Clowns

Clowns are coming to get you. As you read this, clowns are getting even closer. Though they may not be able to see or hear or smell of touch or taste you yet... they are laser pinpointed on your location and will be convening soon.

People in France are always frightened, but this time with good reason. Clowns are eating them in record numbers

Nobody knows if clowns kill because they are serial killers, of from outer space, or some sort of interdimensional monster that takes many forms. Probably all of the above. All we know for certain is that clowns are coming to kill you.

via Vice:

14 teenage attack clowns were arrested outside a high school in Agde, on the south coast of the country. In Montpellier, a man was beaten with a rod by a guy dressed as a clown and his two accomplices. And last week, a butcher’s apprentice was given a six-month suspended sentence after dressing as a clown and terrorizing children in Douvrin, in northern France.

Some people are saying the worst thing to come out of this is that real clowns are losing work. To them, I say: "Why are real clowns still a thing?"

“The best thing that could happen is that people stop talking about them,” says Philippe Herreman, director at Association Ch’tiClown, a social organization that visits hospitals and care homes to alternately cheer and petrify their patients. Going to have to argue with you there, Phil. Going to have to go ahead and say the best thing that could happen with these "evil clown" attacks is that they stop? Because they are the worst? Because getting beaten up by a clown is the worst?

France isn’t even the only place where clowns are getting violent. In London last year, the Met Police were called to 117 "clown-related" incidents, which sounds like an awful lot. Last October, the infamous Northampton clown would just appear occasionally up to his knees in ponds, waving at people. And in December, the Hull Daily Mail ran the immortal headline, "Is there a Spooky Clown scaring people in Hull?"

Creepy clown sightings have spread to 37 US states, Canada and the UK.  via NBC :

A creepy clown intimidated people on a subway in Manhattan on Wednesday before chasing a teenager out of a train station, police said.

The 16-year-old boy was getting off a subway train at the 96th Street station on Lexington Avenue around 4 p.m. when he encountered the man in a clown mask.

The clown was standing in the doorway of the train and preventing people from exiting, according to police.

Moments later, the clown started chasing the teen, who ran through a turnstile and up a flight of stairs. When he turned around, he saw the clown at the turnstile holding a kitchen knife, police said.

Police are searching for the clown. If caught, the person could face menacing charges.

The clown attack comes amid a frenzy of creepy clown sightings across the U.S.

On Tuesday, the White House said law enforcement takes creepy clowns seriously.

Sometimes clowns will appear to be sad or tragic. This is a trick. Do not help them. The clowns will turn on you faster than you can have a heart attack from a clown startling you...

Many supervillains, including some of the Revengerists , the Flash, and the Batman, are clown themed. It just makes sense. Even the eldest brother of Mexico’s once powerful Arellano Felix drug cartel family was killed by gunmen dressed as clowns at a children’s party.

The New York Times noted late last week that at least 12 people had been arrested for “clown hoaxes,” and there have been multiple arrests since then. Other cases have turned out to be a combination of real clowns and irrational panic, as when a 12-year-old Virginia boy with autism dressed up early for Halloween, only to become the subject of a viral social media post and a local news segment. Somehow, police dispatched to all the remaining sightings have found no red noses left behind at the scene and not a single oversized floppy shoe for the crime lab to study.

On May 26, 1990, in Wellington, Florida, Marlene Warren opened her front door to a brown-eyed clown bearing flowers and balloons. It shot her in the face, drove off in a white Chrysler LeBaron and was never seen again. Her murder remains unsolved.

The Chronicle reports that 24-year-old Tiffany Martin was sitting at a bus stop near a Denny's in Concord with her one-year-old daughter Kissanni at 1 p.m. Wednesday afternoon when a man in a blue wig and clown suit — no make-up — came and sat beside her. They were chatting about all the creepy clown sightings on the news, when all of a sudden the man allegedly grabbed at the little girl's arm and gave it a tug. "The clown comes up and sits down, all friendly and smiling,” Martin tells the Chronicle. “I pay no mind to it until I realized he snatched my daughter’s arm. He pulls her arm, and I kicked him in the private parts."

One of the earliest popular depictions of a clown, Canio in Pagliacci, was a killer clown.

Clowns employ indecipherable dark magic and an incredible array of evil gadgets to murder wantonly. Everybody is afraid of clowns, so why don't you? A study by the University of Sheffield concluded "that clowns are universally disliked by children. Some found them quite frightening and unknowable."

Using Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque, Jungian and historical writings on the images of the fool in myth and history, and ruminations on the mingling of ecstasy and dread in the Information Age, cultural critic Mark Dery asserts the evil clown is endemic of our times. Clowns are often murderous psychopaths at many American haunted houses.

"[The clown suit] provides de-identification [for the wearer]," SF State University psychology professor David Matsumoto says, saying that anonymity fuels offensive and bad behavior. "Identity is a large part of how society regulates behavior,” he says.

Phantom clowns[]

The related urban legend of evil clown sightings in real life is known as "phantom clowns". First reported in 1981 in Brookline, Massachusetts, children said that men dressed up as clowns had attempted to lure them into a van. The panic spread throughout the US in the Midwest and Northeast. It resurface in 1985 in Phoenix, Arizona; in 1991 in West Orange, New Jersey; and 1995 in Honduras. Later sightings include Chicago, Illinois, in 2008. No adult or police officer has ever seen the evil clowns, though a prankster called the "Northampton Clown" has been cited as a real-life example of an evil clown. Further complaints of evil clown pranksters have been reported in France and the United States.

“The problem is that when police investigate, they never find anything. These mysterious phantom clowns that these children, and occasionally adults, report—they don’t exist. There’s never any evidence of them, and more importantly they never actually harm anyone. This is one of the keys to understanding the phenomenon. It’s always just missed. It’s always, ‘A clown lurched at me but I ran away.’ It’s a potential menace. It’s not an actual menace.”

"I believe that the surge in phantom clown sightings in 2016 are a reflection of the fears and uncertainties in American society at the present time," Robert Bartholomew, who writes about social delusions, fads and popular myths, told Lehighvalleylive.com. "I think they are part of a greater moral panic about the fear of strangers in an increasingly urban, impersonal and unpredictable world. Phantom clowns are essentially the bogeyman in a different cultural guise."

Future historians have determined that the collective psychic anxiety of an unknowable future opens a rift into an eternal fear void from which homicidal clowns pour forth. It is only by assuaging the people of vulnerable eras that Future Revengerists can prevent the end of days in the Darkest Timeline.