[ad_1]
Back in August 2016, an independent filmmaker in Green Bay, Wisconsin came up with a brilliant idea to promote his new short film. Since the 16-minute horror short focused on a scary clown named Gags, director Adam Krause hired an actor to dress up like a clown and stand silently in various locations around Green Bay. It was classic low-budget viral marketing. A few weeks later, the entire country was in an uproar. Enraged mobs rampaged through the streets hunting for clowns, while terrified parents organized armed posses to protect trick-or-treaters from the red-nosed menace. The Great Clown Panic of 2016 had begun.
It's easy to forget just how huge this thing was. Multiple school districts went into complete lockdown for fear of clown attacks. A Kentucky man mistook a woman walking her dog for a clown and burst out of his house firing an AR-15 into the air, which has to be the worst way to learn you're wearing too much makeup. College students were particularly susceptible to panic, as students at multiple universities armed themselves with baseball bats and pepper spray and roamed the campus searching for clowns. Please take a moment to feel sorry for any parent who scrimped and saved to help send a kid to university, only to see them on the news waving a bat with a nail through it and threatening to fight an imaginary clown.
By October, America was in the grips of clown madness. Hundreds of scary clown sightings were pouring in every month, although most were determined to be hoaxes (it's possible that "we'll shut the school if someone anonymously sends us a picture of Bozo on Instagram" was not a great precedent to set). Vox even published an explainer claiming the entire thing was fake, which is a bit of an exaggeration, since a chainsaw-wielding clown charging at you is scary whether or not the guy in the costume is just doing it for his YouTube prank channel. But even those jackasses were rare. Most of the time, somebody just posted "lol, I saw Pennywise in the woods by the middle school" and within 24 hours half the town was on fire and the mayor was on top of an armored school bus waving a shotgun and screaming that the executions would continue until the clown came forward.
Before long, the clown frenzy had spread overseas. In Sweden, a teenager was stabbed by a clown, while in Germany a clown was stabbed by a teenager. Brazil's "good clowns" held a rally to protest against evil clowns. In England, the police were so overwhelmed that the country had to deploy its unstoppable legions of reality TV stars, who took to Instagram promising to battle the clowns supposedly lurking around every corner. And in New Zealand, a guy in a clown mask grabbed a case of beer from a convenience store and threw it to an accomplice, who pedaled away on a bicycle, because there is literally nothing New Zealand can't make adorable. Seriously, the store owner said he initially became suspicious after realizing the guy wasn't his regular customer who always wore a clown mask. What is even going on down there?
Source link
[ad_2]
source https://earn8online.com/index.php/129092/the-year-the-world-was-terrorized-by-scary-clowns-it-was-2016/
No comments:
Post a Comment