Monday, February 3, 2025

The clown is down: It's just me and you, remember? It's just me and you, and we're in the same business—we make people happy


TERRIFIER 3

2024
Written and directed by Damien Leone

Spoilers: moderate


I made a big deal about Terrifier 2 being something of a retrenchment into conventional slasherdom, and if I did not fully articulate a thesis about how it and the first Terrifier function together, doing so despite being separated by six years, and possibly not out of any conscious design on the part of their maker, Damien Leone (though I think he's certainly enough of a structuralist to have conceived such design), then let me articulate it now: a big reason why Terrifier 2 is great is because of how it functions together with Terrifier, essentially as a diptych about chaos and order, the second film making clear its desire to reassert meaning in a universe rendered meaningless by the unchecked rampage of Art the Clown (David Howard Thorton); it did so by imposing upon him the high school student, Sienna Shaw (Lauren LaVera), chosen by destiny to bring justice back to her worldor, more accurately, she was chosen by a postmodern slasher film creator, whose metafictional impulses are less along the lines of picking slasher tropes apart than taking them as he finds them and making them the ultimate versions of themselves, tantamount to ascribing to them a religious significance, at least within his own low-budget slasher flick legendarium.  Accordingly, Terrifier 2 gave us the abnormally maximalist version of a fundamentally very normal slasher movie: lots of people die but the Final Girl does not; she kills the monster and saves what she loves the most, in Sienna's case saving her brother Jonathan (Elliott Fullam), himself the morally well-oriented slasher fan, all while dressed up like some nerd's jerk-off fantasy, which we're all going to politely pretend is her character's power fantasy.  But why couldn't it be both?  All told, it was pretty great.

Now that that task has been completed, I suppose Terrifier 3 must pose the question of whether you can fight the devil and come out unscathed, and the answer is no; and whether that task ever can be completed, and the answer is also no, for it is a neverending struggle tied to cosmic cycles of season and sacrifice, and that's why this Terrifier is set on Christmas and shall, eventually, equate Sienna directly with Jesus Christ, more directly than you'd probably ever imagine if I'd not found a screenshot.  The alternative approach to Terrifier 3 that probably popped into your mind the instant I mentioned "Christmas," howeverand I believe this is exactly as validis that Leone had a real-deal horror phenomenon on his hands and was poised to make an enormous amount of money if only he made another movie (Terrifier 3 made $90 million and, moreover, made headlines, financially stomping on no less an A-picture than Joker: Folie À Deuxwhich is just one of those perfect industrial factoids).  Hence he had no choice but to make another one, and Christmas offered itself as a vibe and a visual scheme to impart some novelty to the proceedings, whereas if he were ever going to top the semiotics of "sexy battle angel rendered as Renaissance religious art about vanquishing Satan," about the only thing available that could was to just go for broke, and identify Sienna as the out-and-out slasher messiah, the lord and savior of slasherkind.  If Terrifier 2 embraced the conventions of the slasher genre to serve as the antithesis of its predecessor (and its synthesis, because a 138 minute runtime lets you get a lot done), Terrifier 3 embraces those conventions because... what else are you gonna do?


Actually, it turns out that Terrifier 3 brings a lot new to the table, new iterations on several of the franchise's previous convolutions to slasher tropes, but also simply the benefit of Leone's experience, which by 2024 had meant making Art the Clown movies for eight years even if you only start the clock with his first Terrifier feature.  It means he knows this business inside and out by now (ahem, so to speak); it also means Terrifier 3 is probably just the plum best-made movie in the franchise to date, to some degree even shaking off the "alternate 80s pastiche" feeling of George Steuber's photographynot to say I didn't like that a great deal, but it's less overtly pastiche now, because it's getting close to just actually being a replication, via a digital cinematography that comes off more like it could actually be forty year old celluloid cinematography (not least because it's not trying so hard to look like it), and the new Panavision lenses and aspect ratio do much to give it physical heft.  (Paul Wiley's score, incidentally, is a bit more resurgent this time, and the soundscape also gets to buff itself way up with holiday musicincluding a full-on novelty song presented within the actual movie, "It's a Terrifier Christmas," for let us not pretend this is not a gimmicky film.)  Leone, for his part, has become increasingly sophisticated about tone, always a tricky subject for the Terrifiers, which need to be utterly depraved and malignant, but not miserable slogs, with violence that's somehow both consequential and funand no matter how difficult that job is, we've got no interest in seeing the movie sweat itand with this one he's arguably even added a new skill to his repertoire, in that Terrifier 3 can at turns be scary, not a sensation altogether absent from the earlier films (albeit more the first), but they were, in their distinct registers, more interested in shocking and disgusting.  These remain its chief goalsit's a Terrifierbut it has moments that get a little shivery anyway, even as the movie overall tips more comedic.

Beyond that, Terrifier 2's success ensured that Terrifier 3 could finally begin approaching a real motion picture's budgetstill only $2 million, which is what the delays caused by a particularly smelly fart would cost a Disney movie, but, for the first time, we don't ever have to feel like Leone is compromising because he doesn't have enough money, and while he hasn't forgotten how to stretch those dollars, he's also managed to devolve responsibilities that most writer-directors would never have taken on in the first place.  He's still doing his own editing (and it's 2024, man, why shouldn't he), but this is also the first Terrifier where Leone has not been directly responsible for special makeup effects.  It was always a team effort, but the team's much biggerTinsley Studios handled most, and Ryan Keith Ward seems to be the representative individual to creditthough screen credit or not, it's pretty clearly a Leone vision still being executed here, in conformity with the Terrifier style guide for world-class gruesomeness, but with a sick inventiveness that consistently suggests a splattermaster saying to himself, "well, gosh, what now?", and more-or-less invariably meeting the challenge.


All this is demonstrated in the first scene (it says something that the least imaginative scene in Terrifier 2 could well be the signature sequence of many 80s slashers).  Leone has seen fit to drop us into the middle (chronologically, we're starting sometime around the halfway mark of a movie that isn't as long as Terrifier 2, and at 125 minutes still astoundingly long for its genre), and he's using this asynchronous prologue more to tell us what it is we're doing here this time around.  It doesn't really "play in" to the plot at all, but it does show us Art, back in the flesh, and clad in the accoutrements of another holiday's icon, something I'd bet Leone had in mind as far back as Terrifier, given that Art the Clown has always been an Allhallowtide parody of Saint Nick, with that black garbage bag full of "toys" slung over his shoulder, and now we're just making that explicit.  Steuber is playing his part with that fuzzy Christmas lighting that attaches to spaces decked out with holiday cheer (it is, of course, automatically made a filthy perversion of it).  Already, though, we're invited to notice that Leone can be scary now, using suspense, and allusions to violence, while by no means skimping on the onscreen violencewe do all know what these movies do, and this one does so immediately.  It's funny, too, or at least it ends on a funny note, Art chowing down on the cookies left out for one jolly old elf, that might as well be claimed by another.  Much later, we'll find out how Art got his Santa costume, as well as what other uses he puts it to: the former wallows in this franchise's weirdly softened reality, maybe not agreeablyunlike the previous Halloween-set film, we don't actually have a justification anymore for why the world-famous "Miles County Clown" only even prompts recognition half the time (even when he's already covered in blood!)but it's just how these movies work now, I guess, and Art's usurpation of Santa involves a killing style I've only seen once before in a slasher, an outrageous but perhaps fitting manner for the "real" Santa (Daniel Roebuck) to meet his doom.   (I enjoy how bluntly foreshadowed this is ages before it happensit's practically a cartoon sign gageven if I don't think the laboratory testing of the device is very useful when the queasy pleasure of it is lessened by having such a concrete visualization of it already.)  As for what Art does with his new red suit, it's mainly to make this a Christmas slasher (once he's in it, he never takes it off), but the big event entails such a blatant violation of slasher "rules" that I wouldn't dare spoil it, only to say it's the movie's best joke even though it might be the objectively vilest thing Art does; it emerges naturally enough out of this slasher villain's surprising penchant for tools beyond melee weapons, though it's still one awfully unexpected escalation.

Anyway, after that prologue we get bounced back to the mid-credits sequence of Terrifier 2, now finding Leone planting a flag in proper supernatural body horror (one of the last territories unclaimed by the series), and perhaps retconning things a bit so that, in appreciation for Samantha Scaffidi's contributions and willingness to spend all day in makeup on behalf of the first Terrifier's final victim, Victoria, the phantasm that accompanies Art has now transferred herself to the body of the mutilated cyclops.  Forthwith, they Joker and Harley Quinn their way out of Victoria's mental asylum, part of a whole woozily amusing sequence that provides an unusual answer to the question of how a serial killer missing his head gets himself resurrected for the sequel.


On the other side of the moral alignment, we have the woman they've been waiting for, Art's slayer, Sienna, presently checking out of her mental health facility, because, understandably, she's been a wreckto some degree physically (facial scars obtained during one of Terrifier 2's more impressive "small" gore effects turning out to be permanent), and to a huge degree psychologically, insofar as she's still hallucinating the dead friends she couldn't save like Brooke (Kailey Hyman*).  Sienna's taken refuge with her maternal aunt Jess (Margaret Anne Florence) and her husband Greg (Bryce Johnson)each a mixture of welcoming and warybut her 13-ish cousin Gabbie (Antonella Rose) is absolutely stoked to see her, mostly because she's somehow managed to have barely any awareness of why she's there, but we'll let that slide.  Jonathan, meanwhile, has headed to college (just to mention it somewhere, Fullam has improved considerably as an actor, while maintaining a slightly "off" young man who somewhat benefits from miscalibration), and he's adjusted better than Sienna, as his roommate Cole (Mason Mecartea) doesn't like him that much but he respects him enough that he doesn't deliver him as prey to his gross true crime-fan girlfriend Mia (Alexa Blair Robertson), who is almost certainly fucking Cole in the first place to get access to Jonathan, for she's obsessed in particular with Art the Clown and would just love to have one of his victims on her podcast.  (A cool little unstressed poke that Leone's taking at the slasher genrethe Terrifiers always do their meta in unstressed waysapprises us that a popular theory of the case, prompted by the absence of Art's body, is that Sienna and Jonathan killed them all.)  Well, Sienna would like to believe that she's just still crazy when she sees Art, because she is pretty crazy; but, unfortunately, both of these things can simultaneously be true.

One continuity from Terrifier 2 is that this is still one earnestly well-acted slasher film, with maybe some room to grouse that its About Trauma plot hems the performances in, when the Halloween riff that Terrifier 2 trafficked in offered rather more distinctive modes for everyone to play with (though I hasten to add that Being About Trauma is infinitely more earned in Terrifier 3 than virtually all contemporary horror, because thanks to the content of the previous film and this one, it is extremely comprehensible why anybody would be traumatized, plus they still fight against it and without resort to therapy speak).  LaVera, anyway, is still really great, being the emotional fulcrum of our story, deploying on Sienna's behalf some pretty remarkable ways of being "traumatized," and of strategizing methods to collect the shattered fragments of herself into a whole that still retains most of the function of her former personality.  (She also gets a superb monologue that briefly dips this franchise's toes into, weirdly enough, social commentary, when she has cause to bite that true crime fan's head completely off.  I'm not personally a fan or a despiser of true crime, but I'm tickled when hyperviolent horror movies somehow manage to find a moral high-horse of their own to ride.)  Thornton is likewise terrific, which is no surprise.  (I don't think he's better than he was in Terrifier 2, even if his peaks might be higher; while it frequently pays dividends, he's more... antic, this time.)  Scaffidi's participation can feel like a cheatVictoria can speakand it can occlude Thornton's pantomime, but she's a hell of a trouper, and I begrudge her nothing.


The trajectories of these characters intersect more-or-less how you'd expect them to, even when they cris-cross instead.  That's not a sin, and it allows this Terrifier to do its terrifying businessI might accidentally downplay how these are, at bottom, blood-and-viscera-soaked magic shows, but Terrifier 3 makes every effort to make downplaying its purpose impossible.  And so, Leone addresses those criticisms of misogyny by giving you what you implicitly asked for (did you not?), with some very torturous deaths for male characters, including but not limited to Santaalso a nude body-splitting with Cole via chainsaw, in direct conversation with Terrifier's "the thing"though one of the movie's champion sequences comes early by way of a random demolition worker (Jon Abrahams), finding Art in stasis in the attic of his haunted house (and because Leone has found new ways of being horrific, this is itself a great creepy image, the still-living doll covered in cobwebs as he patiently waits); that worker gets his head degloved, while Victoria masturbates with a giant piece of broken mirror.  (And leaving aside a certain overclocked bounciness, Thornton provides some sublime buttons to these sequences: maybe the most delirious scene in the movie involves Art making a "blood angel" on the shower room floor at college, somehow serving as a button to a button, that already-very-delirious moment where he grants Mia her wish to look into his eyesthe "boop" at the end made me shudder so hard I could've pulled something.)  If I were to describe any kills as "bad" it would be one in the finale that's so overcomplicatedly baroque that it feels desperate for a new idea; but it's perfectly nauseating on its merits.

I could detail kills all day (Terrifier 3 has its series' highest body count).  But how they work is where Leone's ever-burgeoning skill comes in, and I think I may have implied it already just by describing them: these are inordinately violent and inordinately drawn-out kills, even for a franchise that's never entirely left the part of the venn diagram where slashers and torture porn meet, and there's very often a weird component to the side of just violence, sometimes "funny," sometimes actually funny, sometimes just discombobulating.  It's an odd-sounding detail to fixate on, but at Sienna's most vulnerable momentshe's been neutralized by Art and Victoriathe proceedings, which involve immense suffering and gore, are frequently punctuated by slaps to the back of her head, not particularly torturous even on regular terms, let alone these, but so extravagantly petty in their cruelty, and hence... funny.  This scene is not funny.  None of these scenes are really funny (except they totally are), but the way Leone's weaving humor in and out of them this time, the way LaVera is psychologically imploding more-or-less the whole movie, the way it's simultaneously completely over-the-top and grotesquely tangible, adds up to this superposition of extreme tones and this addled emotional state that I think represents this series' most successful attempt at controlling how you feel about what's on screen, even if that feeling is "whirling dizziness" and entirely contradictory; it's an enormously pompous thing to say, but I honestly think Leone's actually trying to activate something like the extremity of beholding human sacrifice, and the fact that it is Christmas, while a whole lot of the iconography that gets juxtaposed directly alongside it is from Easter, means that it's not impossible that's entirely on purpose.  Whatever else, Terrifier 3 gets mysticalit takes that Empire Strikes Back comparison I previously made a little further, not least because Sienna's sacrifice has not, to date, been efficaciousand at this time, I really could not predict where or how Leone picks things up from here.  But I'm aboard for wherever he goes.

Score: 10/10

*You know, as gnarly as these movies are, they must be fun to work on, as there's one striking persistence of onscreen and offscreen talent with them.

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

3 comments:

  1. I've found these reviews to be provocative in challenging my assumptions that this series was nothing but artfully-executed cheap and deranged shocks (which, well, you haven't entirely argued against I suppose). Thanks for writing them.

    I'm still very unconvinced I personally will find any merit in these, though maybe I should stop noodling on it and just watch the damn things. I guess, to steal a line from your closing paragraphs, I don't really feel the need to participate in "the extremity of beholding human sacrifice" -- I already know it's bad and I don't want anything to do with it, and I can't imagine doing so will really illuminate anything that isn't drowned out by the flood of visceral disgust and discomfort. Maybe, though!

    I'm always excited to see the "film as ornamentation" label, which the series is 3 for 3 on.

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    1. I have a distinct impression you wouldn't like them and I don't intend this to represent "recommendation" to anyone.

      On the other hand, I dragged my feet for so long because I thought I wouldn't like them. (As I think I noted, mainly because I thought "evil clown" would be annoying and dumb.) You would undoubtedly like Terrifier 1 the least. However, it's at least hypothetically possible to start with 2.

      I may also be accidentally making an overbaked, hyperbolic comparison to other horror movies: the Terrifiers are much bloodier and devoted to impressive gore shocks, but I don't know if I'd commit to it being a categorical difference from, like, Nosferatu, or the gorier Friday the 13ths, or The Blob '88, or whatever. Then again, maybe I would.

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    2. Though it further occurs to me that it's also the case that in 12,000 words I never even *mentioned* the cannibalism, because the cannibalism is pretty low tier on the franchise's parade of horribles.

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