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How Slipknot’s Clown Spends His Halloween

To see more of Shawn’s photos, check out @6cl6wn6 on Instagram. For more music stories, head to @music.

His photos are a nightmarish mix of black eye makeup, crooked teeth and clown masks with blotched skin and mangled lips. Who takes pictures like this? More importantly, does anything scare the person who does?

“I live in my imagination almost 100 percent of the time,” says Shawn Crahan (@6cl6wn6), also known as Clown, the co-founder of the heavy metal outfit Slipknot and the man behind the most terrifying account on Instagram.

For a guy who plays in a band known for its ghoulish attire, Shawn is surprisingly frank about what freaks him out: simply speaking, it’s not what’s in front of his face, but what isn’t. Being scared of the invisible means a worst-case scenario where anything and everything can come charging out from the edge. It all stems back to Shawn’s days as a kid, particularly on Halloween, where he spent time wandering around his neighborhood and staring off into darkness.

“What I like more than anything is to walk around on Halloween and just interject thoughts in my own mind,” he says. “Yes, it’s Halloween. We’re dressing up. We’re going to walk around. But I like to step outside of the brainwashed minds and go deeper into the intriguing thoughts of why people choose to be what they are and the real essence of what Halloween is.”

For most of the year, Shawn chooses to be a clown — at least on stage. The drummer and percussionist has had several different iterations of the clown look over the years, but typically opts for one with white makeup and neon orange hair.

“I’ve never really tried to make Slipknot Halloween, because it’s Slipknot. It’s a rock and roll band,” he says. “But because we do dress up, it’s kind of like we do live Halloween all the time.”

Perhaps that’s why Shawn doesn’t typically jump into costume at the end of every October. The last time he did, he was dressed as a professional welder that had been in an accident and had his face melted off. Shawn is a cryptic person by nature, so whether he’s in disguise or not, the core idea behind Halloween goes hand in hand with his thoughts and mediations. Today, while the holiday feels more in your face — it’s all about showing off everything that is happening right now, in the moment — he prefers the slow burn.

“I can remember being a kid and just walking around and going, ‘Anything I can imagine can be in those woods.’ And that was always scariest,” he says. “So my plans are always to look in. I live for the glitches in life.”

— Instagram @music

How Clown Spends His Halloween