I’m turning to a unique case study of public communication to hopefully gain unique insights into inoculation theory. Here, the threat is fear.

Josh Compton

In September 2017, Warner Brothers announced that It, a film version of Stephen King’s classic horror novel by the same name, had grossed over $500 million in worldwide box office returns, making It the top horror film of all time, breaking the record held previously by The Exorcist (McNary, 2017). The villain of the movie, It, is an evil presence that takes the form of a terrifying, child-killing, cannibalistic clown named Pennywise. Professional clowns saw It coming. To save face before the movie premiered, the World Clown Association (WCA) issued a press kit with the headline, “WCA STAND ON SCARY CLOWNS!!”. In this one-page document, the WCA offers a defense of “real” clowns, a preemptive attempt to protect against any backlash from seeing such a sinister clown portrayed on film. 

Some of this case’s features are admittedly unique, with clowns and movie monsters front and center. Other features, however, speak to larger issues of popular culture portrayals of professions, including how professions, as a group, respond to challenges proactively instead of reactively.

This analysis explores theories of image repair (Benoit, 2014) and image prepare (Compton, 2016), then turns to a specific analysis of the WCA’s preemptive efforts against the portrayal of clowns represented in It. The analysis shows how pre-denial and pre-bolstering were used to attempt to inoculate people against negative portrayals of clowns in the film, which, in a sense, attempted to inoculate people against fear itself.

Compton, J. (2022, April). Image repair, image prepare, and It: Inoculating against horror portrayals of professions. [scheduled paper presentation]. Popular Culture Association, Seattle, WA, United States.