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Best Clown Movies

Ranked by how strongly each film carries the visual signature of clown cinema — measured across 1,678 indexed frames from 18 films, against a 408,752-frame catalogue baseline. Not by box office, and not by vote.

Clown films over-index on clown mask, clown and clown makeup — the objects that make the genre recognisable before a line is spoken.

  1. 1

    Terrifier 2 (2022)

    Damien LeoneDP George SteuberIMDb 6.0TMDB 6.7See in full on FrameThrower →

    A year after the Miles County massacre, Art the Clown is resurrected by a sinister entity. Art returns home, where he must hunt down and destroy teenage Sienna and her younger brother Jonathan on Halloween. As the body count rises, the siblings fight to stay alive while uncovering the true nature of Art's evil intent.

  2. 2

    It (2017)

    Andy MuschiettiDP Chung Chung-hoonIMDb 7.3TMDB 7.2See in full on FrameThrower →

    In the Town of Derry, the local kids are disappearing one by one. In a place known as 'The Barrens', a group of seven kids are united by their horrifying and strange encounters with an evil clown and their determination to kill It.

  3. 3

    Clown (2014)

    Jon WattsDP Matthew SantoIMDb 5.7TMDB 5.8See in full on FrameThrower →

    A little boy's birthday party gets ruined when his entertainment (clown) cancels. His father finds a clown suit and becomes the new entertainment but something is weird about it, there is an evil curse and it won't come off. He specializes in eating little kids... everything after that goes down hill.

  4. 4

    Joker (2019)

    Todd PhillipsDP Lawrence SherIMDb 8.3TMDB 8.1See in full on FrameThrower →

    A socially inept clown for hire - Arthur Fleck aspires to be a stand up comedian among his small job working dressed as a clown holding a sign for advertising. He takes care of his mother, Penny Fleck, and as he learns more about his mental illness, he learns more about his past. Dealing with all the negativity and bullying from society, he heads downwards on a spiral, in turn showing how his alter ego, "Joker," came to be.

  5. 5

    Honey Boy (2019)

    Alma Har'elDP Natasha BraierIMDb 7.2TMDB 7.1See in full on FrameThrower →

    From a screenplay by Shia LaBeouf, based on his own experiences, award-winning filmmaker Alma Har'el brings to life a young actor's stormy childhood and early adult years as he struggles to reconcile with his father through cinema and dreams. Fictionalizing his childhood's ascent to stardom, and subsequent adult crash-landing into rehab and recovery, Har'el casts Noah Jupe and Lucas Hedges as Otis Lort, navigating different stages in a frenetic career. LaBeouf takes on the daring and therapeutic challenge of playing a version of his own father, an ex-rodeo clown and a felon. Artist and musician FKA Twigs makes her feature-film debut, playing neighbor and kindred spirit to the younger Otis in their garden-court motel home. Har'el's feature narrative debut is a one-of-a-kind collaboration between filmmaker and subject, exploring art as medicine and imagination as hope.

  6. 6

    31 (2016)

    Rob ZombieDP David DanielIMDb 5.1TMDB 5.4See in full on FrameThrower →

    The day before Halloween, five carnival employees are kidnapped & held hostage in an isolated compound known as "Murderworld". On Halloween, they are thrown into a sadistic game called "31" where they must survive 12 hours against a gang of maniacs dressed like clowns. It's time to play 31.

  7. 7

    3 From Hell (2019)

    Rob ZombieDP David DanielIMDb 5.4TMDB 5.8See in full on FrameThrower →

    After being imprisoned for 10 years, the "Devil's Rejects" are back at it again. Otis (Bill Moseley) escapes prison, meets Winslow (Richard Brake), and devises a plan to get his sister Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie) out too. The Rejects make their way down the road and into Mexico, killing countless people on their way. They find a place to stay, but are soon bombarded with a large group of killers- killers who are after these Three From Hell. Only one group can come out alive, and with the experience these three have, it'll just have to be one great killing joyride.

  8. 8

    Dead Silence (2007)

    James WanDP John R. LeonettiIMDb 6.1TMDB 6.4See in full on FrameThrower →

    Every town has its own ghost story, and a local folktale around Ravens Fair is about a ventriloquist named Mary Shaw. After she went mad in the 1940s, she was accused of kidnapping a young boy who yelled out in one of her performances that she was a fraud. Because of this she was hunted down by townspeople who in the ultimate act of revenge, cut out her tongue and then killed her. They buried her along with her "children," a handmade collection of vaudeville dolls, and assumed they had silenced her forever. However, Ravens Fair has been plagued by mysterious deaths around them after Mary Shaws collection has returned from their graves and have come to seek revenge on people that killed her and their families. Far from the pall of their cursed hometown, newlyweds Jamie and Lisa Ashen thought they had established a fresh start, until Jamie's wife is grotesquely killed in their apartment. Jamie returns to Ravens Fair for the funeral, intent on unraveling the mystery of Lisa's death. Once reunited with his ill father, Edward, and his father's new young bride, Ella, Jamie must dig into the town's bloody past to find out who killed his wife and why. All the while, he is doggedly pursued by a detective who doesn't believe a word he says. As he uncovers the legend of Mary Shaw, he will unlock the story of her curse and the truth behind the threat from a rhyme in his childhood: if you see Mary Shaw and scream, she'll take your tongue. And the last thing you will hear before you die...is your own voice speaking back to you.

  9. 9

    Delicatessen (1991)

    Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Marc CaroDP Darius KhondjiIMDb 7.5TMDB 7.3See in full on FrameThrower →

    Centered on a post-apocalyptic society where food is scarce and used as currency. In an apartment building with a delicatessen on the ground floor. The owner of the eatery also owns the apartment building and is in need of a new maintenance man since the prior one "mysteriously" disappeared. A former clown applies for the job and the butcher's intent is to have him work for as little as possible. The clown and butcher's daughter fall in love and she tries to foil her father's plans by contacting the "troglodytes", a grain eating sub-group of society who live entirely underground.

  10. 10

    Freaks (1932)

    Tod BrowningDP Merritt B. GerstadIMDb 7.8TMDB 7.8See in full on FrameThrower →

    A circus trapeze artist, Cleopatra, takes an interest in Hans, a midget who works in the circus sideshow. Her interest however is in the money Hans will be inheriting and she is actually carrying on an affair with another circus performer, Hercules. Hans's fiancée does her best to convince him that he is being used but to no avail. At their wedding party, a drunken Cleopatra tells the sideshow freaks just what she thinks of them. Together, the freaks decide to make her one of their own.

What clown films are made of

How much more often each element appears in a clown frame than in an average frame from the catalogue. A ratio, not a share — clown mask is not in most frames, it is simply far more common here than anywhere else.

  • clown mask143.7×
  • clown122.8×
  • clown makeup84.4×
  • ruffled collar40.7×
  • blood5.5×
  • string lights4.8×
  • teeth3.7×
  • tiled wall3.6×

How clown films are shot

Weaker signals than the objects above, and worth saying so: most dramatic genres skew dark and night-heavy, so these numbers separate clown from the catalogue far more than they separate it from its neighbours.

  • 22%dayvs 42% baseline
  • 26%naturalvs 43% baseline
  • 65%nightvs 43% baseline
  • 59%low keyvs 40% baseline
  • 15%widevs 20% baseline

Method

Every frame in the FrameThrower catalogue is tagged for shot size, lighting, time of day, camera angle, colour and the objects visible in it. This page aggregates those tags across 1,678 frames from 18 films carrying the clown label, and compares each figure to the same measurement across the whole catalogue (408,752 frames). Films are ranked by how closely they match the theme’s over-indexed elements, weighted by how distinctive each element is; one film per series. Only films with at least 20 indexed frames and 500 TMDB votes are listed.

Machine-readable: /api/list/clown

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These are real movie frames, shown at reduced resolution. All rights remain with their respective owners; they appear here for study, commentary and education under fair-use principles. How these are meant to be used