We wanted to like this.. but..
Remember 2016?
What a year of chaos it was. Between a contentious presidential election, growing political divisions, and the continued rise of social media, America was seemingly losing its collective mind.
And somewhere in the middle of all of this, we had clowns and a lot of them.. Clowns lurking in the woods, clowns appearing alongside roads, clowns reportedly chasing people, and clowns allegedly threatening children and causing schools to go into lockdown.
It was a really weird moment in American pop culture, and now, a decade later, Hulu has decided to revisit the entire thing.
We also were able to peruse the archives to see what we were saying back then, too!
Clown Panic, directed by Ed Perkins and produced by Jonathan and Simon Chinn through their production company Lightbox, is a new documentary examining the great clown hysteria of 2016. It is certainly watchable, but it doesn’t quite hit the mark.
First, there’s an abundance of hardcore dramatizations that seem to be overdone for the moment. Sure, some of the encounters were genuinely frightening, and there were legitimate concerns at the time, but the documentary seems to want to make the situation more sinister than it actually was. The flashing strobe lights and loud out of no where sound effects… are a little too much..
There are some good parts, however, including interviews with people who claimed to have experienced clown encounters that year and police departments that attempted to investigate the reports.
There’s also a considerable amount of politicization of the clown situation. Sure, there’s always pop culture and geopolitics intertwined in moments in time, and 2016 was unquestionably a year of chaos that likely led to the clown situation becoming more chaotic. But this whole clown thing was not only relegated to communities that were disadvantaged, despite what the documentary seems to suggest. It happened in small towns, suburban communities, cities, and just about everywhere else. It wasn’t limited to one socioeconomic group or political persuasion.
And while I think there’s certainly an argument to be made that the political atmosphere of 2016 contributed to the hysteria, I don’t think the documentary really hits the nail on the head as to why the clown sightings themselves were ultimately political in nature. There’s a difference between something happening during a politically chaotic time and that something actually being political.
One interesting part of the documentary involves Cenk Uygur from The Young Turks, who talks about how the situation became much more serious once it started affecting our kids in schools. When schools began going into lockdown and parents were suddenly worried about clowns threatening their children, people really got up in arms. And understandably so.
The better aspect could have been a comparison of 2016 to the 1980s Satanic Panic …
How many of these clown sightings were actually real?
We know that some of them were. There were people dressing up as clowns and deliberately frightening others. There were arrests, criminal investigations, and even incidents involving threats against schools. But a considerable number of the original sightings were never substantiated, and some of the more frightening stories turned out to be completely fabricated.
In Greenville, South Carolina, where some of the earliest widely publicized reports involved clowns allegedly attempting to lure children into the woods, police investigated but couldn’t find evidence supporting the claims. Elsewhere, people were arrested for making false reports or issuing clown-related threats.
A lot of the videos that were reportedly organic at the time were most likely completely inorganic and created by content creators before content creating became the massive industry that it is today. People were beginning to understand that frightening someone, staging a bizarre encounter, and uploading the footage could generate thousands or even millions of views.
One of the earliest viral clown appearances, a character named Gags in Green Bay, Wisconsin, turned out to be a promotional stunt for a horror film. In other words, what appeared to be a mysterious clown lurking around a community was actually part of a manufactured publicity campaign.
Going to the panic of the 80s, that is where the real comparison remains..
During that period, people became convinced that satanic activity and elaborate conspiracies were occurring throughout American communities. Some people genuinely believed what they were reporting, others repeated rumors, and some allegations were simply fabricated. It made shows like Oprah and Phil Donahue.. The consequences of the Satanic Panic were obviously far more serious, but the way fear spread from one community to another has some similarities to what happened with the clowns in 2016. The Satanic Panic also in part gave us Marilyn Manson…
Fast forward to ’16: Some people really did see clowns. Others may have thought they saw clowns because they were already frightened by what they were seeing on television and social media. And perhaps others simply wanted to be part of something.
The idea that people wanted to be part of this national phenomenon, even if they weren’t. Maybe they wanted a little prestige or notoriety. Maybe they wanted to be interviewed by a local television station or have their story shared thousands of times on Facebook. Or maybe they just wanted to say something happened in their community because everyone else seemed to be experiencing it.
And suddenly, reporting a clown sighting, even if one never occurred, became a way to participate in this bizarre cultural moment.
That’s not to suggest that everyone who reported a clown was lying. Far from it. But when you combine genuine encounters, staged videos, fabricated reports, mistaken perceptions, and a population already on edge, you’ve got the perfect ingredients for a nationwide panic.
And social media was more than willing to help spread it.
There’s also the question of what actually happened to all these mysterious clowns. The truth is that there was never one grand investigation that solved the entire phenomenon. Some cases were resolved, some people were arrested, and other reports simply faded away without any evidence that a clown had ever been there in the first place.
The clown phenomenon DID NOT simply end in 2016!
While the documentary seemed to constrain the clown panic to one year, there have been random clown uprisings in the years since, although considerably lighter in nature. There were additional incidents in 2017, and in later years, including 2021 and 2023, clown-related rumors and frightening videos continued circulating online. Not all of these were new encounters, of course. Some were recycled footage, old stories, and outright misinformation.
The phenomenon also wasn’t exclusive to the United States. Countries including the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand experienced their own clown scares during the original hysteria. In some ways, 2016 wasn’t necessarily the end of something but the beginning of a strange new chapter in internet folklore.
That is what this documentary misses.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the clown hysteria wasn’t the clowns themselves, but the people who were frightened by them, the people who created them, and the people who wanted to be part of the story whether they had actually experienced anything or not.
It was a fascinating example of how quickly something can spiral out of control when social media, mainstream media, public fear, and people looking for attention all come together.
All that being said, Clown Panic isn’t a bad documentary.
There are some genuinely interesting interviews, some good archival footage, and a few perspectives worth hearing. It’s also refreshing that someone decided to focus on a really weird moment in pop culture that seems to have been largely forgotten despite how much attention it received at the time.
I just think the documentary was so focused on finding a deeper political and sociological meaning behind the clown situation that it overlooked some of the more obvious explanations for why it became such a phenomenon.
Was it a reflection of the political chaos of 2016? Perhaps, at least in part.
But was it also a combination of staged videos, genuine pranks, social media notoriety, mass hysteria, and people who simply wanted to be part of something?
I think there’s a much stronger argument for that.
The real story of 2016 wasn’t that clowns were suddenly appearing everywhere. It was that Americans had become convinced they were..