What is frightening about clowns?
You might want to look up something called the “valley of the uncanny” effect. It’s one of the few principles of Freudian psychology where researchers actually did the studies, crunched the numbers and proved the thing. In short, it’s all about the boundaries people have, between “real people” and “fake people”. For most folks, real people are ok, and *simple* fake people are ok, but….in the middle, near the borderline, things get creepy, and folks start to see “monsters” or “zombies” and not people. And if you look at what a clown does, and wears…the makeup makes it look like they can’t stop smiling, and the combination of the makeup and clothes blurs the line between object and human for most clowns. Same sort of thing happens with mimes, realistic dolls and puppets, and on occasion the realistic-seeming humanoid robot. You get something that “seems human” from a distance, but up close and personal, you get the wrong kind of mixed signal and a primitive part of the brain flares t
