If I’ve learned one thing from all my years following contemporary horror cinema (listen to me, making it sound like a tour of duty), it’s that you should never write off any one subgenre or motif. Every time you’re certain that something’s been done to death, along comes a new movie which, against all odds, manages to make it work again. Such is the case with Gags, the feature debut of writer-director Adam Krause (who previously shot the story as a short in 2016). One glance at the film’s key promotional image – a creepy clown holding balloons – and you’d be forgiven for assuming Gags is nothing more than a lazy It rip-off. Learning that it’s also a found footage movie probably won’t inspire much more confidence there. However, if you can put such old bugbears to rest, Gags proves to be a far better, more intriguing and compelling film than you might anticipate.
The action takes place on what proves to be a fairly eventful Saturday night in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The city is in the grip of a minor panic over repeated sightings of a sinister clown, who has been dubbed Gags. So far he isn’t known to have hurt anyone; he just appears, leaving some scared shitless whilst others are loving every second of the attention in the news and online. On this fateful night, four disparate parties are, in their own ways, on the trail of Gags: local TV news reporter Heather DuPrey (Lauren Ashley Carter), who has been assigned to ‘Gags Watch’ much to her annoyance; beat cops Chrissy Renard (Tracy Perez) and Jake Gruber (Evan Gamble), whose night shift sees them repeatedly called out to clown-related calls; college-age kids Tyler (Michael Gideon Sherry), Chris (Squall Charlson) and Sara (Halley Sharp), who are getting their kicks staging copycat clown scare stunts around town; and Charles Wright (Aaron Christensen), outspoken podcast host whose anger over the Gags case compels him to take his show out into the streets in the hope of hunting down and taking out the clown menace.
The one principle reason I found Gags so fascinating – and it’s a reason viewers in years to come might fail to appreciate – is how closely it evokes events in recent memory. Readers will hopefully recall the creepy clown hysteria of 2016, when sightings were reported all over the world and Youtube was awash with phone-shot videos of such incidents; this hit home for me when such a sighting was reported in my own neighbourhood, bringing in local news and winding up with a report not too dissimilar to those we see in Gags, right down to the inclusion of professional clowns heartbroken to see the good name of their profession sullied in this way.
As it offers reflections and commentary on how such hysteria spreads in the modern age, it’s really only fitting that Gags be realised as a found footage movie; and believe me, that’s not something I would anticipate declaring, given my general aversion to the format. Krause makes it work by putting it all together in a style akin to one of the most unjustly overlooked entries in the subgenre, Barry Levinson’s The Bay: the action cuts between TV news cameras, phones, CCTV, police body cams and more besides, to present a more fully rounded, three-dimensional story world than we might otherwise get from the more usual single hand-held camcorder approach. The overriding message – that we are all in some way culpable for the way online hysteria spreads, whether we directly participate or merely click the link – isn’t necessarily anything we haven’t been told before, but it’s still conveyed effectively.
Another key part of what makes Gags so effective is that which so very, very often lets found footage films down: the casting. I think it’s safe to say that Lauren Ashley Carter may well be the very best actress of her generation working in indie horror: from The Woman to Jug Face to this (and I hear good things about Darling and Imitation Girl, though I haven’t seen them yet), she brings something genuinely different to the table every time. Here she really elevates what might have otherwise been a fairly cliched reporter role, and also proves to be very adept at extravagant trash talk. Particular note is also due to Aaron Christensen: while the gun-loving, freedom-espousing Wright comes close to being a bit of a two-dimensional critique on the current, ugly face of far right populism, both the script and the actor manage to find some nuance in there, making him a little more sympathetic than we might at first expect. Some of the smaller roles aren’t necessarily so well cast (early house party scenes may inspire a few grimaces), but we get past these soon enough.
As for the titular antagonist him(it?)self: well, creepy clowns may well be a cliche these days, but there’s no denying that Gags is indeed pretty darned creepy. As events progress we get into increasingly abstract, nightmarish territory which defies clear-cut explanation, and – without spoiling anything – it’s fair to say the very last scenes leave things a bit open to interpretation. But the film does give us some of the most effective scare sequences I’ve seen from found footage in a long time, which manage to just about skirt that fine line between leaving things open to the imagination, but also ensuring gorehounds don’t feel short-changed.
Gags just screened at Chicago’s Cinepocalypse 2018; our thanks to the festival for granting us this preview.