Sinister Spins – Exploring Creepy Clown Slots

10/11/2024 | Categories: Gambling Guides | Published by: Joe | Last updated: 10/11/2024

Are clowns creepy? Many people think so. In fact, medical professionals recognize a condition known as coulrophobia as quite real: the fear of clowns at a phobia level.

We are sure that you know clowns are entertainers who most commonly perform in circuses, and they are best known for their distinct makeup and colorful costuming. For the most part, they engage in acts of physical comedy, and their target audiences are children. Many think that they are successors of court jesters, but that is not so, as historians teach us that clowns pre-date these medieval-age entertainers and have become associated with a vast number of cultures around the globe. Apparently, their lineage can be traced back to Ancient Egypt, but they assumed the modern form we know them as today in 16th-century Italy.

Psychologists believe that coulrophobia has roots in clowns boasting exaggerated features that offer up a distortion of reality that creates a sense of disturbance in some humans’ subconscious. This has gotten amplified by their portrayal as sinister figures in pop culture in works such as Stephen King’s seminal novel – It. Others have argued that a clown’s playful appearance, while fun for children, carries a look of absurdity/strangeness that many adults find discomforting, especially when paired with exaggerated laughter. Clowns look familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, and it is a fact that this can no doubt trigger uneasiness in some due to the brain getting confused by their uncanniness, which can throw a wrench in our mind’s pattern recognition.

Below, we give you five slots that seek to exploit this phenomenon and have included creepy clowns as a central aspect of their themes.

Creepy Carnival

Nolimit City is one of our favorite slot developers, and we think that this company is responsible for some of the more engaging and complex reel-spinning games found on the Web. While many love this Swedish studio’s titles, and we have heaped praise upon many of them, some gamblers we know see them as unnecessarily complicated, up to the point of annoyance. Creepy Carnival does not fall into this batch, as it is an older Nolimit City release, one that appeared on the Internet in September 2016. It is a medium-variance spinner with twenty betways and a 5×3 setup accepting wagers up to $50 per spin. The RTP here can range but should sit at 96.07% at most sites.

For the time, the presentation of Creepy Carnival was not bad, and it hints at the sense of style that Nolimit City’s team developed in the years to follow. Concerning extra features, you have wilds, a free spin bonus, and random multipliers that go up to x5. Respins offer an exciting twist here: winning combinations activate sticky wilds and increase win multipliers.

Dreadworks

Print Studios is one of the few rare slot providers that actually makes scary games. We have mentioned and analyzed their Darkness title, which in our opinion, is one of the sphere’s best horror gaming choices. Dreadworks is up there with darkness, and it is not as much of a clown slot, as it is a scary doll one. It is somewhat reminiscent of the 1986 Stuart Gordon film Dolls, as it features similar-looking toys.

The atmosphere here is as eerie as you will find in a gambling game, and Jack-In-The-Box Wilds have scary clowns. These are symbols that can trigger random Superspinner multipliers. In terms of specs, you have an RTP of 96.08% in Dreadworks, high variance, a betting range from $0.10 to $50, and a max win potential of x20,000. The noted Superspinner feature applies random multipliers to paylines, each calculated independently. In this slot’s bonus mode, you can eliminate low-pay tokens via winning combos and earn more gratis spins.

Circus of Horror

Circus of Horror is a GameArt creation which could have been a bit more polished than what this company put out. We are talking about the graphics on display here, as the mood they aim to capture has promise. It has a Rob Zombie flick feel to it. This is not one of the more popular GameArt releases, as it does not rank high in this studio’s two hundred-title strong catalog, but is not that bad.

Circus of Horror has high variance, two hundred and forty-three paylines, an RTP of 96.68%, a hit frequency of 38, a top bet option of $250, and a max exposure setting of x4,368. As far as its extra features go, three Nosferatus active the Electric Chair Bonus, which is a pick-em round that doubles wins. Three to five Devora scatters give eight, twelve, or fifteen free spins, and Grimo Clown Wilds get Randomly pinned” with knives onto the grid layout here. You also get a red or black gamble feature in Circus of Horror.

Scary Clown

Here is a name that gets straight to the point. Created by Octavian Gaming, a prolific game provider from Italy that has over one hundred and twenty titles to its name, Scary Clown is an It-inspired gaming romp.

Again, you get a high variance math model, but one that gets paired with a below-than-average RTP of 95.1%. Scary Clown implements a classic 5×3 symbol setup equipped with twenty-seven paylines. On this layout, you can see mystery wilds and gain access to a free spin bonus that can give you more than your initial share of awarded gaming rounds, with flying wilds in play that stay on the reels until this round concludes. All that said, the best thing about this slot is its music and horror movie illustrations (akin to the ones in Reel Nightmare by Quickspin).