Hallowe'en & Clowns

[LovelyLadyLux]

Happy Hallowe'en! 'Tis that commercial holiday time today however it is raining quite heavy so am not too sure if that many kids will be out and about this evening especially if the rain continues.

Won't go into how I really don't relate to Hallowe'en. Was a much different holiday when I was a child and now that I've typed the word holiday I have to correct myself that it was never a holiday it was an occasion that we participated in of an evening. Now decorations go up weeks ahead of time and it has been pushed commercially into a major event.

What I've been thinking about today (and maybe imagining it all) is the changing role of clowns. When I was a child clowns were meant to be cute funny things. They were in circuses and rodeos, maybe had a skit to perform but were mostly funny and chasing around people, animals etc. NOW and lately it seems to me that clowns have become much more sinister. They're not the funny cute benign beings or people as before. Now while many clowns may have a painted happy face they are actually harbouring a much more sinister side.

Am sure Hollywood is behind this change as more and more movies are coming out featuring clowns they've created clowns with a malevolent side and even lots of the happy faces are painted with an evil glint to them. This started with a novel by Stephen King (IT?) that featured a blood drooling murdering clown and then Keith Ledger was in a role as a clown with an extremely dark side..............

(*As another aside WHY I can remember the name Keith Ledger when I can't even draw a visual of the guy and know I NEVER watched the movie I'm referencing really attests to the power of TV commercials and how I seem to absorb and retain the most useless trivia!!!)

Am I imagining it or are clowns nowadays being portrayed as sinister beings? I know I'm leery of taking the twins to see 'clowns' until I vet them first and make sure they're ok vs blood drooling denizens!

[Grandad]

LLL, your talk about sinister Clowns was lost on me because it was something I had not heard of. But, opening the Daily Mail online I was confronted with this article, I hope you can open it because it talks about the very thing you have discussed.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... clown.html

Something else I spotted in the week was an article about houses being decorated in Halloween themes much as some decorated the outside of their houses at Christmas. Crazy Crazy Crazy
The upside of this years Halloween for the kids is that temperatures in the south have reached an unprecedented 24 degrees (75 to you LLL ) so we have a relatively balmy evening for end of October.

[LovelyLadyLux]

OMG Grandad - that is exactly what I was talking about. I was watching a show on TV (wasn't really watching it but there is NOTHING on TV here right now that isn't related to ghosts/goblins/poltergeists/horror/terror/blood,guts,gore ......YUCK!) and it was showing Hallowe'en costumes and which are most popular in which areas etc. They also showed a variety of clown costumes and ALL were, to me, relatively disturbing. The clowns mouths were not painted on in smiles they had wicked type grins and the spots under the eyes were not happy spots they seem to be giving the clown a more malevolent attitude.

Started me thinking that in my day ALL clowns were happy & funny. All kids liked clowns but in the last few or more years clowns have taken on a much more sinister look. Dunno when this started.

I know nothing about Twisty the Serial Killer Clown here in the USA (haven't heard of this one) but I know that there is a famous serial killer here in the USA John Wayne Gacey....(from Wikipedia: John Wayne Gacy, Jr. (March 17, 1942 – May 10, 1994), also known as the Killer Clown, was an American serial killer and rapist who was convicted of the sexual assault and murder of a minimum of 33 teenage boys and young men in a series of killings committed between 1972 and 1978 in Chicago, Illinois.

All of Gacy's known murders were committed inside his Norwood Park Township home; his victims would typically be lured to this address by force or deception and all but one victim were murdered by either asphyxiation or strangulation with a tourniquet (his first victim was stabbed to death). Gacy buried 26 of his victims in the crawl space of his home; three further victims were buried elsewhere on his property, while the bodies of his last four known victims were discarded in the Des Plaines River.

Convicted of 33 murders, Gacy was sentenced to death for 12 of these killings on March 13, 1980. He spent 14 years on death row before he was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center on May 10, 1994.

Gacy became known as the "Killer Clown" due to his charitable services at fundraising events, parades and children's parties where he would dress as "Pogo the Clown", a character he devised himself.

Anyway - what you shared is what I've been thinking about. The youngest twin too gets nightmares if he sees monsters or dragons etc. His mom, my dtr and I talked about keeping an eye out for scary clowns this Hallowe'en cause if he sees them he is, for sure, going to have nightmares where he'll wake up crying he is having scary dreams about ???

Sad that clowns are moving now to something that is to be feared vs the jovial happy clown of my day.

On another note the rain has now stopped here. Kinda coolish but definitely very acceptable Hallowe'en weather for the kids to be out and about.

[Horus]

I reckon it did all start with the Steven King novel 'It', that book forever changed the face of clowns (literally) into something evil and it has been used ever since as a scare tactic. I suppose it plays on our basic fears of something very familiar and friendly suddenly becoming evil.