Why clowns keep scaring us:
http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/31/opinion/stott-clowns-france/index.html?iid=article_sidebar"they can invoke anything from a fear of masks, to stranger danger, to our anxieties regarding public humiliation.
(And that's not to mention the question of why a grown person would dress this way, in a kind of asexual fetishism)."
Clowns enjoy a relationship to society that is tenuous at best.
In this sense, it is no great leap to say that dressing up as a scary clown
is an expression of anti-social alienation,
especially when coupled with another phenomenon that we might term "industrial nostalgia."