It is a truth universally acknowledged that clowns are terrifying. At some point in their long history, clowns’ exaggerated makeup and goofy voices went from being funny to being instant short-cuts for coulrophobia ( the fancy word for fear of clowns).
Pop culture is partially to blame for cementing clowns’ unnerving reputation. Take this summer’s box office line-up alone. In Stephen King’s IT: Chapter Two, a millennia-old force of evil chooses, of all possibilities, to adopt the form of a clown to scare children. The controversial Joker movie is yet another example of the villain’s habit of inverting a clown’s traditional role: Using the costume for terror, not laughs.
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But the scariest clown movie in theaters is not fictional. Wrinkles the Clown, out October 4, captures the strange life of a Naples, FL man whose side hustle is professionally scaring kids. Wrinkles the Clown can be summoned to your bedroom. In fact, Wrinkles the Clown could be there now.
Read on for the story of a man who started pranking in the real world, and became a legend on the internet.
The Wrinkles the Clown craze dates back to a 2014 video.
Caught on CCTV’s grainy black-and-white camera, the terrifying video looks like something out of a Conjuring movie, not real life. At first, many people thought it was a joke. It wasn’t. Now, the video has nearly one million views on YouTube and is Wrinkles Mythology 101.
In the video, a girl is seen sleeping on a trundle bed. The drawer beneath her slowly opens, seemingly on its own, to reveal a clown in a polka-dotted suit. He stands up to his full height and looms over the sleeping child. Luckily for her, she doesn’t wake up and isn’t permanently scarred.
Turns out Wrinkles was not an intruder — he was brought to the house on purpose by parents looking to mess with their daughter.
For Wrinkles, scaring people is a profitable side-hustle.
Wrinkles the Clown is most commonly summoned as a desperate (or mean) disciplinary tactic. Parents pay $150 an hour for Wrinkles to scare their misbehaving kids. In an interview with the Washington Post, Wrinkles recalls the time a mother asked him to scare her 12-year-old son.
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“He was scared of clowns and I showed up across the street from him at the bus stop and he just started crying in front of his friends and ran home. His mother called back a few days later and said ‘Thank you!’ Now when he acts bad, she just has to ask him: ‘Do you want Wrinkles to come back?” Wrinkles said.
According to an interview he gave with local Florida news, Wrinkles also shows up to parties, and he lurks outside of schools and in parks. Business boomed. He told GQ he’s booked for months and has a few celebrity clients.
Now, Wrinkles the Clown is a living urban legend.
The mythology surrounding Wrinkles the Clown sounds like a creepypasta story come to life. He wears a red and white polka-dotted suit, balloons, and a morose face mask. He can be summoned with a phone number plastered on stickers scattered throughout the Naples area: 407-734-0254. '
And so, the brave try to take him on by calling those nine numbers.
YouTube is littered with kids calling his hotline, like a 21st century equivalent to the Bloody Mary challenge (but in this case, Bloody Mary might actually show up). Usually, the call is directed straight to voicemail. Some videos feature actual phone conversations with Wrinkles.
With reaction videos galore and a now-defunct Google+ page compiling all clown sightings, the internet has become a Wrinkles scrapbook.
Though he became a local celebrity in southwestern FL, Wrinkles has received nationwide attention, with interviews in The Washington Post (2015) and GQ (2016), and coverage on Jimmy Fallon and James Cordon’s late-night shows.
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In the summer of 2016, Wrinkles was surrounded by like-minded people.
The summer of 2016 was peak clown hysteria. Throughout the country, packs of people dressed as clowns were purposefully scaring people. Eventually, the phenomenon inspired American Horror Story: Cult, which said the clowns were a result of the turmoil of the 2016 election. Clowns unleash chaos.
“Honestly, I think it’s comical,” Wrinkles told GQ when asked about the clown sightings. “As long as nobody is getting hurt, what’s wrong with some kids dressing up and scaring their friends? And how much of it is really true?”
Who is the man behind the mask?
The documentary Wrinkles the Clown offers no specifics about the man’s real identity. Is he, as the legend goes, a senior citizen who dresses as the clown to “have a little fun before I die,” as Wrinkles told local Florida news? Is he really a transplant from Rhode Island, as he told The Washington Post?
Or is he a younger man, stuck in a gimmick? The Naples Daily News posits whether the clown is really the brainchild of Florida filmmaker Cary Longchamps, who started a Kickstarter to make a Wrinkles documentary before Wrinkles was a thing (Longchamps didn’t direct the 2019 documentary).
The movement is bigger than one man.
Are we all Wrinkles the Clown?
We could be. People in Wrinkles costume showed up to a preview of the movie.
The Wrinkles mask may eventually eclipse the Trump Mask or Scream Mask as the go-to mask for trolls.
Wrinkles the Clown is everywhere.