The Sociological Origins of Fear

By Kat Albrecht

On August 2, 2016, seven photos were posted in a Facebook group of a clown spotted stalking the streets of Green Bay, Wisconsin. This clown was no cheery children’s performer. Instead, he was dirty, disheveled, and lurking near an overpass holding a bouquet of black balloons (ABC7 Chicago 2016). The menacing clown immediately captured the attention of the internet at large and the photos were shared tens of thousands of times (Le Duc 2016). Fortunately for the citizens of Green Bay, this clown sighting was a certifiable hoax. It was later revealed to be a marketing stunt for the horror movie Gags the Clown (2018), but this revelation didn’t do anything to stop a wave of clown sightings across the United States (Le Duc 2016). Only a few days later and 900 miles away, children in Greeneville South Carolina reported creepy clowns trying to lure them into the woods to an abandoned house (Roth 2016).  From there, the creepy clown conspiracy took on a life of its own, with clown sightings being reported across the country and all over the world with sightings in the UK, Sweden, Australia, and Canada (Poole 2016; Mackay 2016; BBC 2016).

The creepy clown conspiracy of 2016 included reports of clown-masked attackers, school closures due to clown threats, organized clown hunts, and even some local laws banning clowns (Roth 2016). Some particularly grim incidents included a Pennsylvania teenager fatally stabbed and a group of about 20 clown-mask-clad individuals attacking a family in Florida (NBC Philadelphia 2016; WFTV-9 2016). Ultimately, the creepy clown conspiracy led to at least 12 arrests, changes in the visibility of school police officers due to clown threats, and the application of new laws making terroristic threats class 1 felonies (Lemoine 2016; Mele 2016; Wisconsin Act 311 2015).

Clowns as Objects of Fear

Despite all of these sightings, there was one very important thing missing from the creepy clown conspiracy: actual clowns. At the time in 2016, World Clown Association President Randy Christensen addressed the creepy clown conspiracy, asserting that individuals wearing masks and causing panic were not really clowns, they were just dressed as clowns. Moreover, he remarked that this was “someone trying to use a good wholesome artform and distorting it” (The Washington Post 2016).  Christensen’s point here is well-taken, where the creepy clown conspirators in question were never alleged to be professional clowns or engage in the humorous elements that characterize non-creepy clowning. 

However, the clown as an object of fear has become increasingly grounded in popular culture, much more homogenously than other costumed Halloween horrors like mad scientists or evil doctors. Some theories about the descent of the clown into an object of fear look to the juxtaposition of clowns as wholesome child-friendly entertainers and crazed horror villains. For example, wholesome clowns like Bozo the Clown, who presided over a kids tv show with a ten-year waitlist for studio audiences, or Ronald McDonald and his fast food empire stand in stark contrast with the likes of Stephen King’s Pennywise who embodies the fears of predominantly children in Derry, Maine (WGNTV 2001; King 1986). A comparison between Bozo and Pennywise is particularly appealing here because the audience for that fun or fear, at least in the diegetic world of the show/film is still children. 

This theory of the corruption of child-like innocence and childhood nostalgia rests of the belief that clowns “used to be good” and have now “turned bad.” Clown scholar Benjamin Radford warns against this interpretation, noting that it is an oversimplification of the role of the clown who was never purely innocent and wholesome (Poole 2016). In the first pages of his book Bad Clowns, Radford looks to history and the sinister roots of even the early characters like the Harlequin and his first characterization as an aerial specter or demon in a ghostly hunt (Radford 2016). Through the pages of Radford’s clown history we find that the horror elements of various clowns wax and wane over time, but that these features did not assertively appear in response to too many ‘good clowns’ though there are throughlines of interactions between clowns and children.

There are also a great many bad clowns from which to choose, both in fiction and in ‘real life.’ Scary clowns that occupy spaces on film and television include the likes of not just Pennywise, but also other modern entrants like Twisty in American Horror Story (2014), Art the Clown in Terrifier (2016), and Billy the puppet in Saw (2004) – all of whom operate with the assumption that clowns are already scary rather than having to convince audiences at home to be afraid of clowns. Indeed, fear of clowns has fully become part of the cultural fear-scape with a recent study finding that 27.6% of participants reported a fear of clowns and 5.1% reported an extreme fear of clowns (Tyson et al. 2022). Findings also include more concentrated fear of clowns with younger participants, perhaps lending some credence to continued connection between children and clowns (Tyson et al. 2022).

Clowns on the big small screens are not the only form of interaction with scary clowns. Thus rather than conceptualizing fear of clowns of being solely born from fiction, we are better served by a larger sociological approach to combining fictional and factual media that better represents the position of the clown himself as a fanciful character invading reality. An extreme example of this is John Wayne Gacy, an American serial killer known as a real-life killer clown for his performances as Pogo and Patches for local functions and children’s hospitals (Cahill 1993). While the iconography of John Wayne Gacy as a killer clown captured public attention and infamy, his clowning activities were not actually related to his mode of murder (contrary to how his crimes were depicted in the hugely popular 2022 Netflix series about Jeffrey Dahmer, Dahmer: Monster). Instead, he used his position as contractor to lure in young men (Mackley 2016). In this way Gacy was not really a serial killer clown, he was a serial killer who was occasionally a clown. But this semantic difference, while perhaps deeply important to actual professional clowns, has been consistently overshadowed in fictional and factual media so as to be dubiously relevant. 

Fear of Clowns as Sociological

Instead, we are left with the problem of conceptually understanding the multifaceted position of the scary clown in society. Many attempts to study fear of clowns conceptualize and operationalize fear of clowns akin to how one would measure a phobia on a psychological scale. For instance, Chapman University’s American Survey of Fears asks respondents to rate their level of fear to randomly ordered items (within themes) on a scale of “very afraid, afraid, slightly afraid, not afraid” (SRSS 2024). This measurement strategy maximizes the number of fears a participant can be asked about, but does not necessarily provide the detailed context necessary to understand how a particular fear is intertwined with society. Instead, I take up a complementary sociological approach that investigates and analyzes the various levels at which a fear object can become enmeshed with the macro and micro structures of fear. Tudor (2003) provides a useful framework for considering the parameters of fear as six analytically distinct classes including: environments, cultures, social structures, bodies, personalities, and social subjects. Tudor explicitly asserts that he does not seek to advance a singular inter-relatedness of these parameters, but does state that, “Any concrete situation of fearfulness will involve all six in a variety of possible permutations and combinations. In the nature of things, however, they must be considered one at a time” (Tudor 2003, p.247). I will attempt to do both, briefly considering each individual parameter and then setting about the task of weaving them together.

Environments

Explaining the significance of the physical environment, Tudor (2003) offers direct and indirect pathways to fear where the environment may be itself the stage for fear or indirectly contribute to the character of fear. The environment of the clown can echo this duality. The clown originally finds his home on the stage and the screen, a closed environment that can offer some security to the audience but also itself be foregrounded as menacing. This can be taken literally: like in the uncomfortable circuses of oddities or metaphorically in the protected diegetic world of a film. However, this understanding of the clown as a captured actor to the stage of screen sets up a yet another possible distortion where clowns are especially jarring in environments where they don’t belong. In the case of Gags the Clown, the starkness of a clown skulking beneath an overpass rather than in the colorful pageantry of the big-top helped construct the dynamics of fear. Similarly, clowns lurking in the woods to call out to children further removed clowns from their ‘safe’ environments and positioned them as invaders of places where clowns ought not to be.

Cultures

Tudor gives examples of the types of cultural elements that may lead to the emergence of fear including attitudes, values, presumptions, stereotypes, routines, memories, ideas, and beliefs (Tudor 2003). In the cultural parameter I find a ready vessel for the amalgamation of fictional and factual clowns and clown imagery. Thinking about the creation of news media and fictional media as multidirectional is particularly useful here. If we take news, for instance, as the outcome of sociological work and the flow of that news as multi-directional and mutually constitutive (Shudson 2019), then it is not too far afield to propose that the news is a combination of what cultures both produce and desire to consume. This thesis can be applied to fictional worlds of fear as well. Where, to the chagrin of the artist, the requirement of horror movies is to sell tickets via selling fear. Therefore, the fictional worlds that scary clowns inhabit are also in a sense reflections of the cultures where they were made and embody some of the beliefs, stereotypes, and values of those cultures. This also explains how new scary clowns can leap into life without a prolonged justification for why they are so scary. 

Memories also have an important role to play in the construction of clowns as fear objects. The child audiences of The Bozo Show (running from 1960 – 2001) were the parents of children during the creepy clown conspiracy who are the audiences for clown horror slashers today. The transference of memories and beliefs across generations helps characterize the continuity of the larger sociological context surrounding the clown and who we collectively believe the clown to be.

Social Structures

Tudor’s conceptualization of social structures hinges on the idea of routine, proposing that repetition and routinization create understandable social structures which we all occupy (2003). These are precisely the structures that the clown, even in non-scary form, seeks to subvert. The clown as a trickster or prankster defies social norms and social contracts. Radford describes the historical figure of the clown as “generally devoid of allegiance; he has no masters and is a man in full and at his own command” (2016, p.9). This makes the clown particularly difficult to place within the social structure of the real-world, a task that isn’t necessary when clowns confine themselves to performance. However, clowns that burst forth from their performance, be they in films or in masked form threatening local schools, they are also committing a violation of their role in the social structure that increases their status as a fear object.

Bodies

A discussion of scary clowns would not be complete without an analysis of physical form. Tudor’s (2003) understanding of the role of fear and the body seems to focus on the likelihood of victimization based on perceived or actual weaknesses of the physical form. This definition is perhaps most compatible with clowns when considering the power relationship between the physical form of the adult man clown threatening the weaker and smaller child. Where seeing an adult man partake in silly pranks and jokes may increase the comedy, so too could the comparatively towering and strong form of an adult elevate the fear response of a child. 

But Andrew Tudor was not likely thinking of clowns when composing his theory of fearful bodies, so I will extend his categorization for our purposes to consider the painted face of the clown. Scholar David Wilson, interviewed in 2016 about the creepy clown conspiracy had this to say about the countenance of clowns, “Clowns deliberately exaggerate the human face and cover the human face with paint so as to make the face less human.” This functionally makes it clear that a clown is person, but they also are not a person exactly. The face paint of horror clowns becomes iconic in themselves, an effective distortion of the makeups original intent of developing a performers signature style. This means that the body of victim is a dimension of fear but so too is the body of the fear object an important and distinguishing archetype of fear.

Personalities

Tudor (2003) finds a space for phobias in his parameterization of personalities of fear. He notes that personality traits, while individual, must interact with the social, cultural, and physical. This understanding seems consistent with what we know about coulrophobia. Where studies have found the prevalence of intense fears of clowns to be similar to other phobias, reports of being afraid of clowns in general can be much higher (Tyson et al. 2022). This suggests some other dynamic to fear of clowns aside from individual personality alone, i.e. endorsing Tudor’s idea of the interaction between personality and the social, cultural and physical. There is however, a significant body of research that attempts to measure the personalities of fear-enjoyers, that may also shed light on the types of individuals who voluntarily encounter killer clowns in haunted houses and cinemas (Clasen, Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, & Johnson 2020; Scrivner, Kjeldgaard-Chrstiansen, & Clasen 2021).

Social Subjects

In the sixth and final parameter, Tudor (2003) addresses the individual and how their position within the social structure affects their fear experience. This is a call-out specifically to agency that we can again usefully situate against the backdrop of the clown. Using Tudor’s (2003) example of life-cycle structuring, the positionality of the individual social subject changes relative to the clown. For instance, a small child who comes across a clown at a birthday party has significantly less agency to avoid them than an adult in the same situation who might simply get in their car and drive away. So, too, do other recreational fear engagements vary by age and agency. Where a child might not understand what exactly the film Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988) entails, an adult is able to use their understanding of the social world and their own expression of agency to: 1) have appropriate understanding of the contents of a PG-13 movie, 2) understand satire or comedy, 3) leave the movie if they so choose. In this way the positionality of the social subject varies even with optional clown experiences.

In most of the cases illustrated in the creepy clown conspiracy, the individual agency of both children and adults was stripped from them in forced literal or hypothetical engagements with clowns. This removal of control and therefore mutation of one’s own position within the social structure, helped elevate the fear of even hypothetical clown encounters.

Combining the Parameters

We know that a clown is a killer clown from a glint in his eye, a too wide smile, and eerie wave from the tree line. But we only know those things makes a clown a killer because of how they do or do not align with the macro and micro level structures of society and expectations. Considering all of Tudor’s (2003) parameters in concert, it becomes clear why the clown is such an effective vehicle for fear. The clown themselves embodies both micro and macro characteristics of fear. A scary clown is painted in a way that mutates the comfort of the human face while maintaining the threat and power of the human body, he exists outside the environment that is meant to house him, he acts out of concert with social norms and expectations, and carries with him the weight of culturally understood memories and beliefs of evil clowns. In response, the audience to a scary clown in life of in the movies, sits in the opposite position of having their individual agency threatened, not be equipped to navigate the new social structure in which they find themselves, and perhaps with weakness in their own body or personality that they must still rely on to defeat the clown.

Embodying the Fear Principle and Moral Panic

Returning to the specificity of the creepy clown conspiracy, we can place the dynamics of clowns in society traced through Tudor’s (2003) macrosociology of fear into theoretical models of fear and moral panic to understand more thoroughly why the creepy clown conspiracy managed to grow from an indie marketing campaign to global phenomenon. In my previous work on the subject, I advanced the Fear Principle to help explain what types of fear-relevant incidents can become so frenzied so as to require legal regulation or intervention onto the object of fear. They are 1) an emotional response to the social dimensions of an object, 2) celerity facilitated by spread, 3) reification of the fear object via a legitimizing institution (Albrecht, Burns, & Bell 2024). I leverage the Fear Principle here in an attempt to use the sociological analysis from this essay to help identify how the creepy clown conspiracy became more than a scary story passed around among communities and instead grew to have real social and legal consequences. In the case of the creepy crime conspiracy we can dispatch the three prongs of the Fear Principle thusly: 1) a socially entrenched fear of clowns, 2) some mechanism for information about clown sightings to spread, 3) acknowledgement by institutions of authority that the creepy clown conspiracy is worth worrying about. 

The first prong of the Fear Principle centers on how individuals react to the social dimension of an object. My original conceptualization of fear object theory was a relatively literal one: where an object has a tangible, legal, and social dimension that may or may not be in conflict with each other (Albrecht 2024). I took up the example of an animal object, where a domestic cat might be a literal object (animal), a legal object (property subject to regulation), and a social object (a pet). But in the case of the creepy clown conspiracy, I propose that we take up the fullest version of Tudor’s parameters of fear and consider the clown as a sociological object. This imbues him with the best and worst complications of the six parameters of fear and more accurately identifies him as a fictional character, folklorian part of culture, and a potential real-world threat. Taking up the studies reviewed here proposing significant fear of clowns in society (Tyson et al. 2022; Amirazizi 2022; Mackley 2016) and our sociological analysis of the clown as an object of fear in this essay, we find the first prong of the Fear Principle to be satisfied. That is, a nuanced sociological understanding of scary clowns helps clarify why an individual would have a strong response to a clown as a fear object that would meaningfully motivate a wave of fear.

Turning to the second prong of the Fear Principle, vehicles for spread, there are a number of appealing options that helped ignite the creepy clown conspiracy. Analysis of traditional news coverage of the creepy clown conspiracy reveals spikes in reporting around the month of October in 2016 (Albrecht, Burns, & Bell 2023). This timing is not particularly surprising, as it includes the run up to Halloween, but is similar to media sparks that lit the fuse in other conspiracies like the recurrent case of poisoned Halloween candy where aside from a small number of cases that tried to use contaminated candy myths to cover up crime, no such conspiracy has been proven (Klemesrud 1970; Best & Horiuchi 1985). 

My analysis also uncovered a relationship between the structural availability of news coverage and the transition between local and national news. In his analysis of the 1976 crime wave against the elderly in New York, a crime wave that was not real, Fishman (1978) explained how the fictious construction of real criminal incidents as a wave was facilitated by the availability of eligible incidents and how they were received over the news wire. In the case of the creepy clown conspiracy, local news reported incidents first, followed by the national news, followed by the local news again (Albrecht, Burns, & Bell 2023). This process was likely facilitated by the ongoing construction of the creepy clown conspiracy as a national/global wave of sightings, making all other alleged sightings also eligible for reporting no matter how far afield. This means that a normally localized incident becomes far more reported than it normally would be and that a single incident can be reiterated in the news over and over again.

The traditional news media mechanisms of spread were also joined by intentionally constructed hoax media campaigns and rapid social media spread. In addition to cases like the inciting incident of Gags the Clown (2018), which was intentionally marketed for press purposes, other creepy clown conspiracy threats were made explicitly to attract attention on social media. Throught the wave of clown panic, Facebook pages were popping up making clown-related threats against schools. For example, In Alabama, a Facebook group named ‘Flomo Klowns’ posted gun emojis and threatening messages leading two schools to go into lockdown (Samuelson 2016). Creepy clown conspirators were able to leverage the internet and social media in ways that something like the 1976 crime wave against the elderly simply did not have access to. This opened even greater pathways for the spread of the conspiracy compared to traditional news reporting alone.

Finally, the Fear Principle requires that a legitimating authority take the fear threat seriously. By legitimatizing a fear object, this reifies the danger of that object and the perceived real-ness of the threat. In the case of the creepy clown conspiracy, news media certainly contributed to the air of legitimacy around the event by connecting serious crimes to the hoaxes. For instance, in the case of the Pennsylvania teen who was fatally stabbed, a clown mask or clown threat was known to be part of the incident but the exact involvement of the clown mask was not clear (NBC Philadelphia 2016). But by reporting this incident in conjunction with the creepy clown conspiracy, it functionally made it possible to report that the creepy clown conspiracy had a death toll. This makes for a powerful headline that does not necessarily clarify if the case is a one-off or copycat reaction to the clown conspiracy or one of the now almost mythical clown killers. Actions taken by local law enforcement and schools in the face of hoaxes also helped legitimate fear, even if the threatened incident never actually happened. For example, in response to school-based clown threats in Wisconsin, law enforcement was dispatched to the school “out of abundance of caution” (Lemoine 2016) and in other cases, schools also went into lockdown in the face of threats on social media (Samuelson 2016). While these actions were almost certainly prudent, the serious response by trusted institutions lends credence to the legitimacy of a creepy clown conspiracy. 

By these three conditions, the creepy clown conspiracy satisfies all three prongs of the Fear Principle as a volatile phenomenon ripe for regulatory response and social mobilization. In this way, a sociological object of fear in fiction becomes a legitimate fear object in reality, induces panic, and then requires social and institutional response. While the Fear Principle is not the only way of understanding the potential of a fear-wave for galvanization it is helpful hear in illustrating some of the foundational criteria for such acceleration.

The Fear Principle has much in common with other theories of moral panics, so I’ll briefly illustrate those compatibilities here. A number of moral panics center on children, and the need to protect children, as an inciting reason for that panic. In addition to the aforementioned contaminated Halloween candy myth, the Satanic Panic stands out as a clear example. In her analysis of the moral panic surrounding satanic daycares in the 1980s, deYoung (2010) explains how moral panics serve as revelations about social structures, social processes, and social change – concepts are conveniently compatible with Tudor’s (2003) macrosociology of fear and the first prong of the Fear Principle. In the case of satanic day care centers, day care workers stood as convenient folk devils in an era already characterized by skepticism of increasing use of day care centers thanks to increasing female participation in the workforce, cuts to federal funding for public daycares, and the social forces of the 1980s that included heavy metal music, things like tarot cards and Ouija boards, and even other smaller satanic panic incidents. Clowns are of course the folk devil at issue in the case of the creepy clown conspiracy and their suitability as a folk devil has been well illuminated in this essay. Scholars Goode and Ben-Yehuda (1994) further lay out a framework for analyzing the elements of a moral panic that take up that folk devil and consider the timing, target and trigger, content, spread, and denouement of a moral panic that is also quite compatible with the sociological and Fear Principle analysis conducted here. Indeed, Goode and Ben-Yehuda’s framework might both usefully be conducted for the creepy clown conspiracy as a whole, but also for the individual incidents that occurred within it.

The Future of Scary Clowns

This essay has attempted to do several things: 1) outline the facts of the creepy clown conspiracy of 2016, 2) consider clowns as objects of fear in society, 3) conduct a sociological analysis of clowns as fear objects using Tudor’s (2003) macrosociology of fear, and 4) consider how the creepy clown conspiracy is compatible with and expands existing theories of fear and moral panic. One more question lingers over this essay and its careful consideration of the sociological role of clowns and the meaning of the creepy clown conspiracy: could it happen again?

My answer to this question, based on the sociological analysis therein, the criteria of the Fear Principle, and moral panic theory, is yes. Indeed, sightings of scary clowns certainly both pre-date and post-date the 2016 creepy clown conspiracy. The presence of clowns on film is also well secured for the future with the Terrifier franchise and IT sequels ushering a new host of killer clowns. The cyclical nature of moral panics and the ever-entrenched iconography of evil clowns therefore seems to lend itself to a new wave of fear in the future, even if it looks a little bit different than the 2016 version.

However, the evolving landscape of technology and the spread of information may pose the largest challenge facing a future clown conspiracy attempting to gain traction. It remains to be seen whether increasing access to information and information sharing will make conspiracies like the creepy clown conspiracy more likely by virtue of accessible and rapid spread or somewhat less likely as the internet is saturated with both hoaxes and debunkings. Future research might specifically consider this type of access and information correction in confronting similar phenomena. 

For now, the creepy clown conspiracy remains entrenched in our cultural consciousness as the children of the creepy clown conspiracy, who are currently undergraduate students in my Origins of Fear course, vividly remember the feeling of being stalked by the possibility of killer clowns.

References