Terrifier 3: TraumArt

Damien Leone’s Terrifier crept onto streaming platforms just eight years ago and has amassed a cultish fanbase thrilled by the gore, jump scares, and gentle commentary embossed within each film in the series. I will never forget my first encounter with Art the Clown, the primary antagonist of the films thus far. It was a chilly day in October, and immediately upon finishing the revolting Terrifier, I scrounged up a student film in the style of V/H/S made by the director. In that collection, All Hallows Eve (2013), Art establishes himself as a singular malevolent force in the world. He’s revealed to be a demonic entity carousing into people’s homes and being offended by them in public. 

Terrifier 2 built on the chilling work of Terrifier by adding a protagonist, Sienna. A young woman like any other, her life is turned upside down one brutal day when Art the Clown begins terrorizing (his specialty, as you can imagine) Sienna and her family. Through a sequence straight out of Friday the 13th viewers come to understand that Sienna is preparing for Halloween and hoping to dress as an angel character her father, a comic book artist, invented for her as a little girl. This plan is thrown awry when her angel wings burn in a mysterious fire caused by a dream where Art appears. After spotting Art in nocturnal imaginings, we catch a glimpse of him in real life, beginning the second film's theme of second-guessing. Art is self-aware, occasionally looking straight into the camera as he goes through his day-to-day slaughter. This leaves much doubt as to what is and is not “real,” a problem for viewers and cast as Halloween approaches and the big night stretches into a real life nightmare for Sienna and her younger brother as she finds herself exploring the Terrifier, a scary walkthrough zone at a local amusement park.

Terrifier, the first installment, had a certain way with ‘justice.’ Much of the slasher genre is concerned with so-called right and wrong, whether it’s a gang of rowdy kids arriving into a peaceful town and finding their debauched plans thrown awry by angry townspeople, a crew of camp counselors reopening the site of a mothers traumatic mistreatment, or even a town ostracizing a dangerous individual, only to have him torment the next generation from beyond the grave. Damien Leone must’ve been reading his Carol Clover, an academic feminist who first read the ‘final girl’ concept from slashers. Final Girls are the countermeasure to the rough cocksure cruelty of slashers, and are given special privileges within the moral universe of the movie that help them overcome the Slasher (the bad guy). A classic maneuver, indeed perhaps the defining incidence of Final Girl-edness comes after the killer has eliminated all of her allies and any hope in his big spree (traditionally, the spree is about fifteen minutes of gore and screams right before the end of the film). Having observed his immorality, and seen his phallic symbol destroy a door, manifest as a chainsaw roaring in the night, erupt endlessly from the black inky lake, the Final Girl castrates the Slasher and finally dispatches him. This usually comes after the Final Girl has confronted herself, society, and the group that she is with. A classic case of this is Laurie Strode from the Halloween franchise. In short, she begins her story as a quiet and observant teenage babysitter. After a day of observing Michael Myers following her, he finally attacks at night after first dispatching her friends around the neighborhood. Laurie is initially too scared to confront Michael, but when he threatens the young children she is babysitting, Laurie finds it within herself to strike. As soon as she imagines Michael dead, Laurie seeks to flee for help. This, in traditional slasher fashion, allows the Slasher to return to health, and he chases her again until his psychiatrist, a man named Dr. Loomis, appears. Loomis shoots Michael, and Michael runs away to slink into another movie later, and that’s the traditional sequence. In the Halloween franchise, Loomis is a stand-in for a “male-dominated” society in the late seventies. He is law and order, and uses his firearm and acute understanding of ‘criminal minds’ to stop ‘true crime’ from occurring. He’s completely inadequate to the task of handling Michael, pure evil, which overcomes us despite our humanity, finds our base instincts repulsive, and can only be defeated by innocent devotion and self-sacrifice ala the Final Girl.

Returning to Terrifier 2 and Terrifier 3, Sienna is a further evolution of the Final Girl narrative that has only emerged as the slasher genre is further explored ‘in retrospect.’ Contemporary final girls, particularly literary ones such as Jade Daniels in Stephen Graham-Jones’ My Heart is a Chainsaw, try to deal with the mental anguish of their slasher journeys as much as they deal with physical pain, gore, and suffering. A common refrain and critique of Terrifier is that it is seemingly senseless gore, and in Terrifier 2 this is reversed. A plot is articulated on a spider's web throughout the film, tying together disparate elements to make the viewer really empathize with Sienna and her family. This makes the style of comic over-the-top brutality Art specializes in all the harder to watch. Damien Leone then turned his idea on its head for Terrifier 3, which attempts to investigate Sienna's trauma and the schizophrenic break from reality she suffers as a result of it. This film looks and feels like five different classics from the slasher genre, most notably A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors where the Final Girl from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, Nancy Thompson, is pushed into saving the children of a psychiatric ward from her childhood tormentor Freddie Krueger. What results is the best movie in that franchise, but also a soupy mess of flashbacks, dream sequences, and hazy editing. Damien Leone manages to combine thematic elements from that film with shots straight out of Texas Chainsaw Massacre including a very poignant sequence when a young true crime obsessive who has been haranguing Sienna to find out about Art comes face to face with Art and his chainsaw during a steamy shower scene.

Terrifier 3 is not for the faint of heart. It’s brutal; to call it over the top is to ignore the message of the first twenty minutes of the film, which sees a family beset upon by Art the Clown dressed as Santa Claus with just days till Christmas. That scene, shot through the eyes of the family’s young daughter, reminds us that absolute tragedy occurs every day and is actively, as Art churns through the family before seeming to leave and double back for the young girl, hunting us down. I’ll spare you the details, but this scene is replicated twice more through the film, first in a Santa Claus meet and greet gone horribly wrong, and then in acts of such senseless unflinching violence that you find yourself raging at the screen and yelling, “how could you do this!” The power of art of course is to engage with what mere mortals struggle to understand. Here, Art is an exploration of the callous regard of happenstance for our mortality. He is an unfortunate and hideous invective against joy or peace on earth, and he’s in a Christmas slasher, the best subgenre of slasher. Sienna’s big break comes as she explores her pain and does not push past/through it, as measly feel good ‘content’ might have you believe, but forges her suffering into a blade capable of killing a demonic clown, and scouring hell.

If you’re looking for a thrill, a moral tale bigger than A Christmas Story, and a narrative about finding ourselves after tragedy, then Terrifier 3is the payoff for a franchise of films that will scare you long after the movie is over. I rate Terrifier 3an eight out of ten, and hope you’ll give it a try this Halloween season.