A ‘Killer Clown’ face off: what would you do?

You’re walking home alone along poorly lit streets. Across the road you can make out a figure in the shadows but you’re not sure who or what it might be. Feeling slightly uneasy, you walk faster.

What if that figure started following you from across the street? Add a clown costume, a weapon, and a painted grimace and it’s enough to induce a heart attack.

Even worse, what if a clown jumped out in front of you from behind a street corner. Or ran after you screaming with the knife they were brandishing, fake or otherwise, held above their head.

What would you do? Run? Scream?

Depending on what the clown was wielding changes how quick I would run, and how loud I would scream, but in all honesty I’d just want to get away. I suspect I’d call the police, let them know there’s a ‘killer clown’ on the loose and scaring the shit out of people. But past that, I’m not sure what else I would be able to do.   

Not that I’m afraid to confess that in contemplating the ‘killer clown’ phase, I have imagined a superhero, vigilante version of myself bravely chasing away nightmare clowns, or suddenly realising my full self-defence potential, despite my severe lack of experience.

But for some this isn’t a far off vision. There has been theinfamous ‘Batman’ in Cumbria who has been defending and protecting the local schoolchildren, much to their relief.

In Bristol we even have our own, home-grown vigilante group:the Clown Hunters. This team of good Samaritans are patrolling the streets of Bristol, performing citizen arrests on stray clowns and alerting the police. It is worth noting that the group insist on not approaching clowns with weapons and instead just call the police, before anyone gets carried away.

If it weren’t for the potential harm these clowns could do, the situation would be laughable. There are teenagers with a new hobby of scaring people in clown instead of playing Grand Theft Auto in their rooms. With the addition of costumed vigilantes the situation just gets more astonishing. In my relatively short life, I have never come across quite so bizarre a craze, or actually quite such an unbelievable year. The world seems to be turning upside down.

From one unbelievable news story to the next, the ‘Killer Clown’ craze almost perfectly sums up 2016 so far. First up in January were the deaths of legends Sir Terry Wogan, Alan Rickman and David Bowie, which left the nation in a state of shock only to be deepened as other well-loved celebrities passed, including Victoria Wood, Ronnie Corbett and Robin Williams. At the same time people were getting their heads around tragedies, such as the Orlando shootings and terrorist attacks on the continent and in the Middle East. On top of all that, the political scene appeared to flip on its head too. Suddenly Trump was the Republican nominee, the UK had voted to leave the EU and Boris Johnson had been appointed the position of Foreign Secretary.

Despite the bad news so far in 2016, and the increase in racism and homophobia across the Western world, we can always hope that these unbelievable events soon become a thing of the past. You never know, we could be sitting here in a peaceful, accepting and tolerant society in 2017 thinking, ‘Thank God that all worked out fine’.

Published in online in the Epigram comment section 20/11/2016