TERRIFIER 3 (2024)

The basic appeal of the Terrifier films is that they’re of the same crude simplicity as the Friday the 13th franchise (1980-2009) and other Golden Age slashers, but with so much more gore you couldn’t get away with back then. It’s amusing to think of how slashers of yore were pilloried for their supposed assault on taste and values when now movies like Terrifier 3 get 88% on Rotten Tomatoes (at the time of writing) despite being more visceral and explicit than those films ever were.

SFX maestro Damien Leone has sole writer-director credit for all three of the Terrifier films and the story of the franchise is the evolution of his learning to make a fully satisfying product. The main antagonist, Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton), appeared in shorts and an anthology, All Hallow’s Eve (2013), wherein he was played by Mike Giannelli—before Leone brought both the silent clown and Thornton to wider attention in Terrifier (2016).

That was a film with basically no plot (if you think the Jason Voorhees outings are thin story-wise, try Terrifier), although it was a little more sensical than All Hallow’s Eve. I liked elements of Terrifier, such as the structural circularity of its narrative (teased with a sign in the first murder scene that displays the phrase “THE END IS JUST A NEW BEGINNING”) and how it opens on Art destroying a television, possibly a reference by the genre-literate Leone to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992).

But it ultimately existed for the gore and nothing else, to a point where for me it’s a “kill count” movie: films where you could get the same experience watching a 10-minute YouTube fan edit of all the death scenes. It’s also arguably the most misogynistic of this series, with an unsettling focus here and there on the destruction, mutilation, and mockery of female sexual organs.

It also, of course, has the wonderful Thornton, mute in all three Terrifier films and who gives a performance that can only be described as “Chaplinesque”. (Sorry, Charlie.) The only motivation he gets in the first film is when a character says that he tortures and kills because “he thinks it’s funny”, but that’s all he needs. Thornton’s grinning and capering throughout the franchise is iconic, perfectly straddling that line between horror and humour, slapstick and sadism.

Terrifier 2 (2022) was a marked improvement in both direction, plot, and characters. Suddenly we had a story, mood… three acts, even. It’s in the sequel that we’re introduced to current series protagonist Sienna Shaw (Lauren LaVera), daughter of a late artist father who struggled with mental illness and conceptualised Sienna as the heroine destined to face Art the Clown, armed with a magic sword. The biggest problem with this entry in the franchise—besides a shrill and obnoxious mother character (who might only grate on me, to be fair)—is that it’s 138-minutes long.

It reminds me of when my little sister first made bolognese (stay with me here): she hadn’t yet figured out how to separate the meat so that it was evenly distributed amidst the red sauce, so it came out tasty but lumpy. Terrifier 2 is like that. It has all the requisite gore scenes at Leone’s typical extreme level, but they almost feel like interruptions from another movie as opposed to following naturally from the plot and character stuff.

This brings us to Terrifier 3, the best of the trilogy, with the greatest ratio of sauce to meat. It’s still a touch overlong at just above two hours, but it develops a plot-based throughline that even rises to satire and emotion on occasion. It opens with a bravura prologue referencing several classic slashers, including in the Christmas-themed subgenre such as Christmas Evil (1980), which began with the anti-hero as a child coming downstairs to find Santa kissing mummy somewhere he shouldn’t be.

There’s also a flavour of the once infamous prologue to When a Stranger Calls (1979), which itself was riffing on the urban legend of “the babysitter and the man upstairs”. Leone brings to it his unique capacity for gooey and gungy and crunchy effects, splatter strewn about the rooms of a middle-class American family.

From here we’re caught up with the continuing lives of Sienna and her little brother Jonathan (Elliot Fullam), now a freshman at university, both of whom survived a massacre by Art that claimed their mother’s life. Sienna has just been released from a psychiatric hospital after five years of therapy, but all’s not well as the mistletoe’s hung… Art the Clown is back from hibernation and keen to try out for Santa’s job, accompanied by the demon-possessed remains of Victoria (Samantha Scaffidi), whom he brutally disfigured in the original Terrifier…

If all you want to know is whether this second sequel delivers the bloody goods, then good news, it does. And then some. Rarely have I heard squeals of pleased disgust from a hardened horror audience, but my screening gave them. As if responding to the accusations of misogyny from Terrifier, Leone focuses in large part here on the male form.

I didn’t keep a tally, but most of the victims seem to be middle-aged men, while one young stud has his sexual organs placed in the proverbial meat grinder. If you’re religiously sensitive you may not appreciate the blasphemy motif employed throughout (one character is forced to wear a thorny crown), although I can’t imagine that these films are popular fare for the evangelicals.

Part of my pleasure came from picking up on genre references during the splatter. We get cameos from Clint Howard—who I’m sure Leone knows played a slasher himself in the obscure direct-to-video feature Ice Cream Man (1995)—and practical effects whiz Tom Savini, responsible for a lot of the best gore gags in the Friday the 13th series.

When Terrifier 3 was being promoted, it caused controversy about its teaser’s implication that a child would be killed, on Christmas night, by Art disguised as Santa. As it happens, children are victims in Terrifier 3, but Leone exercises discretion in how that’s depicted. (As he’d have to if he wanted certification, I’d imagine.) I don’t tend to take such controversies seriously anyway. Those crying offence are generally Twitter denizens who just enjoy being offended.

I consider myself a bit namby-pamby about violence in horror; however, because the Terrifiers are so detached from everyday reality, they don’t affect me in a traumatic fashion. That said, Leone’s script builds towards a fantastic set piece where Art and Victoria capture Sienna and her extended family. Scaffidi gives the film’s breakout performance here, evoking a sense of real, profane evil as foul and brimstone-smelling as anything Art pulls off (so to speak). If you were to watch the first Terrifier in isolation, one might not believe that Leone was capable of creating a scene like this, which exploits the situation for pity and terror as well as gross-out.

He shoots on real film (or else it seems like real film), which gives his work the grainy feeling of an authentic grindhouse release from the 1980s. More so, in fact, than the adaptations of trailers from Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse (2007) project, like the recent Eli Roth-helmed Thanksgiving (2023). If you can stomach it, Terrifier 3 is horrible fun. Without spoiling anything, it even teases a fourth entry akin to Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988). Bring on the blood!

USA | 2024 | 125 MINUTES | 2.39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

writer & director: Damien Leone.
starring: Lauren Lavera, Elliott Fullam, Margaret Anne Florence, Bryce Johnson, Antonella Rose, Samantha Scaffidi & David Howard Thornton.