Send in the clowns.

If you have misbehaving children, Wrinkles the Clown will, for a fee, provide a “behavioural service” to frighten the living crap out of delinquent kids.

The genesis of documentarian Michael Beach Nichols film WRINKLES THE CLOWN was a mysterious video that appeared on the Internet of a clown who emerges from underneath a sleeping female child’s bed. The video went viral and Wrinkles becomes internet lore.

It tapped into a market niche with parents abrogating their parental responsibility to discipline their offspring to a masked grotesque threatening them with abduction, incarceration, cannibalism and death.

Paying money to monster minors could amount to child abuse, but kids kind of like being creeped out, so who is to say its all part of cultural conditioning rather than molestation.

Interviews with folklorists illustrate the fascination with creepy clowns going back centuries, Mr. Punch being somewhat of a prototype, and film clips from popular movies such as Poltergeist, It, and the various incarnations of Joker in the Batman films further cement our attraction to, and appetite for, the face painted malevolent prankster.

While Michael Beach Nichols interviews the person purporting to be Wrinkles, photographed in shadow and voice distorted, he also uses an actor to portray the clown, re-enacting appearances as an aid to explore visually the phenomenon and myth behind the mask.

Now if the film could just scare those couch potato, screen surfing, soft drink swilling fat kids that eat up the cult of the creepy clown off their arses, WRINKLES HE CLOWN would serve as a genuine behavioural service as espoused by the menacing mummer.

Wrinkles the Clown is available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Fetch TV, Foxtel Store, Google Play and YouTube. Rated M