Director Jon Watts has made films that have grossed over a billion dollars at the box office but he’s never forgotten about his horror roots with “Clown” …
Long before Jon Watts was directing Marvel movies with Tom Holland as Spider-Man and making over a billion dollars at the box office, he was an ambitious young filmmaker coming out of NYU just trying to get some attention for his work.
So he made a fake trailer for a movie called “Clown” about a father who puts on a cursed clown suit for his son’s birthday party but then the costume refuses to come off before eventually possessing his body and soul. The creepy premise transformed into a a trailer that Watts and his friends tagged as a movie coming soon from famed horror director Eli Roth but they never expected anything to come of it.
That all changed after the fake trailer blew up on YouTube and Roth actually reached out and asked if they had an idea for a full feature film — and truthfully they didn’t — but Watts claimed they did. So he and his friends pitched the movie to Roth and he helped them get financing for the movie, which was made back in 2014.
Watch the original “Clown” trailer below:
Sadly, “Clown” only received a very small release in the United States after actually finding a decent sized audience overseas but the movie came and went without much fanfare. Obviously, Watts eventually made his second feature called “Cop Car” that got the attention of Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige and he ended up being hired to direct “Spider-Man: Homecoming” and the rest is history.
But now a German company named Turbine Medien is re-releasing “Clown” as a 4K special edition on physical media and Watts was asked about potentially returning for a sequel to his first feature film.
“Yeah, [Christopher] Ford and I have it all mapped out,” Watts told Variety. “We’d want to do seven of them, make it a real long-term franchise like “The Leprechaun” or something like that. There are a lot of facets to the story that we’re still interested in telling, because it’s great. It’s kind of an evergreen premise where anyone can put on the suit.”
More than a decade after its release, “Clown” has become a cult classic among horror fans and Watts never forgot his horror roots — most recently providing a story and producing “Final Destination Bloodlines,” which became a smash hit for Warner Bros.
Watts still has fond memories making “Clown,” which ends up being a very dark and tormented tale about this evil spirit that inhabits the clown suit, which requires the person wearing it to literally eat children to satisfy its hunger.
“It was nice to be able to rewatch it with a little bit of distance,” Watts said about the film. “The big joke we had after we made it was that we didn’t really make a horror film about a man turning into a clown. We made a psychological thriller. Looking back at it now, I’m like, “Oh, I should have leaned into the horror a little bit more.” It’s more of a character study than anything else. In retrospect, that was part of the joke, that we took this really ridiculous premise so seriously.
“But now I watch it, and I think I wish that I’d had enough time to really extend some of the kill sequences to be even crazier. I still see a lot of potential in the premise, so when I watch it now, I’m like, “Oh, we could have done so much more there.” I’d love for it to be like “Evil Dead 2.” I’d love to tell the same story, but jump off to even crazier places.”
“Clown” is available to order from the German company and perhaps Watts might get back into another horror movie one day soon — maybe even a sequel to his directorial debut.
