Around Halloween, Hollywood executives watched in horror as a low-budget, unrated clown-themed slasher movie trounced Joker: Folie à Deux during its $200 million, harlequin-themed rival’s second week of release. Terrifier 3 has now grossed more than $89 million, against the $2 million it cost to make.
The inexorable rise of Art the Clown, now giddily and wordlessly played by David Howard Thornton, began in 2018 with the crowd-funded Terrifier, a gruesome 1980s throwback rooted in practical effects and extravagant gore.
Terrifier 3, which is now out on DVD and BluRay as well as continuing to play in Irish and international cinemas, has generated its own mythology. Reports of fainting and vomiting at early screenings and a strict viewing ban for under-16s in France have added to the lore around a DIY franchise famed for flaying, dismemberment and turning human remains into a jack-o-lantern.
The premise of each film is simple. Art the Clown mimes and capers before pulling a weapon from his bin bag and, well, ouch. In the third feature Art is joined by Victoria, a victim turned sadistic and supernatural accomplice possessed by a malevolent entity called the Little Pale Girl.
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The Christmas horror is an especially mischievous subgenre, jollied along by the killer Santys, stalkers and the ancient evils of such standards as Rare Exports, Black Christmas and Silent Night, Deadly Night. With a yuletide Art all bets are off. The niceties that govern horror films, such as not murdering children, are quickly tossed aside when the clown, posing as a store Santa, greets dozens of present-hungry kids.
There are welcome echoes of Heather Langenkamp’s traumatised Freddy Krueger escapee in Lauren LaVera’s performance as Sienna Shaw. This is a Terrifier movie: everything is bigger and scarier, including the psychological damage. Sienna is once again confronted with every imaginable horror before the film’s outsized, otherworldly denouement.
You’d better watch out.
