Wrinkles the Clown

A silent black and white surveillance video is uploaded to YouTube, a child sleeping amongst stuffed animals and blankets. A few seconds later, a drawer under the bed starts to slide open, and a disheveled old man done up as a clown – soon to be known as Wrinkles – emerges, before the footage cuts to static. Over the next year, additional bizarre videos appear online, showing the clown pushing a cart in a parking lot, waving alongside a busy highway, holding balloons in front of a suburban home. The mysterious clips, which immediately go viral, launch Wrinkles to internet infamy. Cryptic stickers with his clown mask and a phone number appear on telephone poles and in bathrooms all over Southwest Florida promising to scare your misbehaving kid straight, a staggering 312,000 voicemails are left and Wrinkles receives over 1,000 calls on some days. Looking beyond the online fame, WRINKLES THE CLOWN is a highly stylized documentary exploring clowns, mythmaking, and the pull of anonymity in the internet age.