Super Happy Fun Clown (2025) Review

Super Happy Fun Clown opens with the definition of the word “atychiphobia”: the fear of being unsuccessful. This is a concept which is most definitely uppermost is the mind of Jen (Jennifer Seward). Twenty years ago, she was a smart, creative, talented schoolkid being touted for big things, albeit mostly by her disciplinarian of a mother (Deborah Madick). Fast forward to the present and Jen is working a menial job, supplementing her meagre income with her extracurricular work as “Jenn-O The Clown” and being touted for nothing, albeit mostly by her disciplinarian of a mother.

Although Jen loves her clowning side gig, she also comes to the realisation that it isn’t going to catapult her into the limelight. With no support from her deadbeat, disbarred lawyer husband and no real hope of escaping her small town, she hits upon an idea which will seal her place in the annals of history. The idea? Go on a killing spree, the upcoming Halloween festivities providing the perfect backdrop…

If you’re familiar with the previous output of director Patrick Rea, you’ll appreciate his various skewed takes on well worn plots. I Am Lisa turned the werewolf mythos into a revenge-driven actioner and the recent The Night Is Young spun a classic vampire tale into a romance-imbued, found footage movie. Here, serial killing gets a bounce around the tonal grid as Jen racks up the body count, pursued by local Detectives Marshall and Barnes (Nicole Hall and Matt Leisy respectively).

Considering the generally grim tone of the opening act, which includes the young Jen being ostracised by classmates, ignored by her older sister and beaten with a wooden spoon by her quite frankly awful mother, the rest of the film settles into an uneasy alliance between genuinely troubling content and darkly comic, often slapstick violence. Eric Winkler’s script doesn’t provide any type of reassuring anchor to justify Jen’s rampage either which adds to the distressing feel.

The presence of clips from The Three Stooges, in one case underscoring a strangling, suggests that the viewer might not want to take this wholly seriously and there may be a certain streak of Art-fulness at play. However, Terrifier this is not, swapping that franchise’s ever more insane set pieces and supernatural trappings for a grunge-soaked, nigglingly unpleasant, indie flavour of slaughter. As Jenn-O’s note-writing and mime-infused clownery lends a certain comic edge to the kills, the fact that innocent people are getting stabbed, shot and burned does leave a question as to if the mounting carnage should be enjoyed at all.

If the shifting tone causes bewilderment, what even the most confused of us can cling to is the direction, performances and staging, which are often assured and belie what would normally be expected of a micro budget. Looking at the credits, family members and friends have clearly pitched in but it never feels amateurish in any way. Violet Rea is effective as the younger version of Jen, asking her mum about the exploits of John Wayne Gacy and impressing the teacher with knowledge but worrying her with disturbing artwork.

In the lead, Seward is very good, shifting from sympathetic, downtrodden entertainer to unhinged murderer in convincing fashion. It’s interesting that both the screenplay and Seward’s work don’t invite us to side with Jen at all once she’s crossed the line and killed someone and, as the Jenn-O part of her takes over, there’s no play for likeability whatsoever, just an inevitability that she’ll be facing down with the cops. That’s not a spoiler, by the way, as the film opens with a stand off between Jen and the forces of law and order.

The juxtaposition of nasty, if OTT, violence with in the overtly comic way it’s portrayed will not sit well with some but even if you can’t recover from the tonal whiplash, Super Happy Fun Clown still has something to say about monsters both real and fictional, especially in the extended sequence which sees Jenn-O crashing a scare attraction to wade into a bunch of classic creatures. There’s something of a kinship with the Terrifier franchise – certainly the most recent of those movies – as Jenn-O weaves her clowning theatrics into her pre- and post-snuff reactions but that’s more to do with atmosphere and queasy humour rather than even the vaguest attempt to copy. Jenn-O exists in a much lower-fi world to Art which means they can (un)happily co-exist and visit their own brand of coulrophobia on entirely different sections of the horror community.

Super Happy Fun Clown is a bizarre film and one which many people may find difficult to get a handle on, but it’s also one which left me thinking about it long after I’d watched it. The concept is simple but the questions it raises are complicated. The crimes on display are increasingly mean spirited but performed with an outlandish streak of humour and I was left conflicted about whether or not I was actually finding it at all entertaining, which is a fascinating place to find yourself. As both an entry into the serial killer genre and a comment on the pursuit of fame, this is one of the weirdest.

Movie Rating:

Super Happy Fun Clown trailer