Sunday, January 26, 2025

The clown is down: Is there any kindness in you—somewhere in your heart?


TERRIFIER

2018
Written and directed by Damien Leone

Spoilers: moderate


2013's All Hallows' Eve was always a compromise; producer Jesse Baget's initial offer to director Damien Leone was merely to ask for his 2011 short film, "Terrifier," on behalf of an anthology he was putting together.  Leone was able to leverage that request into a feature film all his own, but Baget provided it with a caveat: it was still going to be an anthology, with a budget so low it effectively could serve only as a home for "Terrifier" and Leone's other already-completed short, "The 9th Circle," in the can for eight or nine years by that point.  Both of those shorts, incidentally, happened to feature Leone's most popular creation, Art the Clown, likewise the exigence for Leone's pursuit of a feature in the first place.  Still determined, Leone bent that "anthology" into the shape of an Art the Clown movie after allthe only "anthology" segment that was new still featured an Art cameo, and there's nothing else about that segment, except the barest minimum of effortand he pushed Art into its framing narrative as well.  Leone's pursuit of his muse was valiant, but it's just not a good movie.  Moreover, because it's so slapped together out of preexisting material, it doesn't even come off as a "real" movie: its single greatest accomplishment was simply that "Terrifier" already existed, and it showed it to you, allowing you to ponder what Leone might still be able to do with an integral film that cost at least as much as, for instance, an upper-mid-range sedan.  Baget seems to have been indifferent to this question and assigned Leone to 2015's Frankenstein vs. the Mummy, which sounds neat on paper, though it sure seems like most would prefer to just mentally excise it from his filmography.  (So I don't know if that's a "watch this space," or what.)

But Leone persevered, and on the back of an inadequate crowdfunding campaign, rescued by at least one angel investor (the big one was Phil Falcone), in 2016 he finally released the true feature-length Terrifier he'd wanted to make for five years.  (Any sort of widely-accessible release wouldn't come for yet another two.)  As before, Leone wrote, directed, edited, and provided the special makeup effects for this Terrifier, and it can sure feel like five years had passed, in a good way, Terrifier manifesting as something like a statement of purpose of what interests Leone wished to pursueaesthetically as well as by way of content, but even narrativelyrefined out of the material of his short, and now vastly more articulately-expressed.  In more concrete terms, "Terrifier" can come off like Leone saying, "look, everybody, not only could I make a horror movie, but failing that, I could probably help you make your horror movie," even if there's non-trivial novelty to it, and a very obvious passion in its manufacture.  Terrifier is much more full-spectrum: above any other concern, of course, it's a showcase for what turns out to be a world-champion talent for gross-out cinematic illusion, and an excuse to design numerous gore effects, including the gore effect; but it's also almost as interested in getting this cinematography out of George Streuber, a more restrained but arguably more artful evolution of what Christopher Carafo delivered on "Terrifier," as well as in performing a surprising amount of experimentation with how slasher structure and slasher tropes "work."


That first thing is, if we're being realistic, the overriding reason that the legend of Terrifier grew and spawned a franchise.  Though the way it's asking you to give it a franchise would already get us to the "experimentation" part: the film doesn't so much end with a hook for a sequel as just the full-on opening scene from a sequel, and I admire the way it commits itself; as for the opening scene here, it's mainly admirable in how weird it isfrankly, I don't think its structural arrangement really plays and, albeit to a lesser degree, it suggests what All Hallows' Eve already did and Frankenstein vs. the Mummy probably did, too, that Leone is rather less of a world-champion creature makeup artist than he is a pure gore technician.  But it is, nevertheless, also playing with structure, basically the opening scene of what I assume, though I obviously could be wrong, is some wholly alternative sequel, that also doesn't even overtly mark itself as a flash-forward rather than telling the backstory of a previous Art massacre (maybe if I'd been paying more attention to character names, it did); regardless, the effect is more that the film somewhat feels caught in a timeloop.  I barely think that merits a spoiler redaction, but either way, after we visit with one of Art's mutilated victims, making a media appearance on a program that justifies a cameo by All Hallows' Eve's Katie Maguire (playing a different character), we find that clown (now David Howard Thornton, with Mike Giannelli having retired from acting) kicking in televisions and suiting up and organizing his weapons in a blunt homage to A Nightmare On Elm Street.  This in turn means that our feature, Terrifier, takes a different tack than the short film, "Terrifier" (and much, much different from "The 9th Circle"), with Art now being more-or-less grounded in human-scaled evil, bound more by the laws of physics and leveled down to a Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees (possibly even lower, since Art, though rugged, seems much more vulnerable to pain than those two), even if his personality remains distinctive, and a lot closer to Freddy Krueger's, despite sharing the muteness of the former slasher icons, which is of course expressed more like the muteness of the Marx brother, Harpo; so, partly as a result of that muteness, partly just by way of the visual complexion Terrifier takes, it's still a very abstract evil, human-scaled or not, psychologically inaccessible and inexplicable, and altogether quite pureso I don't hate this at all, although I almost certainly wouldn't have bothered with a "getting ready" montage.

In any case, what Art's getting ready for, naturally, is Halloween, and he stalks the streets of, er, Town, with his garbage bag full of toys slung over his shoulder, where two young women, also out for Halloween, have the grave misfortune of drawing his attention.  These are Tara (Jenna Kanell) and Dawn (Catherine Corcoran), party girls differentiated largely by their temperaments and possibly just their BACsTara is slightly more responsible and noticeably more inhibitedand, interestingly enough, the fatal error was Tara's in that she wouldn't just let Dawn's drunk ass drive them home.  They go for a slice, and Art follows, somewhat adapting the "plot" of "Terrifier" (he shits all over the bathroom, is thrown out, and death follows for the employees, unaware that they were interfering with pure evil), and, as it would behoove us to cut bait on describing all the suspense-building shoeleather, while the pair of women wait for Tara's collegiate sister Victoria (Samantha Scaffidi) to come pick them up Tara gets herself trapped in a semi-abandoned office building that's about to get fumigated by the friendly pest control man Mike (Matt McCallister), who let her in to pee, and which rapidly becomes a very practical chamber of horrors for a still cash-strapped writer-director-editor-effects-technician.


That's pretty much it, storywise, and sure, this is the weakest part of it, above and beyond the way I've intimated that it becomes a randomly-sited, real-time, single-location thriller.  To Leone's credit, this still feels like what he "wanted," but it's clear that it was also the only option he had, thanks to a budget that was still just insanely low ($55,000 is the high estimate).  Budget, anyway, is more of a problem inasmuch as second or third takes would've been well-advised.  Mostly you just wish Leone (or somebody else) had given his script another pass, because it's certainly threatening to tip over to the bad side of boilerplate slasher dialogue.  But then, as noted, it's to some extent on the bad side of slasher acting already, too: Kanell, who is rightly proud of doing her own stunts here, is a much better physical performer than she is a reciter of Leone's placeholdery "young woman in 20XX" lines; Corcoran had the most unpleasant physical acting task of anyone (as we'll certainly see), but she makes Kanell look good at reciting those lines.  (I will give some unalloyed praise for the casting, though: Kanell and Scaffidi make for some outstandingly persuasive screen siblings.)

None of this is particularly vital, of course, and if Leone's screenplay qua screenplay isn't so hot, it's much more interesting in how he rips up his genre and puts it back together incorrectly, so that Terrifier was capable of surprising me, along with shocking me, thanks to Leone playing around with his slasher's structure so much.  The "big" narrative turn is probably less surprising than it ought to be: Leone is making it a lot more obvious than the patience he's demonstrating about it implies, but then, that patience is a big part of why it comes off so structurally weird (once Victoria enters the picture, Tara's almost by necessity doomed to be a "false protagonist," yet all of the more full-bodied "Final Girl" traits still attach to the latterVictoria isn't useless, but Tara is active and thoughtful and vengeful while Victoria is flirting with just full-blown catatonia almost the instant she arrivesso that, in a sense, both of them are "false protagonists," since neither one truly escapes, and neither one kills Art, either).  The most successful "you can't do that," though, is less of a surprise if you've seen "Terrifier," because it's just Leone recycling an idea from that.  But the beat is played much better here: Art the slasher villain carries a gun, just for emergencies, and while that's only a "joke" in a metacinematic sense, it's a pretty amazing one, and I admit I had to laugh.  Thinking on it, this might be the most important part of the movie in a very subtle way: it is, in a sense, Leone giving you permission to enjoy it.  He's not overplaying the joke (I assume it's a joke some Scream or another has done, even if I don't remember it; I would further assume the Scream did indeed overplay it), but he does make it clear, at least to this film's assumed audiencenot to puff it up too much, but Terrifier is, after all, openly intended as the slasher for the scholar of slashersthat it is a joke.  And given that "the slasher scholar slasher" is unavoidably going to be one severe and upsetting thing, having some comic relief, even if the comic relief is as utterly bleak as the Final Girl moves in for the kill and then the villain straight-up cheats and pops her with a fucking handgunespecially given that this comes not too long after, ahem, the thingit's pretty perfectly placed, either by good instincts on Leone's part or (better yet) by canny, conscious calculation.


Its abiding mode, however, is one alarmingly cruel slasher film, and like its short film antecedent it effectively splits some of the difference (so to speak) with the 00s replacement for the slasher, torture porn, and not just in the kills, though this is where that's the most salient; the setting, however budget-mandated, is a big part of that, too, where instead of a classical slasher setting (typically either quotidian domestic spaces made murderously unsafe, or natural spaces that manifest an absence of safety once you leave civilization's bounds), we have this filthy urban semi-industrial prison that's basically just a giant trash heap, indicating that civilization's rotted on the inside, too.  I'm not certain it's treating that entirely like a torture porn, though, which is where the aesthetic stuff I mentioned comes in; the quickest description is that it's "Terrifier's" 70s grindhouse pastiche made amenable to somebody actually having to look at it for a full 85 minutes (which somewhat oversimplifies "Terrifier's" aesthetic, but oh well), but Steuber's photography isn't exactly that.

It's more like an idea of the 1980swhatever his other touchstones, Leone is of course influenced above all by the 1980s, and he fits readily enough into that whole 80s nostalgia wave of the 2010sbut it's an idea not moored to any specific anchor in the 1980s, and to some degree it's simply "more 80s than the 80s," this free-spirited impression of the turn of the 70s into the 80s.  (I feel like the best comparison, at least as far as the intensity of the digital "film grain" haze goes, and in the way those buckets of stage blood "pop," is actually Mandy, itself still two years away; as far as actual 80s movies, I suppose that what the filmic reproduction made me think of the most was Death Spa, specifically the footage that'd been sitting in someone's house for several years prior to its VHS release, even as what the scenario made me think of the most was Halloween II.  So good company all around.)  It's capturing unremittingly ugly spaces and pretty much unremittingly ugly action, with a profound tangibility but not a hint of naturalism, thanks to all the bizarre colored lighting and color timing choices Steuber is making, so that it's often planes of sickly color divided by open space, all rather beautiful if only in its immense morbidity.  Paul Wiley's score is doing pretty much the same thing: "an idea of the 80s," though in his case, rather than gruesome colors and fetid shadows, it's a synthwave-type thing, still surprisingly listenable, but which he's built principally out of what appear to be alarm klaxons layered one atop the other.


Altogether, the attention to form helps shake off that sensation of a cheap-ass siege movie, and gives it the force of something more akin to a descent into chaos.  In that respect Leone's screenplay is helping: a lot of the first half is chase rather than kills (and it's good, suspenseful chase, at that); by the last third, it has no options for escalation anymore (it probably is a "problem" that its centerpiece really is its "centerpiece," arriving only about halfway through), and it goes sideways instead, in one sense merely riffing aimlessly on nonsense, while in another it reflects Art the Clown's own apparent purpose, his playfulness, and hence a pile of vignettes executing a bunch of tasteless horror movie madness (until the chase kicks back in, anyway) seems to me just as apt as Leone quixotically trying to top the untoppable.

If there is a good reason for his centerpiece to be brought out so quickly, then, it's that it's presumably left you in such a state of disgusted confusion that you can't really have "expectations" of the movie anymore when it apparently has no limits it's set for itself, and no extrinsic rules that it feels obliged to follow.  Thornton bolsters that feeling: his performance is, it turns out, pretty different than Giannelli'she's trading in Giannelli's disgusting crypto-horny bouncing and mugging for a more controlled kind of showman, most effective in the almost discontinuous way he springs his clownish performance-within-a-performance on both his victims and us.  (The historically weakest aspect of Leone's multi-hyphenate talent, his editing, has taken a quantum leap here, and I would believe you if you told me he were in fact snipping frames out of Thornton's movements, in order to itensify that effect.)  There's a slight sense that Thornton's Art sometimes earnestly believes that he's somehow entertaining his victims, and he gets the most upset when they don't play their roles in his playlets correctly.  (And, befitting a clown, he's not-infrequently funny: getting trapped behind a barrier and impotently honking his horn at his victim is pretty damn good "scary-funny.")


That is, anyway, how I perceived Terrifier to function: it simultaneously wants you to understand "it's just a show" while eroding that layer of mediation pretty consistently with a villain who is, after all, putting on a show, with wretched consequences for anybody with the bad luck to blunder onto his stage.  And thus what I've described as "the thing," though it's also true that basically all the kills in this movie are very well-designed, and very, very, very gory, starting with jack-o-lanterns made of hollowed-out heads and a Drive/Irreversible skull-shattering stomping session (I think it says something that a lot of the "it's like this other movie" references I've been making are from extreme cinema outside of the ambit of slashers); whereas even after "the thing," the bullet squibs are so well-built and well-montaged that I'm put in the disagreeable position of having to declare a shooting as one of the great slasher movie kills.  But then there is "the thing," which is where the slasher and the torture porn intermingle most completely and most horriblyalongside that insistence that "it's just a show."  It's a proper magic trick, after all, and rather classic at that, the old "sawing a woman in half" routine, except Art, the silly, got the anatomical plane all wrong, and instead of axially he did it sagittally, bottom to top (Corcoran deserves enormous credit for being held upside down for most of a day, and whenever the cameras were rolling, being held uncomfortably and not totally safely).  It's unusually long for a proper "slasher kill" (it may feel like it takes longer than it does, but I would estimate "three minutes"), and very unusually vivid, and almost impossibly onscreen; our own disquiet is, further, focused through Tara's horror at witnessing it; and I may not be reacting hyperbolically to suggest it is the most morally violating thing ever put in a movie that was not, itself, really real.  It's that bad, then, but that's good: there's a lot of things horror films can do and "should" do, but one of those things they usually don't accomplish is to make you feel genuinely misused.

Score: 9/10

Reviews in this series
Terrifier (2018)
Terrifier 2 (2022)
Terrifier 3 (2024)

2 comments:

  1. THREE minutes? I only kinda skimmed this one a couple years back but I am certain the scene you're talking about is maybe a minute, tops.

    Three minutes is longer than most movie trailers and nearly the length of a music video!

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    1. I dunno, I'd bet money it's over a minute for the whole sequence (I mean, thirty seconds of it is the pledge, viz. Prestige magic trick rules), but I undoubtedly wasn't adjusting for the "feeling longer" thing.

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