'Terrifier 3’ and Horror's Shift from Elevated to Extreme

The long sordid (emphasis on sordid) history of writer-director Damien Leone’s Terrifier franchise—its beginning in short films starring the I think it is safe to say now iconic Art the Clown character (David Howard Thornton), up through 2022’s shocking box office success Terrifier 2—was helpfully laid out in a piece at Bloody Disgusting this week, which I recommend checking out if you’re as bewildered by its meandering path to the mainstream as I am. And make no mistake —with today’s release of Terrifier 3, which some box office speculators have predicted to top the charts over the 200 million dollar studio bomb Joker 2 (talk about an October Surprise), Art and his sack of merry sadism is now fully, corporeally mainstream.

It’s hard to name (or perhaps, in this instance, diagnose) a moment when you’re right inside of it. But the Terrifier films, along with other outrageously over-the-top horror flicks very clearly influenced by the gore-drenched video-nasties era of the 1980s—think Malignant, Barbarian, and hell how could anyone watch The Substance and not think of Brian Yuzna’s 1989 flesh-feast Society?—represent a very, very hard turn away from the Elevated Horror period we were in not too long ago. We’re deep in the meat of something else altogether now.

And it’s hard not to want to prescribe meaning to that. Those of us who love and write about Horror love to think of each period as a reflection of our time’s anxieties. Night of the Living Dead is the late-60s upheavals encapsulated; The Texas Chainsaw Massacre—and what a perfect day for that film to be turning 50! Happy 50, TCM!—is Vietnam and the 1970s American Uncertainty. J-Horror and its emphasis on cyber-anxiety marked the turn of Y2K. There’s a new documentary playing festivals right now called Generation Terror that dives into the so-called “Torture Porn” era and how it was the perfect encapsulation of our post-9/11 warmongering.

The general sense I had as we recently swiveled away from the cool, slow austerity of something like The Witch toward the meat-grinding monkey theatrics of the Terrifier films was just that people wanted their horror movies to be “fun” again. No more post-Obama-era diatribes on “trauma,” thank you very much David Gordon Green. Of course, it’s hard not to tie this sea change to our immersion and subsequent exhaustion with Trumpism—it seems telling that gleeful cruelty is the representation of our moment’s darkest id. I mean, when even Mike Leigh is making movies about meanness then something is in the air!

It’s weird being a film critic because, more than your average filmgoer, you’ll often see several wildly incongruous-seeming films within a small time period—especially when film festivals are going on. And so that’s how I ended up attending the premiere of Terrifier 3 within 12 hours of seeing Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili’s slow-cinema abortion drama April at the New York Film Festival last week. These are not movies that I can imagine anyone else on Earth double-featuring, and yet Art—meaning Art the creative process, not Art the mass-murdering clown—always finds a way to make connections where no connections should logically lay.

April is steely, cold, and difficult (it is also probably a masterpiece), with one long abortion scene (which I’m not convinced wasn’t real) bookended at start and finish by two scenes of real childbirth (one vaginal, one c-section) in all their gruesome glory. And they reminded me of another film I saw at the NYFF just two years ago called De Humani Corporis Fabrica, which used microscopic cameras to turn surgeries—including another birth scene—into fragmented, hallucinogenic spectacles of light and sound and squick.

Which is to say that if we’re not safe from gore-fests at the arthouse—if Demi Moore might get nominated for an Oscar for having a disembodied boob pop out of her sternum—then by all means, Terrifier 3, go and spray your red stuff all over the big box office. To paraphrase an Oscar-winning film that’s about to unleash its own sequel in a few weeks—Are we not entertained???

Straddling the October-December holiday divide like no film since The Nightmare Before Christmas, Leone’s Terrifier 3 introduces itself as a Christmas movie from its opening moments, where a sweet little girl with a plate of cookies mistakes Art the Clown for the Sandy Claws excuse me Santa Claus, right up until he starts in with the whole forty whacks thing. And there is no “Happy Holidays” spread-the-festive-wealth in sight here—rife with Christian imagery straight out of The Passion of the Christ (aka Mel Gibson’s own 2004 contribution to the Torture Porn genre) including cruxifiction, a crown of thorns, and a terrifying vision of Mother Mary that portends some allegorical reasons to Art’s season of merry dismemberment, this is a Christmas movie with a capital C. (For carnage! For cannibalism! For castration, oh my!)

Eventually, after some deliciously unhinged Art shenanigans that show us how he’s come back after that whole “decapitation via magical sword” thing last go-round—and major props where major props are due, as actor David Howard Thornton has done the work to make Art the Horror Icon he deserves to be; his performance is once again sadistic mimetic bliss—we find ourselves reunited with Sienna (Lauren LaVera), the final girl introduced in Terrifier 2. Finally loosed from the psychiatric hospital where she’s spent the past five years trying to reclaim her sanity after Art left nearly everyone she loved a heap of intestines, she’s doing… okay. Thanks to a lot of pills. And “okay thanks to a lot of pills” is probably the best any one of us could hope for in the wake of her situation.

Sienna goes to live with her Aunt Jess (Margaret Anne Florence, an uncanny ringer for Wendie Malick), Uncle Greg (Bryce Johnson), and adorable tween cousin Gabbie (Antonella Rose), while Sienna’s brother Jonathan (Elliot Fullam)—who himself barely survived being snacked on by Art like so much Lunchable—is off at the local college. Also introduced, since Leone has a two million dollar budget on this one which buys a whole lotta animal intestines to play with, are Jonathan’s frat-boy roommate Cole (Mason Mecartea) and Cole’s true-crime-podcasting girlfriend Mia (Alexa Blair Robertson)—a pair who might as well have “Murder Us While We Have Sex” stamped on their foreheads. (Oh if only they got away with just a forehead stamping.)

From there Terrifier 3 flashes us back and forth between Art’s escalating murder spree and some truly inane scenes of Sienna and her family trying their damndest to be normal, boring people—it’s an odd rhythm, domesticity punctuated by scalpings and masturbation with mirror shard, like an episode of 7th Heaven with Silent Night Deadly Night spliced in where the commercial breaks should be.

But Leone’s devilish glee at getting away with what he’s getting away with—that all of this has somehow become successful—is legitimately infectious; this is easily the most accomplished film in the series, and it’s not just the bigger budget. There are curious and clashing imperatives at work; actual ideas batting about behind the maimings. (The Christian allegorical stuff is legitimately interesting to me—sue me!) I love the moments where Art’s berserker smirk wipes away and he seems to momentarily sink into depression; I don’t want to push the “Clown is Trump” button too furiously (we could be so fortunate to have a Trump that didn’t speak), but Art (a demon that has now officially glommed itself parasitically onto Modern Christianity) clearly wants all eyes on him at all times, and he’s willing to shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue (or say a crowded bar) to make sure that’s what’s happening.

But then that’s me maybe trying to drape too much meaning onto everything here, as is us horror critics wont to do no matter the carcass that’s been dragged in front of us. These films, without ascribing bigger meaning onto them, are basically critic-proof after all—the audience that wants to slurp up this meat parade will find themselves perfectly sated with Terrifier 3.

When I first became a horror fan, I tried to be all high and mighty about it, praising atmosphere and psychology above such Guignol theatrics. But I have come around to an appreciation of gore on its most practical level—I can now watch these scenes fascinated and captivated by the very real skill that it takes its technicians to pull them off. And seeing these scenes of silly, frivolous disfigurement play out within the same 24-hour-period as I did the emotionally brutal and very real violence of an art-film like April really put Terrifier 3 into the appropriate context. Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe, and sometimes a pipe is a penis being chainsawed in excruciating close-up.

Because hey, when all else fails Terrifier 3 flattens the misogyny accusations that’ve long been leveled at the franchise for its female-centered depictions of violence, this time giving a dude’s private junk the same rigorous and explicit attention to mutilating detail that had formerly been reserved strictly for lady business. And that’s real equal-opportunity progress we can see and measure, my friends!