The saga of writer-director Damien Leone’s signature horror character Art the Clown began with The 9th Circle, a 2008 short which was recycled with other mini-movies (including a 2011 first draft of Terrifier) into a 2013 anthology film, All Hallows’ Eve. David Howard Thornton didn’t take over the role of the clown until the breakout feature version of Terrifier (2016). His exceptionally committed evil mime performance — imagine Harpo Marx possessed by the Driller Killer — remains the centrepiece of an ongoing series which shows no signs of winding down.
Thornton’s Art — a deceptively simple black-and-white clown costume and make-up, complete with silly miniature hat and rotten-tooth grin — stands out as perhaps the most hateful franchise fiend in contemporary horror, mocking victims as he rips them to gory chunks and taking the time to add petty humiliations like slaps to the back of the head to the grosser, gut-exposing atrocities which are his stock-in-trade.
Leone is good at sketching in set-up scenes, so the doomed souls aren’t just obnoxious disposables, which adds a layer of cruelty to his gruesome approach.
Terrifier was a lean, nasty 85 minutes, and even then had to throw in an extra act after all its primary victims had been slaughtered. Both the sequels run well over two hours and work out a complicated, still-unfolding rationale for Art and his disfigured, demon-possessed former victim/sidekick Victoria (Samantha Scaffidi). This latest entry recalls Sienna Shaw (Lauren LaVera) from the last film, who seems predestined to be Art’s nemesis. Her late father (Jason Patric, in flashbacks), a comics artist, has some psychic connection with the supernatural goings-on, which will presumably be elaborated on in Terrifier 4. Quite a bit of Terrifier 3 is about the PTSD Sienna and her brother (Elliott Fullam) have suffered after their family and friends were bloodily disassembled in the earlier film. The fact that we meet a whole new branch of the Shaw family — who take Sienna out of a psychiatric facility for the Christmas holidays — is just teeing up more meat puppets to be ripped apart in imaginatively cruel fashion.
Leone is good at sketching in set-up scenes, so the doomed souls aren’t just obnoxious disposables, which adds a layer of cruelty to his gruesome approach. The horror of the _Terrifier_s combines the explicit, practical-effects gore of 1980s video nasties with the tied-to-a-chair-and-abused licks of 2000s torture porn. It’s the cinema of throwing Christians to the lions, but — hey — that was a popular draw too.
You wonder whether in a happier world Leone would have preferred to make a franchise out of his nostalgic, throwback 2015 monster movie Frankenstein Vs. The Mummy. (“Frankenstein — there’s a classic,” muses a kindly bus driver in a throwaway line.) But maybe Art the Clown is the 2020s monster we deserve.
