It’s so cool that writer/director Damien Leone has taken a small, splattery short and turned it into a popular slasher franchise. I personally would not have ever expected the next big slasher icon in the canon to be a clown, but it is, and the canon is better for having Art in its ranks. It’s crazy that this weekend, Leone’s Christmassified third Terrifier entry will be opening on the big screen and is expected to do relatively big numbers. It’s incredible that a William Castle-esque promo cycle has been embraced — barf bags and reports of walkouts galore — and it enriches my soul that the masses are so accepting of Terrifier’s unique brand of shock and gore. Literally everything about the whole Terrifier experience is designed to be as fun as humanly possible, and we horror fans are lucky to be alive while it’s happening. Before I even get into the review at large, I will assure you that plunking down a few bucks for a ticket to Terrifier 3 this weekend is something you will not regret or forget.
That said, Terrifier 3, for all its holiday-tinged hyper violence, is a bit of a disappointment. This isn’t to say that it’s a bad movie, or even a marginal failure, just that it quite plainly highlights that Leone has hit a wall in terms of what to do with the Terrifier story. With Terrifier 2, the stripped down nature of the first film was swapped for an ambitious (albeit overlong), plot-heavy slasher/fantasy epic. It was fun to see such passion applied to a genre that is typically lacking in story innovation, but the mythology was so big that any potential sequels were sure to either feel comparatively small, or would attempt to go so much bigger that the whole thing falls off the rails. With Terrifier 3, Leone tries to do pare it down AND expand the lore, and in doing so creates a fright flick that isn’t particularly scary or interesting beyond its gruesome surface level pleasures (yes, pleasures).
Terrifier 3 picks up shortly after the end of the previous film. Sienna (Lauren LaVera) has been recovering in a mental health facility while her brother Jonathan (Elliott Fullam) is attending his first year of college. Sienna is invited to her aunt and uncle’s home for Christmas, and wouldn’t you know it? Art the Clown is back in town as well. If you remember the end of part two, one of Art’s early victims goopily gave birth to Art’s new head, which has replaced the one Sienna cut off with her magic sword. Despite such a high-camp setup, what follows is pretty straightforward slasher stuff: Art kills a bunch of people while working his way toward his main target.
The kills are respectably gnarly, and most feature Victoria, Art’s horribly disfigured, demonically possessed assistant — she does something with a piece of glass that would drop the jaw of even the most hardened horror fan (me, I’m talking about me). As a viewer who laments how much gore was cut from the later Friday the 13th entries, it’s wonderful to see a skilled and imaginative gore technician putting his craft on full display. Leone clearly wants to showcase gore as its own art form, and in that sense Terrifier 3 is massively successful.
As for the story? Meh. After the grand mythology of Terrifier 2, the story here feels rather rote. Some of the larger (cosmic adjacent?) ideas are fun, but they feel less like genuine organic storytelling and more like bookmarked avenues through which to potentially expand future entries, but which can easily be abandoned if not needed. It’s a wealth of plot with a dearth of story.
Now trust me when I say that I know how ridiculous it is to feel short-changed by the story of a slasher movie. I fully understand that thematic depth and strong characterizations are a huge and unreasonable ask for a movie of this type. It’s just that the film seems to think it’s delivering such things when it quite clearly is not. And when you lose the human element, the gore, while incredibly fun, doesn’t carry much weight, which leaves it feeling more like an effects reel than a feature film. There reaches a point where the viewer is no longer shocked, and instead will find themselves simply marveling at the craft. This, to be sure, is far from a bad thing, but even the most depraved kills in Terrifier 3 don’t stack up to the showastopping torture scene from part 2. Why? Because when Mom showed up to see her daughter being skinned alive, it hurt. We felt her pain. In Terrifier 3 even when prominent characters die it doesn’t feel like anything more than an opportunity to see a chainsaw do something it shouldn’t.
It sounds like I’m complaining, but I swear to you I’m not. All in all, Terrifier 3 is a hootin’, hollerin’, ho-ho-ho-in’ good time at the movies that will undoubtedly put blood-soaked smiles on the faces of horror goons like myself. I will absolutely be seeing it on the big screen with a crowd while I can. I want to celebrate the meteoric ascent of a true horror auteur who, unlike other slasher filmmakers, is the sole architect of the franchise thus far. If Leone leaves, I don’t feel that anyone else could do the series justice. I also don’t think it should continue beyond this point. Damien Leone has clearly got a beautifully deranged creative mind, and I’d like to see it applied beyond the novelty of Terrifier.
Directed by Damien Leone
Written by Damien Leone
Starring Lauren LaVera, David Howard Thornton, Samantha Scaffidi, Chris Jericho
Not rated, 125 minutes