Nooooo Zeebo!!!
Looking back, this episode may be the reason why I have a deep abiding fear of clowns, carnivals, spooky fun houses, and old timey Southern carnival barkers who are also definitely ghosts.
So there’s this creepy ride at a local amusement park called Laughing in the Dark, which is supposedly haunted by an evil, cigar-smoking clown named Zeebo. This sounds like everything I hate in life, but OK.
A kid named Josh gives his best friends such a hard time about being scared of the ride that they get fed up and dare him to go in by himself. And what’s more, he has to steal Zeebo’s red nose to prove that he went all the way through it. Not a good plan, dude. If there’s one thing dead ghost clowns hate, it’s people stealing their shit.
The ride is sort of spooky (and also extraordinarily unsafe – at one point there is a dragon with what basically amounts to a flamethrower shooting out of its mouth), but it’s not so bad. That is, of course, until this motherfucker shows up.
No god why?!
So Josh steals the clown’s nose and upon winning the bet becomes even more insufferable to the kids who are inexplicably still friends with him. But to the surprise of no one, weird shit begins happening to him.
He starts smelling cigar smoke, Zeebo’s trademark, all over the place. He gets strange phone calls telling him to give it back. His delicious spaghetti dinner turns into a pot full of half-smoked cigars. Then, because apparently we weren’t already scarred for life, Zeebo himself makes a personal house call to demand his nose back. Child me was not on board with this, and adult me is arguably even less on board.
So he makes the executive decision to return the nose to the decidedly un-fun house, and the maniacal clown is appeased. Thank God, because I don’t think I could take much more of this.
It’s crazy how much of an improvement this episode is on The Phantom Cab. Zeebo is the kind of villain that you remember, in a vaguely traumatizing sort of way. It works because there’s so much to be scared of: a creepy clown who is also a ghost and breaking into your house?! Come on now.
Scariest Moment: As much as the image of Zeebo himself is super horrifying, he works best when you can’t see him, when there’s just a cloud of smoke and a creepy clown laugh. But by far the most terrifying scene is when Josh is on the phone and realizes that Zeebo is in his freaking house.
Look, the whole “the call is coming from inside the house” gag is a classic for a reason: it’s about the most chilling thing you can possibly hear. Your personal space where you feel most safe has been violated. Then Zeebo takes it a step further by supernaturally blowing up a balloon from under the door telling him to give the nose back. This whole thing has shades of Stephen King’s It and Pennywise the Clown, and that’s just something that I’m 100% not OK with.
You May Recognize: Our little ginger lead Josh was Tucker “Duck” Clellan on Battlestar Galactica, amongst other things. He’s been showing up all over the place on Wayward Pines, The 100, Fear the Walking Dead, and Minority Report, to name just a few.
Final Verdict: 7 Clown Cigars Out of 10
Up Next: The Tale of the Lonely Ghost
Audrey Is Afraid of the Dark 