If it’s October and if the trades are running reports of audiences fainting, walking out, and throwing up during public screenings for a buzzy horror movie, it can mean only one thing: Wake up, honey, Damien Leone dropped another Terrifier sequel.
Bulletins like these are spiritual xeroxes of articles about Terrifier 2‘s premiere in 2022, which alleged the movie provoked severe gastrointestinal distress in its viewers. So why should Terrifier 3 be any different? Is it a mystery by now what’s expected from these splatter-thons? (A recent thread on Reddit claims one such screening was the result of a viral marketing ploy, so take the gossip well-salted.) Grant that the Terrifier series lacks the mainstream recognition of modern franchises like The Conjuring or Saw, but it has achieved impressive notoriety nonetheless.
Contrary to Terrifier 3’s preliminary hype, it doesn’t actually top its predecessor’s stomach-churning brutality. Mileage will vary, but for as many excruciating ways as Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) concocts to inflict horrible deaths on supporting characters, none of them keep pace with Terrifier 2’s “bedroom scene,” already the stuff of slasher legend. But so what? Who cares? It’s silly to expect Leone to outdo himself by now, especially since Terrifier 2 is such a colossal improvement over the first Terrifier movie, which is less of a “movie” than it is a string of loosely related sequences cut with unbridled violence.
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The Spirit of the Season
Leone has strong command of the slasher niche’s core entertainment in that first installment, but it’s all hollow. Terrifier 2 immediately distinguished itself in its early promotions with its lead, Lauren LaVera, a gifted actress and a trained martial artist with 20 years of experience. You don’t hire that person to run helplessly from the villain, but to beat the tar out of them. The combination of Art’s cruelty with Sienna Shaw’s (LaVera) selfless heroism elevates Terrifier 2 without putting on airs about “elevating” horror. It’s a far nastier film than Terrifier, with actual stakes, too. We care about the people on screen, including the ones we barely get to know before they become a work of Art.
These qualities carry over into Terrifier 3, where the most shocking kills happen off screen. Leone generally leaves nothing to the imagination when Art does his thing. His victims’ wholesale suffering is what we pay the price of admission for. (We probably all need therapy.) But Terrifier 3’s opener, where Art goes a-slaying hapless families in their sleep at on Christmas Eve, chills to the bone; the effect is stronger than the vaunted shower scene, a twofer where Leone pays off one side-character’s arc with grim thematic satisfaction, and even the Santa Claus kill, where the unluckiest mall Santa in the world (Daniel Roebuck) gets his Christmas spirit shattered in what ought to hold the crown as the movie’s best kill sequence.
As Art lurks about neighborhoods, dive bars, shopping malls, and dorm rooms while leaving a bloody wake in the snow, Sienna slowly loses her mind; 5 years have elapsed since the events of Terrifier 2. In that time, her little brother, Jonathan (Elliot Fullam), went to college, while she did rotating stints in a psychiatric hospital. Placed in the care of her aunt Jessica (Margaret Anne Florence) and uncle Greg (Bryce Johnson), Sienna tries to move on from her encounter with Art, indulging in holiday traditions while reconnecting with her cousin, Gabbie (Antonella Rose). But PTSD is a tick under her skin. She sees visions of her dead friends (namely Kailey Hyman, reprising her role in Terrifier 2 with full corpse makeup) that her medication regimen can’t suppress.
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Clownphobes Need Not Apply
Worse, nobody believes her. They think she’s ill, which is the most frightening idea in the overarching Terrifier narrative. It sucks being one of only two survivors of a massacre. It really sucks when your own family thinks that you’re delusional. Horror films tend to punish people either for their curiosity or their apathy. Terrifier 3 does both. The movie is as gross as advertised, but Leone understands that “gross” is different from “scary.”
At the same time as Leone pushes his talent for staging carnage to new territory, each actor pushes their performances, too. LaVera knows how to express grief and rage, so here, she plays Sienna like a bundle of nerves, before ultimately bursting into righteous, incandescent fury in the final act; Thornton, her horror-trope chum, is operating at peak Vaudevillian, having the time of his life pantomiming Art’s glee with each kill in between beats of genuinely hilarious physical comedy. This time, he’s teamed up with Samantha Scaffidi, the original Terrifier’s final girl turned cackling witch, crushing on Art from the sidelines while slashing one or two throats herself. Rounded out by Fullam’s efforts at unraveling Jonathan’s suffocating denialism—he refuses to accept that Art is somehow still alive—Terrifier 3 pits humanity in a classic bout with pure evil, slathered in animal fat, sausage casings, and strawberry syrup cut with powdered milk.
Taste is a paradox; we know what we like, but we don’t know what we like until we try it. This does not apply to the Terrifier movies. Take a glance at a summary of the series to date, and you’ll figure out right away whether “grinning murder clown traipses around butchering people” is your bag. For folks with delicate constitutions, mark down Terrifier 3 down as a “skip.” For all the sickos and weirdos, hold onto your pieces: Art the Clown, the infamous Miles County killer, is back in town with an ax to grind. And a chainsaw. Plus a hammer. Don’t forget the fire extinguisher full of liquid nitrogen.
