It’s a story that sounds like the plot of a Stephen King novel, but this is all real.
In 2015, stickers started appearing around the city of Naples, Florida advertising the services of Wrinkles the Clown. With his haunting, black-eyed mask, Wrinkles would, for ready cash, scare misbehaving kids.
Soon he was getting calls from exasperated, end-of-their-tether parents who wanted to pay for Wrinkles’ services.
Take when the mum of one 12-year-old boy hired Wrinkles.
“He was scared of clowns and I showed up across the street from him at the bus stop,” Wrinkles told The Washington Post, “and he just started crying in front of his friends and ran home”.
After that, all the mum had to do to keep her son in check was to ask, “Do you want Wrinkles to come back?” (It is not known how much therapy that poor kid needs now.)
So just who was the man under the sinister mask? What sort of adult terrorises young children for money? That’s the question that Wrinkles the Clown, streaming now on Tubi, sets out to answer.
Wrinkles first came to public attention in 2015 when a video surfaced online showing what appeared to be security footage from a child’s bedroom. As a little girl sleeps, the large drawer underneath her bed slides open, and the nightmarish Wrinkles emerges. He gently puts a soft toy next to the child, then sees the security camera, and the camera cuts out. It is impossibly creepy and has gotten more than 1.3 million views.
Soon, Wrinkles’ story blew up, with The Washington Post, NPR, BuzzFeed, GQ, NBC, and Jimmy Fallon covering his unique and disturbing business. Soon he was getting “hundreds and hundreds” of texts, voicemails and calls, every day, Wrinkles says.
His identity remained a complete secret and all he would tell the media was that he was a 65-year-old military veteran and retiree from Rhode Island who had moved to Florida for the warm weather.
The documentary tells an even weirder and creepier story. When it opens, we are introduced to a white-haired, bearded man, living in a van, who slobs around eating burgers in a white singlet, and who looks like a very seedy mall Santa. He won’t show his face, he tells Wrinkles’ director Michael Beach Nichols, because “I don’t wanna be hassled … I don’t need kids recognising me on the street. The whole viral thing for me is a pain in the arse.”
But we do get to see his daily life, one of sad microwaved frozen dinners, hot dogs barbecued next to a swamp, beer-swilling and visiting strip clubs.
Wrinkles explains how it all started: He moved to Florida (“a swamp with houses”) but playing golf wasn’t his thing, so he decided to do some part-time work as a clown “to keep me occupied” and to earn some cash. But, “no one was hiring me when I was just a regular clown. So I thought, maybe I’ll give it a little edge. All these clowns are the same, kinda boring.”
He had also found that in the heat, his clown face makeup was melting off and so, “[I] saw this one mask on eBay and just liked the way it looked”.
Thus Wrinkles the Clown was born. He had some stickers made, the video came out, and soon he was receiving a torrent of requests that ranged from adults wanting him to prank their friends to what he describes as “legit parents out there looking for some behavioural services”.
His technique: “I’ll show up outside in the backyard, you know, maybe give a knock on the window and you know make sure they see me and give them a wave.” Wrinkles then leaves parents with a sticker for their fridge, an unspoken threat that he could always come back.
Take Antoine, a father for whom just leaving Wrinkles a voicemail in front of his young daughter was enough to scare her into behaving. (“I’m just calling to let you know Kaila’s being bad in the store. I want you to come and get her”, we hear Antoine say, while Kaila can be heard crying and saying “no” in the background.)
“I don’t see that that’s child abuse,” Antoine tells the film’s camera. He thinks Wrinkles does what he does to be a “contributor to society, giving parents another way to discipline the kid”.
Wrinkles argues he’s “just doing my job” and that he finds the work “kind of rewarding in a way.”
Throughout the doco the question of who the real Wrinkles is keeps coming up and then about halfway through the documentary, comes a massive and sensational plot twist. No spoilers here, but the whole story gets even stranger still.
But what we can tell you: Wrinkles is still working and if you are struggling to find the right Christmas present for that impossible-to-buy-for person, you can find his website online.
Wrinkles the Clown is streaming now on Tubi.