How does one make a monster clown?

[InvidiaRed]

I mean just add creepy carnival music and it works for most.

but how does one make a decent one?

Is it mostly character details? Or is it adding relevant details and how other character react to it? Is it partly atmosphere?

Or is it a combination of the above with the character's actions?

[Kurahieiritr]

An interesting question that I think holds a number of possibilities. Human nature looks at actions and ways of phrasing things as defining most cases of creepiness. A very normal looking person on the outside is charged with being creepy most often because of combinations of actions and ways of speaking that are deemed by the rest of us as being uncomfortable and or dangerous to us as fellow human beings. A creepy scene in a movie often contain a specific character's actions and speech patterns which are focused upon raising one's hackles as the scene is watched. Atmosphere does have a contribution to make, along side of the reactions of others.

A truly nightmarish character must be shown through their thoughts, words, and actions as a complete individual. Often the creepy character is shown through the lens of these multiple levels of existence in such a way that it screams how crazy and/or vicious the character is at their core. It is possible to show flashes of the character's past that helped to shape them into such an unacceptable and inhuman person. Religion and historic abuse are often among the devises used to portray how a person could become so abnormal and outside of normal civilized structures of interaction.

Read the masters of story telling who excel at promoting creepiness and you will find a number of very well written nightmare individuals, many of whom are mentally warped into monsters who can no longer control their instinctual behaviors.. Among my personal favorite creepy stories are some that were written by Edgar Allen Poe. If you have ever read his complete works of Poe you have already seen how he uses the character's thoughts, words, and actions to promote the validity of psychosis. He makes the creep factor lively through combinations of all of the above elements which alert the reader from the first paragraph that the character is unhinged, while believing that they alone are sane. Such characters spend time harping upon and degrading the ways of truly sane and rational people's views in many cases. Therefore, if you want to master a truly creepy, monstrous clown character, read some of Edgar Allen Poe's stories, not his poetry, and you will begin to see how most masters of creepy writing create their timeless creep factors.

Hope that helps you out a bit. Good luck with your character development.