The indispensable mascot of birthdays held at McDonalds, invited to parties to entertain children; clowns. How is it that clowns, who appear to make people laugh and entertain, can make us so scared?
The fear of clowns, called coulrophobia, has become a fear that plagues hundreds of thousands of people around the world. This fear is caused not only by killer clowns like in Stephen King’s masterpiece It, but by some tricks our brains play on us.
What is coulrophobia?
Koulrophobia is the name given to the fear of clowns. Although at first glance it may seem like a very simple, less important fear than other phobias, the number of people who receive treatment for coulrophobia is quite large.
People with coulrophobia hate seeing clowns, looking at their photos, or even hearing the name of a clown. I am sure that the number of people who cannot eat at McDonalds because of the clowns whose purpose is to make them laugh and entertain is quite high.
Was there a clown in the past, dear, where did this phobia come from now?
We see clowns a lot now in many movies, TV shows or in real life at birthday parties, grocery and market openings (whatever that is). In the old days, these friends took part in circuses and performed acrobatics or magic shows. And let’s not forget the royal jesters who entertained the nobles during the royal era. (King jesters wore wigs, painted their faces, and performed various tricks, although they were not similar to today’s clowns.)
We have many reasons to be afraid of clowns, who previously existed only for entertainment. According to scientists, coulrophobia is a disorder that develops mostly in childhood, and the biggest reason is that parents persistently try to put their children in the same environment with clowns.
Although parents think otherwise, young children do not like clowns in the least. In fact, the University of Sheffield, England, brings together 250 children aged 4 to 16 and learns about their attitudes towards clowns. All 250 children say they find clowns creepy and scary.
Of course, there are those who experience this phobia in adulthood rather than in childhood. Here, other factors that trigger clown phobia come into play. Books, movies and TV series are among the factors that trigger this phobia the most. Killer clowns in movies like It, Clown or Poltergeist can cause coulrophobia. The little games that our brain plays on us are among the other factors that help this phobia occur.
Our brain wants to see what’s going on behind the mask.
When the human brain sees a person like itself, it expects to see a face that it is accustomed to until today. So he wants to add a familiar face to a familiar body. Everything should be clear in the face we see; eyes, lips and even facial expressions.
The make-up of clowns completely distorts these familiar facial signals in our brain. A red nose, a smiling face, and big eyes. We think that the clown is laughing because of the make-up, but the brain says: “No, it’s just make-up. I can’t understand what’s going on behind that fake smile. Run or fight!”
When our brain encounters a face that it cannot identify on the other side, it starts to emit danger signals and tells us that we must either run or fight. At a birthday party, a movie, or anywhere we need to be exposed to a clown, these signals come back to us in the form of rapid heart palpitations, panic attacks, nausea, or fainting.
Isn’t there a cure for this?
As with many ailments, there are various treatments for coulrophobia. While some treatment consists of methods that can be applied at home, it is recommended that people with an advanced fear of clowns go to the doctor.
The treatment of most phobias, such as coulrophobia, consists of techniques to overcome the feared thing, but since it can be extremely dangerous to try such a thing alone at home, such trials must be done under the supervision of a doctor. Therefore, we think that if your palms start to sweat when you hear the word clown, it would be beneficial to consult an expert.
If you think that this fear is caused by the games your brain is playing on you, I have a personal advice for you. As someone who has coulrophobia from an early age, this phobia is triggered to an incredibly disturbing degree when I see not only a clown, but also any person with a completely masked face, as in the movie Purge.
When I heard of the movie It, in which Bill Skarsgard will star as Pennywise, I realized that I would never be able to watch the movie. Shortly before the film’s release, I had the chance to see the Pennywise make-up applied to Bill, and suddenly what I was watching with my heart pounding started to seem like a perfectly normal thing to me.
I don’t think I’m an expert or knowledgeable person on this subject, but I think my brain saw who was behind the makeup, it somehow recognized it, and then when it saw the character of Pennywise, it said to itself; He said, “Okay, there’s our handsome Bill behind the make-up.” I don’t know about childhood trauma or the clowns we fear because of the movies, but I think seeing the face behind the make-up will help overcome coulrophobia so that the brain can decipher the tricks it plays on us.
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