In 100 Tears, two tabloid reporters are desperate for a big story, and decide to do an exposè on serial killers. They decide to start with a local murderer called the "Teardrop Killer." They get some good information, including the fact that he's a clown, but eventually the Teardrop Killer comes after them.
The first segment of Amusement features a room filled with scary clown dolls and toys. Except one of them isn't...
Another Cinema Snob Movie features an entire museum full of these, each complete with their own hideous backstory. And they're cannibals to boot. It turns out they're not willingly monster clowns - Bally Joe has enslaved them with special collars, invented all their backstories and is forcing them to eat human meat. Once free of his control, the "clowns" quickly turn on him.
The high priest who conducts the gory temple ceremony for the god Kukulkan in Mel Gibson's Apocalypto could be considered a pre-Columbian version of this trope. His eye makeup looks very much like that of a clown, he laughs constantly, his ceremony is circus-like entertainment for the crowds watching below, and his voice is wild and high-pitched, especially compared to the subdued tone of voice spoken by all the other movie characters (including the other villains).
In Batman Returns, the Penguin was the leader of the Red Triangle Circus Gang, a group of criminals made up of former circus performers, including several clowns. Likely the nastiest one (called "The Terrifying Clown" in the credits) was the one with the stun gun that threatened Selena in the battle at the tree lighting ceremony at the beginning.
Inverted in Billy Madison where the clown in question seems innocent enough, but when he is subject to a head injury that leaves him unconscious and drooling blood, everyone else seems oblivious to the seriousness of the situation as they laugh at him.
In Blood Fest, the eponymous horror park has an entire circus worth of psychopaths in clown costumes as one of its many threats. Walsh apparently found them on Craigslist.
Blue Velvet: Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" or "CANDY COLORED CLOWN!!!" is a Monster Clown in the form of a song. Interestingly enough, Dean Stockwell, who lip-synchs the song while wearing white make up and exotic clothing, comes across as a Monster Clown Pimp.
The Butchers: The resurrected John Wayne Gacy (see Real Life examples) spends the entire film in clown makeup and costume, which is deeply disturbing.
The Camp Blood trilogy. Ten years after a killer disguised as a clown had a gorefest at old Camp Blackwood, two couples ignorant of the camp's past, decide to visit the now renamed Camp Blood.
The killer in the slasher/porno hybrid Camp Cuddly Pines Powertool Massacre is a rather badass looking example of this. He was set on fire while wearing a clown mask, and it melted to his face.
La Casa 3 has the clown doll that Henriette carries around. On few occasions it turns into sharptoothed version of itself.
Subverted in The Chase (1994): Charlie Sheen's character Jack Hammond is pegged for a felony because he works part-time as a clown, despite the fact that he was innocent. (He's convicted, however, because a crucial piece of evidence was deemed inadmissible, which led to the events of the titular car chase.)
Eli Roth's film Clown posits that the ordinary Non-Ironic Clown is actually a bastardization of a demonic creature from Scandinavian folklore which lures children into its cave and eats them. Its skin is pale because it hides from the sun, and its nose is red from the cold. ...Oh, and whoever puts on an old Icelandic "Cløyne" suit to entertain at children's parties transforms into the monster, because the suit is actually the demon's skin.
In the 1998 slasher film The Clown At Midnight, a murderous clown attacks several teenagers.
In Clownhouse, three mental patients dress as clowns and go on a killing spree.
Clown Kill has Charlie Boy, a clown who raped Jenny in the film's prologue, and comes to her office six months later to torture and kill her at the request of the janitor.
Clown Motel: The eponymous motel is populated by murderous (and in some cases, creepy-looking) clowns who sacrifice every human who comes to their motel.
John Candy starred in a drama/horror film in the '70s titled The Clown Murders which was about a Halloween prank gone wrong. The main enemy was a guy in a clown mask but he only appears for a few seconds in the movie.
The Crow (1994) offers a heroic Monster Clown with its main character Eric Draven, who's an undead Villain Killer that wears facial makeup based on a Pierrot mask he owned before his assassination.
The 2007 movie Drive-Thru features a serial killing clown named Horny.
Shivers the Clown from the Fear of Clowns duology. An artist with coulrophobia ("fear of clowns") is stalked by a murderous clown resembling one of the ones she paints.
The Funhouse Massacre: Rocco The Clown dresses up as a clown by wearing the face of the clown he attacked when he infiltrated the park staff with the other Serial Killers. He keeps it on throughout his killing spree.
The 1994 British horror/black comedy Funny Man features the title demon, who takes the form of a twisted, homicidal, wisecracking harlequin. Imagine "Freddy Krueger meets the Joker," and you have a solid grasp of the Funny Man.
Gacy, To Catch a Killer and Dear Mr. Gacy, all about John Wayne Gacy.
There's also the title character of the 2013 horror comedy Gingerclown (yet another killer clown played by Tim Curry), who leads a group of monsters that inhabit an abandoned amusement park that a group of high school kids happen to explore one night. It goes like you'd expect.
Zigzagged with The Greatest Show on Earth's Buttons, a gentle, altruistic, medically-inclined clown who never removes his makeup, even off-duty... because he's actually a doctor on the run for Mercy Killing his terminally ill wife.
An original plan for Halloween (1978) was to have Michael Myers wear an Emmett Kelly Weary Willie mask instead of the tweaked William Shatner Captain Kirk one they ended up using. Michael does wear the clown mask for the film's opening scene, where he murders his older sister.
Thomas is taken to a Circus of Fear featuring these in Imaginaerum, who as part of their act begin to scoop his memories away - only his memory of going to the circus with his daughter and feeling like a good parent stops them.
Shows up again in Inland Empire. The scene with the movie's first big Jump Scare — in which Laura Dern's slightly distorted face suddenly races up to the camera with a Scare Chord — fades in from a creepy painting of a clown. The famous Nightmare Face near the end is also extremely distorted to look like that of a clown. May be related to what Lynch calls the "suffocating rubber clown suit of negativity".
Pennywise the Dancing Clown from the 1990 adaptation of Stephen King's book IT, portrayed by Tim Curry. Even the on-set cast and crew were terrified. Even scarier when you realize he's actually an Eldritch Abomination disguised as a clown. Ironically, he chose the clown form to trick children into trusting him.
Pennywise from the 2017 adaptation It (2017) and It: Chapter Two is even more monstrous and frightening, with Bill Skarsgard taking Its sadism and predatory nature up to eleven because in this version it gets off on using the clown's creepy Uncanny Valley-ness to make its victims even more terrified so it can feed off their fear. Even when it's trying to pretend to be a nice clown it immediately makes its victims unsettled, and even has to play to one victim's empathy by crying because "he's a creepy clown who nobody wants to be friends with" before she'll come within range to be torn apart.
The various film incarnations of The Joker are classic examples.
In Batman, the Joker looks even creepier with flesh-colored makeup, and the climax consists in him trying to murder an entire crowd of people with parade balloons filled with poisonous gas, one of which is a giant clown. He and his men also dress up as mimes in order to get close enough to a mob target to kill him, then blast the street with tommy guns.
The Dark Knight's Joker, complete with a Glasgow Smile; small children will no doubt be quietly wetting themselves in theaters around the world.
Joker (2019) focuses on the character and his backstory. In this version, the Joker, or Arthur Fleck, actually starts out as a troubled but otherwise Non-Ironic Clown of sorts, but as his sanity further deteriorates and his resentment of the society that's forsaken him grows violent, he eventually unwittingly inspires a group of clown-mask-wearing violent protestors.
In Diary of the Dead (the Romero Zombie movie) there's a Zombie-Clown at a birthday party and he bites the birthday child's dad's ear off. It's hilarious and absolutely terrifying. It's telling that the child is shown to be instinctively afraid of the clown.
One also pops up in Land of the Dead to eat one of the side characters.
And in Day of the Dead (1985), too. It makes you wonder just how quickly the Zombie Apocalypse struck that the poor bastards didn't even have time to change into something more dignified for their trip to the hereafter.
In the James Bond movie Moonraker, when the villain’s big scary henchman Jaws stalks Manuela in a dark alley during the Rio de Janeiro Carnival, he is dressed as a giant clown.
Mr Jingles and its sequel/reboot, Jingles The Clown. Determined to make the guilty parties pay for what they did, Mr. Jingles goes on a bloody killing spree, wreaking grisly havoc on the families of those who put him behind bars. But the homicidal clown had one witness who got away - and spent years in an institution trying to erase the gory memories. Now she is back and ready to join society again - but someone else is planning a very different homecoming!
In Night of the Demon (1957), Crowley-esque cult leader Julian Karswell, who will blithely send critics to a horrible doom, holds children's parties at his estate, playing a magician/clown...pretty benign for this trope, but capable of bad stuff (and in the original story, quick to scare the daylights out of the kids).
The Night They Knocked: One of the killers going after the people inside the house wears clown make-up, white gloves, suspenders, and a red shirt.
In Nite Tales: The Movie, Scary Black ManTony Todd pays a terrifying clown named James who turns up out of the storm asking to use the phone. Later, Tom receives a phone call which warns him of a psycho on the loose who impersonates, amongst other things, a clown and a cop. Ultimately subverted when James turns out to be an undercover cop who his hunting the fake cop.
* Out of the Dark features a killer who targets sex-line workers while wearing a clown mask.
In Parker, numerous bad guys dress up in clown get up and Uncanny Valley Makeup when terrorizing people with guns and starting fires.
The second dream sequence in Pee-wee's Big Adventure is loaded with them. The scariest one probably being the surgeon, who is only revealed to be a monster clown after he pulls down his surgical mask showing his eerily painted mouth. Definitely a case of less is more.
Then there's that motorized clown dummy Pee-Wee chained his bike to...when he comes back and the bike's gone the clown has an evil grin and laughs mockingly!
In Poltergeist, towards the end a toy clown is possessed by evil spirits and ends up attacking the older brother. This was foreshadowed earlier in the movie when the boy covered up the clown with his jacket, because it was staring at him when he went to bed.
In the Problem Child series, it's a Running Gag that Junior really hates clowns — although it appears to stem more from intense dislike than fear.
The short Québécois film, Le Queloune, rather subverts this. The clown in question happens to be a confused zombie in a clown costume just rising from the grave, and you can't help but root for the poor fellow when it takes him two days to get himself out of his grave site. Then he wanders into a couple's home and scares the wife into accidentally killing herself by falling down the stairs (and when he accidentally himself falls on her corpse, his zombie cravings awaken when he tastes human flesh for the first time). After killing the husband with a shovel (and serving their flesh on a skillet for his first breakfast), he removes his old clown clothes and makeup, dresses himself up in a new pair, and walks out of the house ready to begin a new day as a flesh-eating zombie (unaware that everyone around him outside apparently has thought the same thing, what being zombies themselves and all).
People from Quebec have a fondness for the trope, it seems; not only were Le Queloune and Happy Meal (the vampire Ronald McDonald short above) made there, there's also Pogo et ses amis (Pogo and friends), a stop-motion short about the darkly funny day-to-day life of Pogo the clown (see the Real Life section below) and his friends Ed,Albert and Mr. Z. Even funnier/more disturbing because Ed and Albert are voiced by the same voice actors who do Ned Flanders and Mister Burns, respectively, in the Quebec-made French translation of The Simpsons.
And Pogo is Homer himself.
Quick Change: Bill Murray's character dresses up as a clown to rob a bank. He's not really evil, though he did endanger the customers and bank personnel (who could have been wounded or killed during the robbery if someone had gotten heroic or the police had charged in guns a' blazing).
Saviour of the Soul 2: The film's main villain is the Clown King, a demon in clown get-up who can inflate his body size until he towers over the heroes. He also have a legion of clown henchmen he can summon at will.
The Saw franchise has Billy, the grotesque puppet Jigsaw uses to communicate with his victims. He has a white face, oversized smile, swirls on his cheeks and blood-red eyes. His clownish design deliberately contrasts the gritty, metal-and-rust aesthetic of the films, making him even more unnerving.
Shakes the Clown is a comedy that treats clowns as a minority. Most of the characters have foul mouths and substance abuse problems, but one clown in particular, played by Tom Kenny, loses it at the end, and holds a woman hostage.
In Silent Hill: Revelation 3D, Heather is having visions courtesy of her evil twin Alessa. A birthday party attended by clowns with balloons becomes a hideous gorefest before her eyes.
The Smiling Man from the 2015 short film The Smiling Man.
"The master and I are going to have words. He knows I hate clowns. God, I hate them. I hate them all. I hate Bozo, Ronald, Chuckles with their freakin' dumb noses and their lousy party hats!" - Violator from Spawn (1997), though his hatred comes from the fact that he has to look like a clown.
Tickles the Clown: The titular Tickles the Clown is a criminal who's serving a life sentence for an unspecified crime. The human resistance needs his blood to make a cure for the sociopathy gene in The Illuminati's minions, which he's unwilling to give. Also, near the end of the movie, he breaks out of prison, kills someone, and then escapes on a spaceship.
The movie Torment 2008 features the evil Dissecto the Clown.
Uncle Buck had "Pooter the Clown", who showed up to entertain children at a young Macaulay Culkin's birthday party, while drunk, but ends up trying to pick a fight with John Candy instead.
Fritz the serial killer Vicious Fun dresses up as a clown as part of his MO. He just likes clowns.
with flesh-colored makeup, and the climax consists in him trying to murder an entire crowd of people with parade balloons filled with poisonous gas, one of which is a giant clown. He and his men also dress up as mimes in order to get close enough to a mob target to kill him, then blast the street with tommy guns.
