Terrifier 3

One might define the current state of the world as the society of spectacle, with a circus or a carnival as the obvious metaphor. One profession comes to mind in particular in that regard: the clown. Like his colleagues, the clown is an attention-seeking creature, but devoid of the particular skills of, let’s say, animal trainer, fire-eater or a trapeze artist. As the audience, we can find him irritating, funny or scary. Coming from Damien Leone’s imagination, first for a collection of shorts and then for a franchise-in-progress called Terrifier, Art the Clown is of the lattermost kind. His scariness probably tops the competition of the horror-fictional characters, including Stephen King’s Pennywise.

Terrifier is certainly a story of success in film creation and entrepreneurship. Its beginning with the first Terrifier feature (2016) was very modest in the senses of budget (around $50.000) and story – which was as bare-bones as they come, but rich in imagination, with splatter, gore and torture powered by practical effects instead of CGI. Leone tried and largely succeeded to raise the bar with the sequel Terrifier 2 (2022). The budget grew to $250.000, and the filmmaker tried to tell the story while also introducing elements of world-building and mythology surrounding the silent, sadistic clown, and doing even more and even better executed splatter, gore and torture. Leone demonstrated that he is a talented director with a perfect instinct for set pieces, but that he is less capable as a screenwriter, struggling to convert a collection of his ideas and drolleries into a rounded story, let alone script.

With the third part, we now have a bona-fide franchise, which puts more pressure on weaker points of Leone’s filmmaking. The budget has grown to $2 million, and so has the distribution, from a small cult to viral to large scale multiplex cinema operation. The runtime, which was one of the biggest issues with the second instalment, has been shortened to just over two hours. The bad news is, however, that Terrifier 3 feels a bit clunkier, yet more calculated in different aspects, and it is destined to serve as a 'bridge' between the second part and the expected grand finale. The audience does not seem to mind it at all: after the first week, the film grossed $25 million.

Once again, we meet Art (the mime David Howard Thornton, reprising the role from the two previous movies) in an opening slashing sequence that might or might not be related to the mythology. Dressed as Santa Claus, he gets into a house to slay three members family with an axe, treat himself with milk and cookies and find the last surviving member, a girl named Julia. Leone sets up the rules of his 'game' in this way, with a new holiday as a backdrop (in the two previous movies, it was Halloween) and with the rules of engagement regarding the violence: the kids are being killed off-screen and male characters are about to experience more imaginative, explicit, sick and perverted violence than their female counterparts.

Victoria Hayes (Samantha Scaffidi), the survivor of the first film who made a cameo appearance in the second part, comes back, this time as Art’s henchwoman. Now disfigured, she serves as his voice (Art still does not speak) and partner in 'un-life' and crime. After she has given birth to his head, which was severed at the end of the second part, the two hole up for the next five years until they are awakened by the duo of unassuming construction workers who become the first victims of their new rampage.

In the meanwhile, the survivors of the second film, Sienna (Lauren LaVera) and her brother Jonathan (Elliot Fullam), are recuperating from their traumatic encounter with Art, each in their own way. While Jonathan is studying at a college, trying to leave the past behind him, Sienna is in a mental institution. She is then picked up by her uncle Greg (Bryce Johnson), aunt Jessica (Margaret Ann Florence) and little cousin Gabbie (Antonella Rose) to spend holidays and some time after that with them. But Art and Victoria are after her, both in her dreams and in real life, and she has to encounter them once more.

When Leone does things he is good at, those scenes and sequences are simply great to look at. Once again, the special effects are of the practical kind, deliciously bloody and nasty, and the ways to use tools to kill a disposable character are getting more and more creative. Some of the audience might have moral concerns about Art’s behaviour and Leone’s approach to it, but the filmmaker’s skill in envisioning and executing a set piece are undeniable. Further enhanced by David Howard Thornton’s performance as Art the Clown, that is even more along the lines of silent-era comedians and is getting better and better, those sequences are a marvel to watch for those that have the taste for proper, 'un-elevated' horror flicks.

On top of it, it seems that Damien Leone’s misanthropy is for real and quite unhinged, so his attitude towards the 'real world' and its manifestations is quite punkish, immature and extreme. That can be sensed also in the way he treats the setting of Christmas, the greatest of the capitalist and consumerist holidays, from Art’s fascination with the kitschy iconography, via the way he sees it working (the subplot in the shopping mall), to the pseudo-religious iconography in the final sequence. Leone does not have a 'message' to pass on, and has no plan other than to obliterate the favourite holiday season 'for the whole family'. In the end, if Terrifier 2 was death metal that stuck to certain rules, Terrifier 3 is quite grindcore in its best sequences.

In some other aspects, Leone seems to be quite calculated, since he is aware that he is running the franchise now. Therefore, he choses the targets of Art’s violence carefully in order not to outrage certain audiences too much. It has some effect in countering the accusations of misogyny after the first and second part, but Leone also demonstrates his tongue-in-cheek attitude to showing the consequences of it. The spice of quips he garnishes the sequences with also works well enough, but there is a lingering sense that a better scriptwriter could use them more astutely, to maximise the effect.

The trouble is that Damien Leone is not even a decent writer, which leads to problems with storytelling. The ideas he has simply do not come together as a compelling story, while some of them, arguably better ones, from the previous part are left out from this one and replaced with others. There are also problems with how he prioritises characters, which implies that he does not know what he is doing on the narrative level. On the other side, there is a certain sense of obligation to introduce the moment of trauma from the 'elevated' aspect of the genre into the fabric of Terrifier franchise, so the 'normal' scenes with Sienna and her family are numerous, done in uninspired, almost automatic manner with poorly written dialogue, shabby acting and pedestrian directing.

That leads us to the capital problem of Terrifier 3: there is not enough pay off. Even the final sequence, before the very last scene (which has a simple function of preparing us for the fourth part and at least one more return of Art the Clown), falls a bit flat and is counter-intuitive in the terms of the tone Leone has tried to establish here. But maybe the juiciest parts are saved for the next instalment(s).