Those who know me, or read my column, have heard me go on and on about how the biggest problem in Hollywood today is executive incompetence. The heads of today’s major studios are so far removed from the product they’re producing, and so focused on boosting stock prices to juice their performance-based bonuses, that they miss obvious plays. The latest case in point is the month of October. The spooky season puts people in the mood for horror films. But the majors have missed the boat. First, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which couldn’t get more Halloween-themed, premiered the first week of September. Second, Robert Eggers of The Witch fame’s latest film is a remake of Nosferatu, a silent, German Expressionist film that was one of the earliest to bear the horror label. Universal scheduled its release on Christmas Day.
Instead of a high-art horror flick aimed straight at the zeitgeist, this October we got Joker: Folie à Deux, an epic disaster which will lose Warner Brothers a whopping $200 million. To add insult to injury, it’s not even the best evil clown movie of the year. That title will go to Terrifier 3, an indie film produced and released entirely outside of the Hollywood machine. It’s so indie, they didn’t even submit it for a rating.
The Terrifier series is written and directed by Damien Leone. The first film, which introduced David Howard Thornton as Art The Clown, cost $55,000, most of which was raised by a crowdfunding campaign. In 2022, Terrifier 2 upped the stakes to $250,000, introduced former stuntwoman Lauren LaVera as cosplaying final girl Sienna Shaw, and caught the imagination of horror heads to the tune of $15.7 million. For Terrifier 3, the budget has expanded to a whopping $2 million. That’s 100 times less than Joker’s budget, by the way. After its second weekend of wide release, it has grossed $41 million.
But enough business talk, how is it? Well, it’s disgusting, and I mean that in a good way. Ironically, it’s set at Christmas, five years after Sienna killed Art with a magic, demon-killing sword. But it takes more than a mere decapitation to keep a bad clown down. Art’s headless body reanimates and kills a cop (Stephen Cofield Jr.), then reunites with Victoria (Samantha Scaffidi), a victim from the first installment who is now possessed by a demon known as the Little Pale Girl. After the pair recuperate by hanging out in a haunted house for five years, they are disturbed by a pair of workers scouting the house for demolition. Needless to say, it does not go well for them.
After gathering explosives, knives, guns, hammers, rats, and liquid nitrogen, Art and Victoria go off in search of Sienna, the one that got away. She’s getting out of the psych ward for the third time to spend Christmas with her Aunt Jess (Margaret Anne Florence), Uncle Greg (Bryce Johnson), and lovable but sneaky cousin Gabbie (Antonella Rose). They visit Jonathan (Elliott Fullam), Sienna’s younger brother who is dealing with his own PTSD while navigating his first year of college.
Leone hits all the beats of a classic slasher, and then some. The sound design can only be described as “juicy.” David Howard Thornton is absolutely terrifying as the wordless Art, a possessed undead clown (and worse, a mime) who experiences a high degree of job satisfaction. Amid the rivers of blood and viscera, there is winking humor. Art takes public transportation to his slaughter-fest, and nobody blinks an eye. A pair of true crime obsessed podcasters are convinced that Sienna is the prime suspect in the Miles County Clown Massacre, only to learn the hard way how wrong they were.
Terrifier 3 is a meat-and-potatoes horror flick that the majors seem incapable of making, and audiences are rewarding it. Who knew that people want to see horror at Halloween? Everyone but Hollywood.
Terrifier 3
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