‘Clown’ Trailer: It’s Not a Costume, But You’ll Wish It Was

Several years ago, a fake trailer for a new Eli Roth-produced horror film called Clown hit the internet, attracting a bit of attention. Roth himself was so impressed by the fake trailer that he struck a deal with the directors to make a full-length version of the terrifying short, featuring a father who dons a clown costume only to discover that he’s actually becoming a horrifying clown. Although the film doesn’t have a U.S. release date yet, a new trailer for Clown has debuted online to give you a legitimate case of the creeps.

Clown has already been released theatrically in Italy and the UK, and has even made its way to home video in the latter. It’s been five years since commercial directors Jon Watts and Christopher D. Ford originally debuted their fake trailer, and a few years since they filmed the full-length version of Clown. And this isn’t the first trailer we’ve seen promising to deliver the film for our viewing pleasure, either—so it’s a little baffling that we haven’t gotten an official release date yet.

In the film, a desperate father needs to find a clown for his son’s birthday party at the last minute, when he stumbles upon an old clown costume in his attic. But after the party’s over, he discovers that he can’t remove the wig or the silly fake nose because they’ve become grafted to his body. Something insidious lurking in the costume begins to slowly transform him into a terrifying clown monster.

It certainly sounds silly, but the fake trailer was very effective. It remains to be seen if the full-length feature can live up to that promise, or if it would have been better off as a short. Roth himself makes an appearance as Frowny the Clown in the film, which also co-stars Peter Stormare.

This isn’t the first time that one of Roth’s projects has been shuffled off to the side. Last year, the Roth-directed Green Inferno was delayed indefinitely, but it’s been rumored recently that the film will be hitting Netflix and DVD/Blu-ray pretty soon.

If you live in the UK, you can currently purchase a home video copy of Clown. For the rest of us U.S. folks, we’ll just have to keep waiting. Check out the original fake trailer for Clown below: