The Clown with the Tear-Away Face is a character from the Nightmare Before Christmas who appears within Haunted Mansion Holiday in Disneyland and Haunted Mansion Holiday Nightmare in Tokyo Disneyland.
Description[]
Origins[]
The clown is a resident of Halloween Town who personifies the Halloween iconography of evil clowns. The clown is shown to have abilities like vanishing, and tearing off his face to reveal an empty abyss within.
He assists in the seasonal creation of the Halloween holiday and in the film assists Jack Skellington in his take-over of Christmas, creating the nightmarish Jack-in-a-boxes.
Appearances[]
Haunted Mansion Holiday[]
In the load area, the clown is featured in the Scary Christmas display where he removes his face to show a snowflake underneath of it. The clown's likeness later appears on one of Madame Leota's tarot cards in the séance chamber. The card displays the 13 days of Christmas lyric, "Five lucky charms" and shows the clown tightrope-walking across tinsel.
Haunted Mansion Holiday Nightmare[]
The clown makes an additional appearance in Tokyo's seasonal overlay of the mansion within the Sinister 11 corridor. Here, the clown is shown holding a brick of fruitcake. His portrait is found in the space traditionally reserved for the portrait of the Ogre.
Live Appearances[]
In 2003, the clown was featured in a Haunted Mansion Holiday themed show hosted by Ken Page. In the show, the clown sang "Send In the Clowns" from A Little Night Music before ripping off his own face to scare the audience. He was later joined by the Mayor to assist him in a duet of "Put on a Happy Face" from Bye Bye Birdie.
Trivia[]
- Due to clowns' affiliation with Halloween being fairly recent; it is possible that the clown's appearance was inspired by the entity Pennywise from Stephen King's 1986 novel It!. In this story, the main clown was an eldritch, lovecraftian entity which shape-shifted into the form of a clown to both terrorize and lure away children to devour.