Director: Damien Leone
Stars: Lauren LaVera, David Howard Thornton, Antonella Rose
While large sections of the internet are getting riled up over Todd Phillips’ polarising Joker sequel, another dark trickster of pop culture has been let loose on unsuspecting cinema audiences. None other than David Howard Thornton’s ghastly serial killer Art the Clown; a sadistic, black-toothed menace, supernaturally powered to keep on killing in his monochrome jester’s suit, grinning as he gleefully dismembers in a (teeny-tiny) hat-tip to the splatter movie’s heyday.
This is the first of Damien Leone’s Terrifier movies to achieve a wide cinema release (300+ screens) in the UK, and one can only wonder how it’ll play to the curious but uninitiated, who’re popping out to their multiplexes just because it’s ‘spooky season’. Leone is a make-up and VFX artist with an abundant love for horror’s gorier inclinations, eschewing notions of loftiness or deeper meaning in favour of a carnival of blood and broad slapstick. But as Terrifier has caught on and evolved, it has inevitably taken on some of the other tropes of becoming a horror franchise (increasingly involved lore, for instance), and is thoroughly caught up in them as we arrive at this third outing proper.
Born from a short film elaborated upon in 2013’s All Hallow’s Eve, the first Terrifier full length struggled to fill out an 80 minute running time with total satisfaction, and left little expectation for legacy. This was then confounded in 2020 when Leone presented the 138 minute sprawl of his vulgar auteur’s opus Terrifier 2, a film of neon-soaked excess that finally gave the burgeoning series it’s iconic heroine; Lauren LaVera’s Queen Phoenix Sienna Shaw. Terrifier 2 also started sprinkling in some more hallucinogenic elements, with trips into Lynchian dreamworlds and a greater sense of the series’ supernaturally mythic potential.
Terrifier 3 carries over these inclinations with precious little hand-holding for those who’ve just stumbled in now… but then it effectively puts Art the Clown’s mythology on hold to play glorious homage to the Christmas slasher subgenre.
It’s been five years since the events of Terrifier 2. Sienna has been in and out of psychiatric facilities following her near-death run-in with Art. Her younger brother Jonathan (Elliott Fullam) isn’t faring much better as he tentatively starts college. It’s Christmas time, and Sienna is released into the care of the surviving wing of the Shaw family, home for the holidays with her aunt Jessica (Margaret Anne Florence), Jessica’s husband Greg (Bryce Johnson) and their daughter Gabbie (Antonella Rose), with whom Sienna bonds most fondly. The scenes in the homestead between these four are deliberately warm and cosy, bordering on parody of Hallmark cutesiness as Leone paints big emotions by numbers. Their interactions may be broad, even mocking of notions of American wholesomeness, but it’s an intentionally nostalgic contrast the cacophonous ultra-violence happening at each and every cut away.
Art is holed up in a derelict building with his mutilated protege Victoria Heyes (Samantha Scaffidi). Up until now she’s seemed like the Amanda to his Jigsaw, but Terrifier 3 increases her importance to the evolving narrative. That is, once she’s done taking a bath that wouldn’t look out of place in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The two appear to have been mystically laying dormant for the past 5 years until a crew scoping the premises for demolition literally reawaken the unquenchable blood-lust. Thus Terrifier 3 begins a romping detour into Yuletide Slasher territory as Art gleefully takes the seasonal opportunity to play dress-up and wreak havoc.
Many of the staples of the Christmas slasher hark from its golden age of the early ’80s (Christmas Evil, To All a Goodnight, Silent Night, Deadly Night). Maybe it’s seeing his work blown up to cinema-size for the first time, but Leone seems to have paid deference to these grotty old landmarks of scuzz cinema by trading in the hyper-modern digital sheen of his recent efforts for anamorphic lenses that lend the film a decidedly retro vibe. It’s amusing to think that a year ago horror hounds sat in cinemas for belated Grindhouse slasher Thanksgiving only to be bitterly disappointed by Eli Roth’s anonymous knock-off. Here, one year and one holiday later, the real heir to those over-the-top fake trailers finally arrives.
The extreme violence of Leone’s Terrifier movies is their most divisive aspect. Opening to his biggest ever crowd, Leone shows no signs of softening up the kills. If the series has taken flack in the past for primarily – and indulgently – targeting young women, Terrifier 3 takes its festive setting as an opportunity to push further buttons, redirecting the comedic ire to kids. It’s just as well, then, that the series’ excess has never been so deeply rooted in comedy. Each of Art’s mini-adventures strung like bloodied fairy lights through Terrifier 3 is so brazenly over-the-top as to make anyone crying outrage seem foolish. Indeed, Leone uses the opportunities presented here to pay as much loving homage to the slapstick masters of old as the plucky crew behind Hundreds of Beavers. Leone just does it with gloopy buckets of blood.
Pushing hard into parody territory (or should that be ‘terrortory’?) and keeping its twin avenues of interest separate for the lion’s share of the running time means that Terrifier 3 feels less operatic than its towering predecessor (which is quickly cementing itself a place in the pantheon of horror’s hardest cult titles, beside the likes of Rob Zombie’s ethereally harrowing Halloween II). This entry in the Terrifier series is about embracing the grimy no-budget spirit that’s hyper-specific to these oft-little-known slasher movies from the early ’80s. In the face of unprecedented popularity and audience reach, such niche specificity is admirably nonchalant, and gives the further sense that Leone is in this purely to enjoy himself. Thornton twinkles his eyes for the camera with unbridled campiness, while LaVera’s strong-hearted bad-assery will see her catapulted to heights of adoration in the genre only presently occupied by the likes of Melissa Barerra’s now-martyred Sam Carpenter.
This one might not feel like nihilistic high art the way Terrifier 2 managed to, but for those inclined to embrace a gratuitously gaudy and grisly good time at the flicks, Leone’s over-eagerness to lay waste to good taste will keep things ticking over nicely until the story continues in Terrifier 4.
The Lost Highway Hotel 