A 65-year-old retired man in Naples, Florida, acting under the alias of Wrinkles the Clown, is hired by parents and friends to scare misbehaving children, attend birthday parties and play pranks. Now, there's a documentary that captures it all. "Wrinkles the Clown" is making its debut Oct. 5, 2019.
The event is being hosted by Retro Film Series at The Carolina Theatre of Durham in downtown Durham. The documentary is part of the Nevermore Film Festival, a competition festival which programs brand-new genre features and short films from around the world.
Arts & Culture staff writer Courtney Heaton spoke with Michael Beach Nichols, the director of "Wrinkles the Clown," about the film.
The Daily Tar Heel: How does your documentary fit into the horror genre?
Michael Nichols: It fits in because Wrinkles the Clown has been around since 2014, and he's had this phone number that parents can call to hire him to discipline their misbehaving children to basically scare them straight. And since that phone number went up online, he's amassed over 2 million voicemails of people that have reached out to him and called him. So we made this film, we got access to all of those voicemails, and so we spent several months just listening to these wild disturbing violent creepy funny voicemails.
Kids react differently to Wrinkles. Some are terrified, but others think he is sweet and want him to be their friend. We basically use those voicemails to help sort of take a look at people's perception of Wrinkles, and how a lot of people are really terrified of him and think that he's kidnapping children and murdering children, and then some kids think he's great and sweet and want him to be their friend. And so in the film stylistically, we try to sort of illustrate a lot of the terrifying imagination that a lot of kids have about Wrinkles the Clown. We use a lot of horror genre elements when we're creating these vignettes to illustrate children's nightmares.
DTH: Why do you think people would watch this documentary? Do you think they would watch it out of the sense to get scared or do they want to know more information or just for a good laugh?
MN: I would hope kind of all of the above. I mean, I think it's I think it's a very funny film. But I also think it's has a lot of sort of disturbing creepy elements to it as well. And I think that there's some cultural fascination with clowns that reared its head again now with the sequel to it and with "Joker" coming out. We basically use those voicemails to help take a look at people's perception of Wrinkles and how a lot of people are really terrified of him and think that he's kidnapping children and murdering children, and then some want him to be their friend.
DTH: Does anyone know who Wrinkles is?
