Choosing Canadians for his cornfield American import Eli Craig loves our country, our actors and our blow-torching film crews By: Randall King Posted: 2:00 AM CDT Thursday, May. 8, 2025

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This article was published 08/05/2025 (441 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Shot in Manitoba from late September to early November of 2023, the horror film Clown in a Cornfield has all the earmarks of a typical American offshore production.

It is set in the United States, though the town of Kettle Springs, Mo., is an invention of novelist Adam Cesare, who published his bestselling book of the same name in 2020.

Even the movie’s theme is very American. A depressed rural town is afflicted by a psycho killer dressed as a corn-industry mascot named Frendo the Clown. (Listen, there was never a movie titled The Saskatchewan Chain Saw Massacre.)

Also, screenwriter-director Eli Craig is quite literally a product of Hollywood, the second son of Oscar-winning actress Sally Field.

But Craig, 52, on a Zoom call from his home in North Vancouver, says the movie is deliberately cast and mostly crewed with all Canadians, including, surprisingly, himself, a decision that arose due to the ongoing American love affair with guns.

Years after he married his Canadian wife, Sasha, he recalls: “My fifth-grader — at the time — was in a couple of lockdowns in Los Angeles where there was a gun-toting maniac on campus.

“And I just thought: We’re done with this. Let’s move.”

The family moved up to North Vancouver in 2018; Craig says, “The kids were raised to speak French and be full Canadian.”

The filmmaker’s embrace of Canada led him to simply hire Canadians, especially for the cast.

“I became a Canadian citizen in May of the year we were shooting. So it felt like a gift back to the country who allowed me in,” he says.

“I think that sometimes Canadian actors — especially actors when they’re starting out — kind of get sidelined from the U.S. actors and from (Screen Actors Guild) actors.

“So often, the U.S. productions do their castings in Los Angeles and they will hire maybe the top five actors on their call sheet from L.A. or New York and then they’ll bring them up to Winnipeg … and they’ll round out the cast with Canadians.”

In this cornfield, even the most recognizable actors in the crop are Canadian, including Delta, B.C.’s own Will Sasso as Kettle Springs reactionary Sheriff Dunne, and Thunder Bay’s Kevin Durand as the mayor.

Craig was especially pleased to cast Burlington-born Katie Douglas in the lead role of Quinn Maybrook, a newcomer to Kettle Springs unfortunate enough to be caught in the middle of Frendo’s rampage. Craig says since the beginning of her career, Douglas has played a kidnap victim three times (once in the Winnipeg-lensed TV movie The Girl Who Escaped: The Kara Robinson Story).

“She always played this survivor and I saw in her the ability to be the No. 1 on a call sheet to carry a movie,” Craig says.

Of course, the film also has a wealth of Winnipeg actors, including Ayo Solanke, Verity Marks, Alexandre Martin Deakin and Cassandra Potenza as Quinn’s new friends in Kettle Springs, and Daina Leitold (as a memorably bitchy waitress).

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In movie circles, Craig is probably best known for his 2010 horror-comedy Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, a delightfully gory farce in which a couple of benign rednecks are mistaken for murderous hillbillies. In 2017, he followed that up with Little Evil, a comic take on The Omen in which a boy’s new stepdad comes to the conclusion that the lad may be the spawn of Satan.

Both are strong movies with a solid fanbase, but their existence on his CV does not mean Craig had an easy time getting Cornfield made.

“I think people are always surprised how hard it is to make a film,” Craig says. “With Tucker and Dale, there are fans that love that movie. It’s on the top of their list.

“But the studios really just look at the numbers. They look at box office. They’re really a bunch of bean counters, and they’re not filmmakers, and they’re mostly not even film fans… It’s a real struggle.”

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Clown in a Cornfield is set in the fall, but when you’re shooting a film into early November in Manitoba, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a little winter will sneak in.

“Manitoba is both a blessing and a curse when making a movie,” Craig says. “The blessing is the crew and the people and the support you have. It’s really a first-class, top notch crew that will work themselves to the bone for you.

The curse is the weather, Craig says, admitting that he was “rolling the dice” expecting the autumnal vibe to last.

“There was no way it was going to blizzard in Missouri in the fall. But sure enough, we get hit by a major blizzard at the end of October,” he ways.

For the last week of shooting, the crew scrambled for locations that wouldn’t reveal the city was in the middle of a snowstorm.

“It was amazing, though,” he says. “We showed up for the exterior walk-and-talk that … I had no choice, I had to shoot this. And it had just snowed, you know, like 25 centimetres the night before.

“I get there and the crew are blowtorching the sidewalks, they’re blowtorching the trees. There’s guys in the trees like shaking the snow off so I can get one direction of a shot with green trees,” he says.

“It was really only because the crews were just so awesome that there’s not piles of snow in the shots.”

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‘I could fully be myself’

When the Nigerian-born Ayo Solanke moved to Winnipeg from East London at the age of 12, it probably did not occur to him that, one day, he would say his acting career kicked off because “I was in the right place at the right time.”

But it’s true. This month, Solanke, now in his early 20s, has a supporting role in the theatrical feature film Clown in a Cornfield (his third locally shot horror outing after Tales from the Hood 3 and the upcoming Egor Abramenko film Altar).

More impressively, he takes on a lead role in the upcoming Netflix series Bet, premièring May 15. Based on a popular manga Kakegurui, the show is set at a prestigious international boarding school where upstart Japanese transfer student Yumeko (Miku Martineau) shakes up the school’s gambling-based power structure.

In a phone interview from New York City, where he is doing publicity for Clown in a Cornfield, Solanke says you’ll hear his real English accent in Bet, but he keeps an American accent in his repertoire when auditioning for films such as Altar and Clown in a Cornfield.

“The role (in Bet) was made in such a way where I could fully be myself,” he says. “I put my own experiences into this character.

“I thought, since I already have a British accent, and this is a global boarding school, I’m just going to speak in my natural tone and I’m going to try to tap into this character that’s rooted in what was already true to me. I did that and they really liked that approach.”

Solanke enjoys horror as much as the next guy, but he acknowledges, when you live in Winnipeg, that’s where the work is.

“It’s between horror movies and Hallmarks,” he says, referring to the abundance of seasonal romance movies shot here for the Hallmark Channel.

“You’re just trying to try to be in the right place for when those opportunities come,” he says.

So how did he end up in Winnipeg?

“Very good question. I asked my parents the same thing,” he says with a laugh. “About nine years ago, my parents decided to embark on a journey to Winnipeg to really find that Canadian dream.

“They decided to do that and give us a better life,” he says, acknowledging the move was a huge adjustment.

“The snow being the biggest one,” he says. “You know, being from England, we’d always glorify snow. We didn’t get much of it, right? So when I saw it for the first time — well, in this magnitude — I was like, ‘This is amazing! I can’t wait to always have snow like this.’

“And by the third year, I was like: ‘OK, this is a bit much.’”

Apart from that, Solanke says he’s found the community nothing but beautiful.

“I’ve met the kindest and most caring people in Winnipeg. They call us Friendly Manitoba for a reason. I wouldn’t change that decision that they made for anything.”

Clown in a Cornfield opens today at Grant Park, McGillivray and Polo Park.

randall.king.arts@gmail.com