It’s pretty wild to think that the successor to something as mean-spirited and vile as Terrifier 2—a film in which multiple people are flayed on screen in protracted sequences of relentless gratuity, some having their skin seared or melted by acid or household cleaners—is getting this wide of a release this weekend. In my area alone, it’s showing in a whopping 17 multiplexes, many of which usually cater only to the most widely appealing titles.
Wilder still is that said successor, Damien Leone’s Christmas-themed slasher Terrifier 3, shows no signs of slowing its roll (of heads) in hopes of chasing that wider audience. Quite frankly, it doesn’t need to—but it’s no less surprising that, three movies deep, this series is only becoming more committed to the specificity of its entertainment value and the brutality of its violence.
Terrifier and Terrifier 2 are far from perfect films. The first is a downright ugly-looking movie that feels aimless when blood isn’t being spilt, and its latter half fails to match the gleeful depravity of one early kill in particular. The second film, despite upping the ante on the violence to a stunning degree, is bloated with countless characters and plot threads that go nowhere and serve no purpose beyond offering up another head for Art to axe. And despite vastly different runtimes (92 and 138 minutes, respectively), both films feel way too long due to their clumsy pacing—the first film suffering from an utter lack of plot and its sequel from way too much.
If the first two films were Leone refining his craft, then Terrifier 3 might just be him hitting his stride. As a fan of the previous two, for all their warts, it’s a glorious thing to watch. 13 minutes shorter than the second film, and far more balanced in how it spaces out its sanguine spectacle than the first, this “Trilogifier” feels like Leone listening to criticisms and—to a healthy degree—fine-tuning what a Terrifier film should be, for maximally morbid effect.
We pick up five years after the events of Terrifier 2, wherein Sienna Shaw (Lauren LaVera) seemingly killed Art after discovering she was cosmically destined to defeat him and was in possession of a magic sword that would allow her to do so. Sienna and her younger brother Jonathan (Elliott Fullam) are, understandably, deeply traumatized by their first run-in with “The Miles County Clown,” carrying not only obvious physical scars, but cumbersome mental wounds as well.
Despite extensive institutional therapy and a regimen of medications, Sienna is haunted by visions of Art’s blood-drenched victims, her friends and family, who taunt and blame her for pulling them into the path of Art’s campaign of carnage. Meanwhile, Jonathan’s specters are actually the living—in particular, his college roommate’s girlfriend (Alexa Blair Robertson), an overzealous true-crime podcaster who views the Shaw siblings as the ultimate guests for her show.
Traumatized protagonists are nothing new in the realm of slasher sequels, but it’s delivered rather effectively here, thanks in large part to a major performance upgrade from LaVera. Seriously—she’s putting in a ton of work here, and genuinely good work, at that. I thought she was fine in Terrifier 2, but it wasn’t exactly a memorable performance. This time, she wears Sienna’s frazzled anxiety with a surprising amount of naturalism, portraying a tender and loving person whose mental health is being corroded by the trauma from her grim experiences. Her strength as a lead continues even as the film shifts gears into more intense spectacle. (She’s better with the sword this time!)
But what of the real showstopper, our beloved Art the Clown? Well, the ending of 2 showed first-film victim Victoria Heyes (Samantha Scaffidi), driven insane by her experiences and locked up in an asylum, giving birth to Art’s decapitated head, indicating some kind of supernatural life cycle at work that allows Art to keep coming back. With Victoria’s help, Art manages to meet back up with the rest of his body and get straightened out, just in time for Christmas—and just in time to ruin it for Sienna and Jonathan.
David Howard Thornton, who has played Art in each canonical film in the franchise, offers as rambunctious a performance as ever. There’s something really special about him in the role across all of these films; it’s hard to think of another slasher villain as silly and as creepy in equal measure. Thornton’s Looney Tunes-esque movements and hairpin changes in facial expression lend Art a strangely lovable quality, even as he’s carving up innocent people. He’s a disgusting embodiment of pure evil, but you can’t help but root for him to outdo himself with every successive kill, frankly, because it’s funny.
And Art certainly outdoes himself here. The previous film featured some of the longest, most drawn-out deaths I’ve ever seen in a slasher, and while 3 doesn’t necessarily milk its kills for every onscreen second to quite that extent, Leone continues to surprise with his sheer creativity for murder. Art deploys guns, hammers, bombs, and even liquid nitrogen this time around to carry out his cavalcade of decapitation, disembowelment, and dismemberment.
It’s well-worth seeing these kills for yourself, so I won’t detail them here, but one in particular is bound to stick in the mind. If you thought chainsaws were played-out in the genre, Leone offers up an extensive shower scene as proof that there is still savage fun to be mined from the iconic horror tool.
As mentioned before, Terrifier 3 finally strikes the balance between plotting and killing that the previous two films lacked. While there are some strange choices with regard to what is shown onscreen versus what is shared in dialogue, and not all of the interior “lore” peppered throughout completely lands or makes sense, Leone crafts a straightforward-enough story that neither overstays its welcome nor spaces out its kills too far. Multiple stretches of 2 had me tapping my foot for the next character to die, but I never felt that here. I was enjoying Sienna’s dramatic journey enough to be content until Art’s next masterwork.
The ending may turn some people off, though it worked well enough for me. It’s very much a cliffhanger, but enough is accomplished in the preceding two hours to make it feel like a satisfying chapter on its own, and the threads left open make an enticing case for the franchise to continue pushing into the supernatural in future films.
Personally, I was already onboard with the franchise going into this movie, but I’m thrilled to be all the more enthusiastic leaving it. This is far and away the best Terrifier entry yet, having tuned the story and the gory to their perfect balance. Bring on another. To both Leone and Art, I say, “Go off, kings!”
There’s been a thoughtless meme going around social media lately calling Art the Clown an “industry plant horror icon.” I’m not sure if it’s because he got his own skin in Call of Duty, or simply because the recognizability of his face has a wider reach than audiences’ actual exposure to the films themselves. But based on those whom I’ve seen share in this boneheaded discourse, it’s clearly borne out of an insecure mindset that goes something like, “I haven’t seen these movies, and I don’t want to; therefore, they are culturally irrelevant”—a disingenuous notion that feels similar in its prudish, peurile reductiveness to the “sex scenes are bad” discourse that has plagued Twitter for the past year.
Regardless of where the meme comes from, it’s objectively, hilariously incorrect in its accusation. We’re talking about a character who has been showing up in one indie filmmaker’s movies for 16 years now, and a franchise built around him that has been on a slow rise from its humble beginnings. The first film was made for $35,000 and looks like it. The second was crowdfunded. (Is Art the new face of populist cinema?) The third film was rejected by studios who wanted to tone it down to an R-rating and reboot the franchise for wider appeal.
Hardly the agent of conspiracy these losers suggest.
Terminally online wimps and corporate prudes be damned, Terrifier 3 outperformed industry plant kinophile bait Joker: Folie a Deux in its Thursday night preview box office—Art’s $11 million to Arthur Fleck’s 7—and is on track to potentially unseat the DC film from the #1 spot this weekend. Perhaps Leone’s commitment to gratuitous, merciless violence resonates with a broader audience than the studios feared. It’s certainly an interesting sign of potential sea change in what constitutes acceptable (even desirable) cinema to a larger audience.
I, for one, will happily follow Art into Hell, if that’s where a fourth film takes us—and I have a sneaking suspicion millions of others will as well.
Wishes he could forego sleep to watch more movies. Besides co-hosting Odd Trilogies and writing reviews, Andy builds Gundam models, loves on his three cats, and spends way too much time managing his Plex server. You can follow his movie-watching habits on Letterboxd.