The question on everyone’s lips: what actually is going on with this fucking clown thing? What the hell? What?
Here at PEDESTRIAN.TV, our US clown epidemic coverage has been, for want of a better phrase, woefully inadequate. We apologise to our readers, who trust us to tell them everything weird and unhinged that’s happening in the world right now. It was not a conscious exclusion but an escalation of many, many small oversights. Before we knew it, America was gripped by clown panic and we were on the back foot.
So what’s with the clowns? The first clown sighting in this current spate of ’em was in North Carolina, when a young boy in a low-income housing project told his mother that he had seen two clowns in the woods who tried to lure him away. TIME reports clown sightings have been recorded in more than two dozen states. In Alabama, seven people face felony charges for making terrorist threats described as “clown-related activity” – which I don’t need to tell you is deeply absurd.
It has also caused actual school lockdowns and led to this insane scene where 6,000 Penn State kids ran out onto the streets hunting for three clowns which had allegedly been spotted around the campus.
3 Clowns spotted at PSU allegedly. So naturally 6,000 kids mob the streets to hunt it down. I love Penn State pic.twitter.com/P4xYx0nVhs
— Addison Carson (@AddiCarson) October 4, 2016
Even Stephen King, progenitor of the modern creepy-ass clown via his creation Pennywise, is telling everyone to please chill the fuck out:
Hey, guys, time to cool the clown hysteria–most of em are good, cheer up the kiddies, make people laugh.
— Stephen King (@StephenKing) October 3, 2016
Early speculation held that this might just be an extremely effective guerrilla marketing campaign for the new It film, but the producers and distributors have claimed they have nothing to do with it. If they do – solid effort, guys. Everyone’s talking about it.
And look! It’s made it’s way here to Australia too!
There’s also an actual scary clown – as in, a dude who does it for a job – named Snuggles, who popped up on The Project last night to defend clowns, and confirm that he himself feels threatened by the current paranoia. He’s also started something called Clown Lives Matter which has to be a massive joke because seriously do not do that.
But ultimately, it comes down to this: people in America are literally terrified that an army of demonic clowns are luring people into the woods to murder them. There are people out there currently more frightened of murderous clowns than they are of ISIS. Maybe that’s a sensible angle to take, I dunno.
What this is is a really wonderful example of something that has generally subsided in the era of social media: a real, genuine episode of mass hysteria. The internet makes it so much easier to quickly confirm / deny whether or not something is true, so it’s rare to see such fear over something so easily disproven.
Back in the 80s, the big one was the Satanic abuse panic. A whole bunch of Americans, Europeans and – yeah – Australians became convinced that sexual abuse perpetrated by Satanists was actually a real thing, and that preschools were bring run by Satanists who abused children. There were only a very, very small handful of cases which had even a remote similarity to the kinds of abuses people were alleging – and none with a real Satanic element – but people still believed it.
The headlines were pretty ace back in the day:
The thing about big ol’ moral panics is that once they take hold, and before they inevitably peter out, is that you’re going to get deadshits who think it’s a lark to buy into the hysteria by actually dressing up as clowns and terrorising people. That’s the phase we’re in right now. And it seems like it’s come to Australia too, so that’s fun.
So f’real. Stop it with the clown bullshit. Someone’s probably gonna get murdered for real when they reckon it’s cool to hang around in the woods dressed as Bobo.
Photo: IT.
