Eli Craig, the director behind cult horror comedy Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, returns with the new slasher Clown in a Cornfield. In a pre-release chat, the director and co-writer breaks down his latest film, reveals how his teen son helped shape his Gen-Z characters, and explains why he might never make a horror comedy like Tucker and Dale again.
Clown in a Cornfield is now showing in theaters.
Listen here. The following transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity:
Hello, I'm Shaurya Thapa of Borrowing Tape, and today I'm joined by Eli Craig, who is the director and co-writer of the new Shudder original, the slasher horror Clown in a Cornfield. Our listeners who are into horror would also remember Eli Craig as the director behind Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, which is, by the way, one of the funniest movies I have watched. So welcome, Eli. It's a pleasure having you on the podcast.
It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
My first question for you, Eli, is that your film is also based on a novel called Clown in a Cornfield, which is about a killer clown terrorizing a small town, making the locals fight amongst themselves. This is the first movie in a career when you don't rely on an original story. As far as I know, Tucker and Dale vs. Evil and Little Evil were both based on your original concepts. So, how was the experience of adapting a novel for a film this time?
I really enjoyed adapting this book. In part because it was such a great sandbox to play in. It had all of the elements that I could use to tell the story in the way I'd want to. But I'm always looking for guardrails, like rules in a story. How do you minimize in a way, like when you're looking at the page, and you're writing, and it's just this blank page? How do you give yourself a direction and some guardrails so you don't completely just spin off into nowhere land? Adapting really helps you do that. Say, when I'm writing Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, you're always coming up with these rules: Tucker and Dale — it has to look like a kill from the kid's side. There's rules in writing that actually focus you. So I don't find adaptation all that different from coming up with the story yourself, except for — for me, you're really trying to satisfy those fans and stay true to the ethos of the book while also adding like these cinematic elements that may heighten the movie experience of it a bit.
So, apart from the book, did any horror or non-horror films inspire Clown in a Cornfield?
I grew up watching a lot of horror films, a lot of action films, and also comedies. I think they all live within a soup in my brain, like a bouillabaisse. Sometimes I'm borrowing from things I don't even know I am, but certainly always borrowing from the tropes that all horror movies had in the '80s and '90s.
I was looking a lot at the old slasher 80 films like Friday the 13th, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, and, of course, Nightmare on Elm Street. The newer, more sarcastic versions of Scream affected me a lot. Then, also looking at Jaws. You'll be surprised to know I literally was watching Terminator 2 and thinking of like that: here. Okay, it's like a nonstop villain that just is relentlessly coming for someone over and over and over — like those James Cameron movies and Aliens. So, it's so many movies that I take from and put into a place where it could just be its own thing.
Talking about old influences like the 80s and 90s, the lead character in your film. When she comes to this town, she asks other teenagers and other high schoolers. It feels like this town is still stuck in the nineties, and the locals — they give her this vibe that it maybe is still stuck in the past because a major theme in this film for me was fighting tradition because here we have a quote-unquote redneck town, a tightly knit community, but your heroes are these rebellious, bratty students, who want to reject this tradition. They're also very Gen Z. Were there any challenges in writing such young Gen Z characters for you?
Yeah, because I'm not young Gen Z. Yes, but that's part of the fun of it. I also have an 18-year-old son now; he's 17 at the time I was making this. He has alarm bells that go off if something seems false to him. So I did find myself reading the script a lot to him, and in the editing bay, showing him scenes and being like, What about this? What about this? I really wanted to come across as authentically Gen Z because I do feel like sometimes you have these older writers plugging words in young people's mouths, and it just doesn't seem like the stuff they would actually be saying. It was important to me that it just feels like it doesn't strain itself to try to make this Gen Z dialogue seem different. One thing about this generational divide that you're bringing up is that young people growing up in a small town in America now, they all have access to the same stuff on the internet. There's much more of a community of young people in the world. They understand what's going on all over, and it's, they're not so isolated as maybe they once were. These kids, when Quinn Maybrook shows up to the small town of Kettle Springs. They surprise her with how cool they are. She's from Philadelphia and feels like she's going to be the one who just got more awareness to like the big city and stuff, but she's not. She fits in with them quite quickly.
So my takeaway from this was that your 18-year-old son was like a testing audience, like the pre-release testing audience.
But coming back to the fact, like when I mentioned that Tucker and Dale vs. Evil was your first film, it still remains a cult film. It has quite a dedicated fan base, but do you feel any pressure? Clown on a Cornfield is your third feature. Do you feel any pressure from your first film being such a cult hit that people, like critics and audiences, would tend to compare your new work with your first feature?
Well, I'm starting to feel a little more pressure now that you're comparing the two. A lot of people are.
My apologies for that.
Of course, I feel pressure anytime I decide to make a movie. This is the thing I want to make, and it'll live with me forever. There's just a huge amount of pressure making a film, especially [an] indie film where you don't have a lot of resources. If you run out of money, they're not going to give you more. They're just going to shut down production and it's a high-stakes thing. But I will say I very consciously wanted to make a film that was not trying to be Tucker and Dale. I personally don't think I could do comedy horror again as well as I did Tucker and Dale. I came out of the gate from film school. I was so hungry to make my first movie. I thought I made the movie I wanted to make with Tucker and Dale. Unfortunately, it didn't take off. It took a long time for it to become this cult classic that it is now. Initially, it fell flat in movie theaters. I was devastated because I thought maybe I'm not right. Like, maybe I'm crazy... A lot of making a movie or doing anything artistic is like, how do you relate to the audience, and how are they going to experience this? Initially, when the audience didn't seem to gravitate toward it, I thought, well, maybe that's not going to work. Ultimately, it came around to becoming what I always thought it would be, which is this cult classic that lives to me. I wanted to make the next Evil Dead 2 when I made Tucker and Dale. Strangely, Evil Dead 2 wasn't a success out of the gate, but it got there through video rentals. And this got there through streaming. And so I'm just so grateful that people see in that film what I saw when I was making it.
My final question for you, Eli. You just mentioned that you're going through a different territory now after Tucker and Dale. I assumed that Clown in a Cornfield would just be a horror comedy, but there were some freaky jump scares in it, I'll admit, and the clown, Frendo the Clown, was really scary, especially for a viewer like me, who is generally afraid of clowns. So, apart from Frendo, which other cinematic clown is your favorite, or might be the scariest clown for you?
Well, I'm a big fan of story and character. I'm a big fan of an underdog character rising to the occasion and overcoming. Even through real horror, getting that feeling of hope.
"It" to me is not just one of the best clown horror movies of all time. The Andy Muschietti movie is just a profoundly wonderful horror movie. So I wanted to make sure I wasn't like trying to emulate any part of "It", we were creating very much our own clown. Pennywise is so magical, and Frendo is very grounded. He's like a blue-collar clown. I knew I was playing in the clown horror genre. But I'm thankful that it's a genre because people could say, oh, well, they're trying to be Art or trying to be Pennywise. No, we're not trying to be any of those things. We're trying to be our own horror film with our own Frendo clown that is quite distinct from any of those, and we'll live within that clown horror genre.