Why are we so terrified of Clowns?

Most clowns in a circus wear traditional make-up and costumes to entertain people who come to the circus but that is not the only commercial value they have these days. Clowns do shows humans in a different light which is why they are seen as fun but when the people who are running the show start experimenting a lot the amusement turns creepy and sometimes even frightening. There comes a point where we stop seeing the clown as a thing with human-ish features and see it as a human with thing-ish features. While some of us associate them with amusement all of us do not share the same imagination and are gripped with fear whenever they are in our field of vision. It is a possibility that these people who are frightened just by the thought of clowns heard fairy tales which were full of witches, dragons, wicked clowns and other evil elements and even with the experience of reality they were unable to wash out childhood’s deception. We clearly have a soft spot for exaggeration as it is an element which mixes with both our fear and elation. This same exaggeration extends to clowns as they remain uncanny we cannot pin them down as just funny or just scary all the time particularly because of their dressing style and get up in which they have a sad face painted which does not go with their body language or have a funny expression but their behavior involves snubbing  people . In a psychological study it was concluded that we dislike things we cannot figure out and soon become aversive to them. The reason we distance ourselves from these ghoulish impostors is that they represent someone acting their self by assuming another identity so we dislike them because we don’t know their real self and this element of dislike surfaces as wear when we assume them to commit acts which storytellers make them commit just to give a thrill to the audience. Most kids are scared of clowns because they dress in a scary manner and adults because they don’t know who the real person behind the clown is.