Eli Roth Producing 'Clown,' Based On Fake Eli Roth Movie Trailer

By Russ FischerNov. 18, 2010 10:36 am EST

This story will be a lesson for anyone who has ever scoffed at the idea at spending time and money on a fake movie trailer. In mid-October Jon Watts and Christopher D. Ford dropped the trailer for Clown onto YouTube. The trailer purported to be for an Eli Roth movie about a killer clown, and it attracted the director's attention.

And now he's producing an actual film based on the Clown trailer. It will be financed by Cross Creek Pictures alongside another film Eli Roth will produce, called Aftershock.

Deadline quotes Eli Roth talking about Clown,

I loved how ballsy they were, issuing a trailer that said, 'From the Master of Horror, Eli Roth.' Some people thought I'd made the movie, or that it was another fake Grindhouse trailer...I really felt these guys deserved a shot, and that people are truly freaked out by evil clowns. It's new territory to make this a version of The Fly, where this guy can feel himself changing, blacking out only to find blood all over his clown suit. You're sympathetic toward a monster until the monster actually takes over.

What he's talking about with respect to The Fly is that Clown (as you can see in the original fake trailer, embedded below) features a dad who dresses up in a clown suit for his son's birthday party, but finds he can't take the suit off, and it begins to change him.The idea with the movie, in part, is to create a new horror icon. Mr. Roth says, "I'd like to apologize in advance to the MPAA, for what we're going to put them through to get an R rating."

And then there's Aftershock, to be directed by Nicolas Lopez from a script he wrote with Guillermo Amoedo. Mr. Lopez also made the Chilean film Que Pena Tu Vida, and this film will be a realistic thriller " set during the aftermath of the February 27, 2010 Chilean earthquake that hit 8.8 on the Richter scale, created a tsunami and claimed the lives of more than 480 in one terrifying event." The film will follow people trying to survive in the aftermath of the quake.