Plot
Lynn Blodgett, an artist with coulrophobia, has a nightmare in which she is a young girl and encounters a clown with a decomposing face after a car crash at a carnival. Lynn's nightmares have been getting worse since she filed for divorce from her husband, Doctor Bert Tokyo, who hit her upon getting the news, and is fighting for full custody of their son, Nicholas. One night, a shirtless clown ("Shivers") with black eyes and a battle axe gazes at Lynn's house, then walks away. In the morning, Lynn is told that a family living near where she was house sitting was massacred.
At a gallery exhibiting her work, most of which involves monstrous clowns, Lynn meets Tucker Reid, a roller coaster tycoon who purchases one of her paintings for $8000. Tuck invites Lynn to his office, and after the tour, the two are attacked by a mugger, Heston, but escape. Lynn is shaken by the attempted robbery, but brushes off Tuck's offer to stay at her house. Lynn answers a call from the gallery owner and faints after spotting Shivers standing on her patio. The gallery owner then calls the police, who later question Lynn and dismiss her story.
At the gallery, Lynn reluctantly accepts an offer of $20,000 to do a portrait of a man's father, a clown and convicted child molester. Elsewhere, Shivers is tormented by voices, which tell him that he will get better if he continues to terrorize Lynn. Lynn meets with Bert and his lawyer, who state that Bert not only wants custody of Nicholas, but also wants child support, and half the rights and profits to all the paintings that Lynn has created and sold since they married. It is also revealed that Bert has been out of work for six months, and has been lying about being preoccupied with his job.
Shivers stalks Lynn as she is walking with Tuck, and later murders Lynn's friend Amanda. Lynn is contacted by Detective Peters, who tells her about Amanda's death, and that he now believes her story about being scared by a clown, as grease paint was found under Amanda's nails, and in a colorful pattern on one of her windows. In a parking lot, Bert meets with Heston, who he has hired to kill Lynn so he can collect life insurance. Heston successfully badgers Bert into giving him more money, due to the complications caused by Shivers and the police. Bert visits Shivers, who is revealed to be Doug Richardson, a former patient of his, a sex offender with Leber's congenital amaurosis. Worried that Shivers will wreck his plans, Bert orders him to leave Lynn alone.
Ignoring Bert, Shivers sends a party clown to Lynn's house to distract the guard, whom he beheads, spotting Heston nearby as he does so. When Shivers leaves, Heston breaks into Lynn's home, and is shot with his own gun during a struggle with Lynn and Tuck, who had stopped by to check on Lynn. At the Tokyo residence, Shivers murders Bert, due to Bert trying to have Heston assassinate Lynn, and thus almost ruining Shivers's chance to be "cured". While the authorities are content with believing that Heston was Shivers, Lynn is unconvinced. Nevertheless, she decides to go out on a date to a theatre with Tuck to celebrate being paid $100,000 for the painting she was hired to do.
Shivers continues his mission of trying to rid himself of his schizophrenia through Lynn. He kills her boss, abducts Nicholas after dismembering his babysitter, and breaks into the theatre, where he butchers two employees. As Shivers pursues Lynn and Tuck, Detective Peters races to the theatre, having gotten an alert about a 911 call from it, and news that the DNA under Amanda's fingernails matches Doug. Shivers uses Nicholas to lure Lynn out, and as the clown is about to kill her, Tuck blinds him from a projectionist booth, incapacitating him long enough for Peters and other officers to arrive, and arrest him.
Lynn goes home, and has a nightmare about Shivers escaping from prison, and attacking her and Nicholas.
The evil clown, also known as the killer clown, is a subversion of the traditional comic clown character, in which the playful trope is instead depicted in a more disturbing nature through the use of horror elements and dark humor. The modern archetype of the evil clown was popularized by the DC Comics supervillain Joker starting in 1940, and again by Pennywise in Stephen King's It. The character can be seen as playing on the sense of unease felt by sufferers of coulrophobia, the fear of clowns.
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