Fears of a Clown, Thalassaphobia, and a Bit More
My hottest horror take is still comfortably room temperature.
I once knew and worked with a young lady who was terrified of balloons.
She couldn’t even stand to be in the same room with them. She would skip out on certain office parties—birthdays, company anniversaries and the like—if the conference rooms booked to host them were stuffed with balloons. Which was most of the time. If there were just a few balloons present she could tolerate that, as long as they were kept far from her.
Some people in the office either doubted this was a genuine phobia, or thought it was too ridiculous to be taken seriously. I, along with some other folks, didn’t have such a viewpoint. To say I treated her fear compassionately is probably an overstatement, because I just didn’t give that much thought to it, but I defended her in person or absentia when it came up. Again, I wasn’t alone with this. While a good number of people seemed to feel it was their duty to ridicule her (mostly behind her back, in this case), many of us also spoke up to say, if nothing else, “Why does this even matter to you?”
Her phobia was legitimate to her, which was all that really mattered, and pretty damn easy to respect. It’s not as if she was saying, “I’m terrified of the color white,” and demanding nobody wear it around her ever, not even on their shoelaces. That would be an unreasonable imposition on others, I’d say, even as someone who favors a lot of black, blue, and gray.
Balloons, though? Let her be. Or don’t have balloons at the parties. Or both. I knew a different guy at that same office who hated balloons (and decorations in general) for no reason other than just hating them, and only one person gave him grief about it, one time, then after that everybody respected it, likely because of some male, tough guy presence privilege (something I may have benefited from on occasion despite not actually being a tough guy, or ever wanting to present as one).
I say all of this because I want to establish my bonafides as someone sympathetic to phobias. I’m not at all dismissive of people’s fears, no matter how “irrational” they may seem, as long as those fears do not in some way harm anyone else. I’ve experienced some of my own, as I’ve already shared on my substack. For a quick refresher, when I was much younger, I was terrified of Bloody Mary, and by extension wasn’t a big fan of mirrors. I’ve written a bit about my fear of needles along with my fears of heights and open water.
I do believe that I understand what it’s like to fear something other people find harmless, even mundane.
So I know that some people are sincerely, deathly afraid of clowns. I also think a lot of other people who say “clowns are scary” really mean to say, “I think certain specific, anti-clown types of clowns are scary.”
Murderous clowns.
Psychotic clowns.
Demonic clowns.
Ghostly clowns.
Monstrous clowns.
These can indeed be scary, but I submit that the adjectives preceding the word “clowns” in each example listed is doing the heavy horror lifting.
For further example, take the title, Killer Clowns From Outer Space. You can replace the word “clowns” with another benign noun and still have a horror story on your hands. Babies. Penguins. Candy. Trees. Someone basically created that last one: The Day of the Triffids. Now that I think of it, someone kind of made the first one, too, within the video game, Drakengard.
Killer anythings from outer space would be terrifying to encounter, A) because they’re deadly, B) because they’ve emerged from the unknown, so you’d probably be clueless as to how to stop them.
I made a comment referencing this general topic once in a blog post on my personal website, years ago. Not in reference to people with legitimate coulrophobia, or even people who would just feel uneasy sitting next to a clown on a park bench. It was about people who say things like, “Clowns freak me out. Like that one in Poltergeist. Or Pennywise. Or Art in Terrifier.”
“So you think evil, bloodthirsty killers are scary? I don’t disagree.”
Here’s my personal, entirely unscientific litmus test for how inherently horrifying a regular-ass clown is: I’ve been to a few horror conventions, Halloween parties, and haunted house attractions in my time. I’ve seen several bloodied, weapon-wielding, black-eyed, fanged, and otherwise outwardly menacing clown costumes. I have not once—not a single damn time—seen someone dressed as just a clown. No bloodstains, no prop axe, no sharp teeth. Not giggling madly while waddling and carrying a dismembered baby doll from a string (kudos to that gentleman and his standout costume from Midsummer Night’s Scream in 2022; yes his costume also had bloodstains on it).
I’ve never seen someone dressed simply as Bozo, Krusty, a rodeo clown, or anything similar.
Not once. Not even in a picture taken at a horror convention. Now I haven’t seen even one percent of all the pictures taken at all the horror conventions and haunted house attractions from around the country, much less attended every one, so I can’t say any of this definitively, obviously, but I still feel confident that even if there are examples of ordinary clown costumes at such places, they would be far outnumbered by the pictures of blatantly, deliberately ghoulish clowns at these events, because, if nothing else, the overwhelming majority of clowns in horror fiction are overtly designed to frighten people.
Again, I stress to all of the actual coulrophobia sufferers out there, I am not denying you exist, or that your plight is true to you. And even to people who just like to say that they’re afraid of clowns without giving it much thought or actually being afraid of them… this isn’t that serious. I’m not accusing you of lying, per se, and ultimately it doesn’t much matter.
But to that latter group, just between us, I’m right, aren’t I?
By the way, I don’t mean to disparage the use of clowns as a vehicle for horrific hijinks, either. Some things just work well with the genre. Ghastly white complexions, painted on or not, and smiles barely hiding homicidal habits—or failing to hide them at all—look terrific on a killer. Clowns, like many other things, can also be creepy when spotted where they don’t belong. Adam Cesare used this to great effect in his book, Clown in a Cornfield.
Note, however, that he did not place his clown in an expected location. His book isn’t titled Clown in a Circus, or Clown at a Kid’s Show, or Clown in a Clownfield.
Okay, that last one could be scary, but only because we all know that clowns don’t grow in clownfields. Clowns grow in graveyards. They’re buried in clownfields, which inherently makes clownfields a little bit unsettling. I digress.
I guess my overall poin is that, from a creative standpoint, it can be important to recognize when something is scary on its own, or is capable of enhancing your scares, or might even be detrimental to the fear you’re trying to induce if it’s misused. And you can’t rely on what the reading / watching public claims to be afraid of to know what’s effective, because sometimes it feels like a lot of people are saying things just to say them.
Related: another seemingly “trendy” fear I’ve seen a number of people claim to have recently is thalassophobia. Fear of deep water.
Once more, with all the feeling in my bones, I am sure that this is a genuine phobia for many people and I am not making light of that. Again, I’m not big open water, myself, although depth oddly isn’t that crucial to my fear. To me, forty feet deep and four-hundred feet deep are equally alarming when you’ve got nothing but water surrounding you for miles. Regarding the depths, however, there are stories that effectively examine such a fear or situation. Some people, however, will claim to have thalassophobia in the comments of a YouTube video titled “Thalassophobia Compilations,” which in turn will not feature a fear of deep water so much as a fear of things that would be scary in or out of the water.
Now, I’m not knocking the idea of seeking out a video of the thing that frightens you. I’ve admitted to doing as much in an earlier post. I am questioning whether the content of these videos actually centers the fear advertised in the title.
One such video I came across regularly employed underwater CGI recreations of the titular behemoths from Attack on Titan. The gist apparently being, “How scary would it be if you were swimming in the deep and saw a gigantic cannibalistic horror suddenly coming after you?”
About as scary as it would be to see such a thing on land, or on the moon. In Heaven itself. Basically anywhere.
Even when these thalassophobia videos center their jump scares around sea creatures it’s typically an extreme, fantastical version of one, and often several of them in a clustered horde that makes the vastness of the ocean irrelevant. If you say you’re afraid of the deep dark sea because six krakens and sixty sharkticons could be lurking right near the surface, all within a hundred-foot radius of you in particular, I’d contend that the immensity of the water is not what is scaring you the most.
Again, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for people to be afraid of something, yet seek out content that features their fear. This isn’t about that, but instead about arguably misidentifying what you’re afraid of. For instance, as established, I am terrified of heights (see here), so seeing any video of someone just driving through the mountains, walking across a rope bridge, or even standing near the edge of a high-rise sometimes gets to me, but I can still watch said videos, or look at pictures. Sometimes I even seek them out just to sort of test myself. But if I only felt a “fear of heights” while watching videos of a man on mountaintop being attacked by flying giants and living demon-clouds, I’m not sure acrophobia would accurately describe what I’m experiencing.
I’ve probably written more than necessary to make my point. But just to underscore it on the way out, I’ve seen movies and read stories where heights (and the fear of falling inherent to them) are featured as a primary or secondary source of terror, such as Vertigo, 2022’s Fall, and Michelle Paver’s Thin Air. A movie like Open Water might feature shark attacks and a storm, but it also spends a considerable amount of its limited runtime just lingering on how scary it would be to be left alone in the sea, no way to get to shore without a miracle. I’ve read people comment on how eerie it is to get to the point of the Lake Pontchartrain bridge where there is no land in sight in any direction, only water. Might the appearance of a Titan, Cthulu or a kaiju enhance the terror of such situations? Sure. But heights and the open sea can prove to be scary enough on their own.
I haven’t come across a scary story yet about a clown just being a clown. Just hitting people with cream pies that aren’t secretly acidic or something. Creating balloon animals that don’t turn into real, carnivorous, insatiable animals that turn an unsuspecting group of partiers into a buffet. That sort of thing. Just normal clowns being scary solely because of who they are. Not saying such stories aren’t out there, but if they do exist, they certainly aren’t as popular as the murder-clown stories.
For some people, surely, clowns just being themselves could be scary. For most people saying they’re afraid of clowns, however, I doubt a movie about clowns just throwing cream pies and making balloon animals would actually horrify them. They’re mistaking being afraid of clowns with being afraid of sadistic murderers, which most of us are afraid of, whether or not they’re wearing facepaint, oversized shoes, or a big red nose.
A Few Favorites
“Work Shoot Hook Rip” by Nick Mamatas
A wrestling horror story that comes to mind now as I read it in the anthology Nightmare Carnival. which has a murdered clown lying at the feet of the child who either killed him, or is just admiring the killer’s work, on its cover.
Anyway, Mamatas story of the old, carny wrestling days, the difference between a “work” and a “shoot,” how things can go horiffically wrong, and how even in the event of such horrific wrongness you might still have a job waiting for you in the old traveling carnival shows is one of my favorite short stories of the last ten or so years.
The Salt Grows Heavy by
And since I’ve written some about carnivorous sea creatures in this post, I feel like that gives me cause enough to bring up Cassandra Khaw’s The Salt Grows Heavy. Not that the book needs an excuse for anyone to mention it. It’s as excellent as you’ve likely heard it is, and Cassandra’s every bit as great as you’ve probably read they are. But this also gives me an opportunity to share my favorite review of Cassandra’s book, provided by a friend of mine who surprised me by visiting our panel at the Bronx Book Festival, where he picked up The Salt Grows Heavy along with The Spite House:
“And Then the Music Stopped” by Greg McElhatton
Back to the carnival-themed horrors that don’t involve clowns, this killer flash-fic piece takes a simple, well-known children’s game and makes it frightening. Just one more example of how many normally innocuous and even fun things are just a sprinkle of deadliness and/or a dash of the unknown away from being perfectly suited for horror stories.
I wonder if a lot of these stated fears are just misplaced fears of the unknown (i.e. who's really under that clown makeup? what's really in water that deep?).