We did an informal survey once on a now-long-vanished social network, and concluded that almost every adult who found clowns scary had seen Walt Disney’s Dumbo at a young and impressionable age - indeed, for a couple of them, it was the very first movie they ever saw.
The clowns in Dumbo are pretty scary.
One of them recounted the vivid, almost psychedelic memory of being dragged to the theater by his parents at a tender age, knowing virtually nothing at all about movies or cartoons or animation or anything beforehand
Clowns don’t frighten me, but I didn’t see Dumbo until I was an adult.
