother were unjustly ostracized for mental illness when, in fact, they were simply trying to outwit impending doom.
The kernel of a more gripping drama about family gaslighting lies hidden within Final Destination: Bloodlines. But the subtext remains merely subtext, as directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein are less interested in exploring their characters than in serving up a buffet of gory, increasingly outlandish deaths. This they do ably, though no subsequent kill can touch the macabre humor and fiendish orchestration of the opening sequence. In a world of B movies serviceable for whiling away a rainy weekend, a set piece like that one is to die for.
This article appears in The Summer Preview 2025.
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