Nightmare Fuel / Killer Klowns from Outer Space

A clown only a mother could love.

• Jumbo. Even compared to all of the other Killer Klowns, Jumbo takes it to a whole other level of pure sadism and creepiness. It really doesn't help that unlike the other Klowns who have their genuinely funny moments in spite of their disturbing nature, Jumbo is played dead seriously and it just makes him and his actions all the more creepy.
  • The scene where Jumbo captures Farmer Green's dog. The fact that you never see what happens to it makes it worse than the other deaths.
    • If you look closely at the first time you see the cotton candy room, there is a cocoon next to the farmer that's smaller than all the others. Word of God in the director's commentary confirms that is the dog.
  • Jumbo's antics are also unnervingly Bloodier and Gorier than the rest of the Klowns.
  • The scene where Jumbo lures the little girl out of Big Top Burger to try kill her. Jumbo lurks around the playground of the fast food like a nightmare version of Ronald McDonald before gesturing the little girl towards himself and successfully lures her outside, hiding a huge mallet behind his back. This is the only time in the movie when a child is even shown, let alone in danger. The background soundtrack fades out, replaced by a very creepy chorus. It's effective, and not played for laughs at all.
    • When the little girl's mother angrily pulls her back into the restaurant for not finishing her food, Jumbo lets out an awful, distorted growl in frustration at the near miss.
  • The whole scene of Officer Mooney getting confronted and mocked by Jumbo is mostly played for laughs acting out kind of like a typical Bugs Bunny outwitting Elmer Fudd routine... until Mooney has enough and hits Jumbo on the back with his baton after the Klown has walked into the cell. At this point, a pissed off Jumbo stops playing and twists his head around to face Mooney and let out an enraged growl at him. Mooney is finally taken aback by this sudden Mood Whiplash and tries to maintain his controlling demeanor saying: "I dunno who you are... but before this night is over, you'll be begging for mercy!" right before Jumbo makes his finishing move on him.
  • The line "Don't worry, Dave. All we wanna do is kill ya." soon after Mooney is killed.
    • What really makes this moment creepy is the fact that Jumbo is using Mooney's corpse (with his face done up in Raggedy Andy makeup and two bloody trails running down at the sides of his mouth and jaw which make him resemble a creepy ventriloquist dummy) to say this to Dave. When he speaks, Mooney's voice comes out as distorted yet eerily calm.
    • Then there's the unsettling shot of Mooney lying dead on the ground after Jumbo finishes his puppet routine. Chilling.
    • What makes it even worse is that the Klowns, these intelligent alien lifeforms, are not Obliviously Evil beings driven by Blue-and-Orange Morality, Jumbo's line spoken through Mooney's corpse removes all doubt and confirms that the Klowns are complete monsters perfectly aware of what they're doing, as this one instance of meaningful conversation is used to express that their only goal is killing us.
• Debbie and Mike's exploration of the Klown ship takes a dark turn when they arrive at the cocoon chamber and Mike tears off some cotton candy from a cocoon only to reveal a bleeding human face already reduced to a Jell-o consistency from the melting effect of the alien webbing.
  • Mike blowing the cover after dropping his lamp upon noticing Joe Lombardo in a cocoon. The guy wasn't properly cocooned and his face is partially out, indicating that he didn't get a quick demise but instead clearly died with eyes wide open while feeling his cocooned body getting dissolved.
• As pictured, Bibbo jumps onto the windshield of Mike's car making Debbie shriek her head off as we're treated to an extreme close up of that hideous coulrophobia-inducing face. The Scary Flashlight Face effect caused by the car's interior lights doesn't help.
• Take your pick. The Klowns have some disturbingly unusual ways of killing people.
  • A helpless middle aged security guard is reduced to a steaming pile of bones (if even that much) by acidic pies ("It looks like a big wad of melted ice cream!" "Yeah, well, it's not.").
• Hell, the Klowns in general are so hideously frightening that you gotta wonder how none of the townsfolk notices anything wrong with them.
• Their laugher is genuinely unsettling, and will likely catch first time viewers off guard.
• While in the finished film the scene of Slim chasing the guy on an invisible car is not that scary due to the energetic music and execution, it becomes creepier when one learns that it was the idea that sparked the whole movie to the Chiodo Brothers upon them discussing the scariest thing imaginable, and coming up with the Surreal Horror scenario of driving along a dark road and seeing a clown appearing next to you outside.
• Dave arriving at the devastated police station is unironically played for horror. Everything is darkly lit as he follows Jumbo's clown shoe traces on the floor before arriving at the cells and noticing them going up on the wall, then he sees the two youths Mooney had unfairly arrested earlier in the film being cocooned in alien cotton candy, here the bloodied arm of one of them gives Dave a Jump Scare when it suddenly lowers down.
• Debbie getting attacked and kidnapped by the Klowns. It starts with the popcorn Rudy shot at her and Mike earlier moving while she's taking a shower (which is quite Paranoia Fuel-inducing to imagine happening to you while you're home alone and you lower your guard thinking you're safe) and growing into hideous looking Klown-snake spawn that while harming her she's still capable of fending off until the adult Klowns surround her house, break in and trap her in a balloon. The topper is when she turns around and Slim picks her up off her feet to bring her close to its face as she screams helplessly, sounding like she's about to break down crying. The alien bastard laughs gleefully as it revels in terrorizing her.
  • Slim picking up Debbie would've been even more cruel with the inclusion of the deleted scene in which Debbie tells Mike how she was traumatized as a 5 year old by a group of circus clowns subjecting her to Sensory Abuse after picking her up from her seat, meaning that Slim's gesture made her re-experience that fright and the breakdown-like cry was Debbie momentarily regressing into that scared little girl.
• While Mike and Dave look for Debbie, they finally see why the Klowns are on Earth when they see Chubby drink one of the cocooned victims with a crazy straw. It turns out, Paul Terenzi's silly idea about them "cruising through the galaxy and stopping here for a bite to eat" was right!
• Mike, Debbie and Dave getting surrounded by a Klown army after The Chase through the Klown ship. Before that point, the Klowns ran after the heroes, but now they menacingly walk towards them coming out of the shadows armed with colorful bats and maces. The Klowns were taking their sweet time because they knew the humans had nowhere to run and they wanted to scare them one last time before beating them to death instead of quickly cocooning them. The music that plays during this scene does nothing but complement the sense of helplessness and horror of being stuck in a chamber filled with angry Monster Clowns coming to get you.
• The Terenzi Brothers manage to stop the Klowns by pretending that the clown head decoration on the roof of their ice cream truck is their leader ordering them to let them go... but this ends up inviting the actual 18-foot-tall Klownzilla to show itself and furiously beat the living daylights out of the puny fraud. Before its descent, all the Klowns look up terrorized before hurrying out of the chamber. Klownzilla's mere presence is capable of Horrifying the Horror.
• Word of God confirms that while Jojo and the ship are destroyed, several of the Killer Klowns (such as Shorty) survived the destruction, leaving them free to continue wrecking havoc.