Dead Clown was born in Chicago, the night comedy died for me. I went there to be a stand-up. I left having buried the clown and kept the stage. The old comedy-drama masks became the perfect emblem: one side laughing, one side bleeding — theater as resurrection rather than escape.
The earliest Dead Clown work took the shape of darkly funny anti-depression campaigns, using humor to drag taboo subjects into the light. From there the work metastasized into horror shorts, then features, and now animation, games, and serialized world building. The through-line isn’t genre — it’s sincerity, myth making, and the belief that art should punch back.
Dead Clown was never designed to become the next Warner Bros. or Universal. It’s an anti-studio forged in the spirit of the independent heretics: Robert Rodriguez shooting out of his garage; Ed Wood building Hollywood from cardboard; John Waters staging filth as liberation; Chaplin turning poverty into poetry; Ferrara chasing absolution through sin; Fessenden preserving horror when the industry forgot it. They weren’t waiting for permission. They were already rolling.
The brand stands for misfits, underdogs, and everyone who builds because the alternative is spiritual death. Gatekeepers, posers, and careerist hobbyists collapse quickly under that weight, because real art demands talent, craft, and heart — not merely ambition. Dead Clown opens the doors that were never built for us in the first place.
Founded by writer-director Andrew D. Pringle, Dead Clown remains dedicated to the life and death of performance: pain and beauty, tragedy and freedom, comedy and truth — two masks, one stage, and no apologies.
