Critical response
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 74% of 156 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 6.3/10. The website's consensus reads: "Clown in a Cornfield doesn't reinvent the corn-maze, but its clever insights, subversion of expectations, and solid foundation slashes its way to the top." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 55 out of 100, based on 15 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C+" on an A+ to F scale, while 44% of those surveyed by PostTrak said they would definitely recommend it.
Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com gave the film 2.5 out of 4 stars and wrote, "I found Craig's film much more interesting when it was just allowed to be chaotic instead of when it was explaining the chaos." Meagan Navarro of Bloody Disgusting gave the film a rating of 3 out of 5 and wrote, "Tucker and Dale vs. Evil director Eli Craig tackles the mostly faithful adaptation with aplomb, bringing the right balance of gore and comedy for a zippy, lean slasher." In his review for Exclaim!, Wesley McLean rated the movie a 7/10, citing its mixture of traditional slasher elements with an attempted "subversion of the genre," adding that its strengths come when it "branches off into fun and novel ideas." Jake Wilson of The Sydney Morning Herald gave it 2.5 stars out of 5, writing, "There’s nothing wrong with using a teen horror movie to comment on the generation gap, class relations and the decline of the US manufacturing sector. But it helps if the plot isn’t so cluttered with half-realised ideas that the climax winds up being cluttered further with long speeches explaining what the message was meant to be. It’s a shame because Craig is a talented filmmaker, with a knack for discreetly stylish tracking shots and jolting edits and for working with actors to develop characters that undercut genre stereotypes."
Owen Gleiberman of Variety gave the film a negative review and wrote, "The film, in its trivial way, exudes a dyspeptic downer vibe, the result of everyone in it being so testy and unpleasant." Benjamin Lee, reviewing for The Guardian, gave the movie two stars out of five, praising the "neat and genuinely surprising queer twist" but describing Frendo as "just some clown, never given all that much to separate him from the many other horror clowns we know better" and the other characters as "weakly etched and indistinguishable". He summarizes the movie as "pretty standard late night fodder". Kevin Maher of The Times gave it one out of five stars, writing, "The characters are mostly loathsome and simply reduced to treading narrative water before the inevitable decapitation. Quinn is tiresome and clueless, while the final big reveal of the all-consuming murder motivation makes little sense. It’s like, I dunno, an awful Eighties slasher movie."
