By At last, we have a slasher flick for school boards, parents, and church groups to be scared about. Sacrilegious Christ cosplaying, shopping mall bombings, white suburban family massacres, child dismemberment, glass shard-masturbation, decapitated heads donned as helmets, and force-fed rodents: This is not some shitty FRIDAY THE 13TH sequel, TERRIFIER 3 is what the late-20th century congressional hearings on banning violent video games and movies were made for. This is for the teenage miscreants who pushed Knotts Berry Farm to enforce an adult chaperone policy, for the horror convention crust-lords and their tattooed pin-up model partners, and the Arkansas high school juniors who are a little too into hunting deer. It’s a welcome improvement from the dismal TERRIFIER 2, a flat and dreary lo-fi slog that was rewarded for all of its worst tendencies: a starfucking opus that, even through its independent grit, felt more like a play at the stock market than something that creeped in from the woods. TERRIFIER 3 is an altered beast, a merciless splatter fest that muscles through its growing pains with progressively more hardcore shocks. It’s fucking unbelievable this reigned as the number one movie in the country.
It’s rare to see a director so directly iterative on previous criticisms. TERRIFIER reeks of misogyny, and not the type inherent to a genre that’s made its bones on chopping up nubile teen girls. Damien Leone fixates his set pieces on women’s slash-slathered bodies as men suffer in brief stints; perhaps TERRIFIER 2’s most glaring misstep is when Art stabs a dude in the dick a few times only to move on to his girlfriend whose chest cavity is ritualistically hollowed out with a spiked club and face doused in acid for five minutes. In TERRIFIER 3, a college bro is partially vivisected with a chainsaw through the butt, flipped over, and then vivisected again through an extreme close-up of his exploding dick and balls. This is after the first act where a bar patron dressed as Santa Claus gets his face frozen with liquid nitrogen and chipped off into pieces with a hammer.
On the topic of butts, the first two TERRIFIER films look like complete ass. TERRIFIER 3 is still plagued with stale master shots, but Leone is marginally more interested in the scenes sans prosthetic body parts. There’s split-diopters! Shadows! Condemned grime, the menacing hues of Christmas lights, even the cranked artificial film grain is a welcome sight that indicates a more profound sense of identity. Now that Leone has successfully Shark Tank-pitched a new slasher icon into the cultural fold, he’s freed himself up to actually make a movie instead of another demo reel; it’s also granted David Howard Thornton some breathing room away from having to ham it up for awkwardly sustained bits of half-assed comedy. Art’s brutal dispatching of some local bar regulars is cut to make you giggle, paced to keep you anticipating what he’s going to pull out of his sack of weapons, and executed to still shock you despite the inevitability of it all. They’re not just being tossed bigger budgets, these Staten Island goons are legitimately leveling up as they go. Sure, are we three films into a franchise that has spent an inordinate amount of time on dishing lore, despite us, I repeat, being three films in and understanding very little of that filler lore? Yes, and it sucks that it’s making these things upwards of two hours, but c’mon, guys, those are just growing pains! He’s from upstate New York! They just got running water, right?
It’s odd watching such agnostic horror in 2024. Art has never been—and likely never will be—a stand-in for some greater societal ill. The films may implicate a particularly blood-thirsty American id, rabid over violent rhetoric but impotent upon first strike (January 6th was a Three Stooges routine; the 2010s’ “Resistance” infograph posting was one prolonged “Who’s On First?”), so instead they swarm the weary multiplex for a fix of the old ultraviolence. And that ultraviolence is so potent that it’s not outrageous to instantly rank TERRIFIER 3 in the pantheon of all-time gorehound cinema; Hell, it’s even worth asking if it’s the most violent horror movie ever made.
Actually, yeah, let’s ask that question point blank. Is TERRIFIER 3 the most violent horror movie ever made?
While it seems like CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST never went as wide as TERRIFIER—Art the Clown now regularly adorning T-shirts in Hot Topic and Spencer’s Gifts—it was the second highest-grossing film in Japan in 1982, hot on the tail of Spielberg’s E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL. Take a second to ingest that. Ruggero Deodato’s infamous CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST was a bigger hit in Japan than any of the Showa-era GODZILLA films: Can we really be that surprised by the GUINEA PIG series, TUMBLING DOLL OF FLESH, or the Takashi Miike canon? But there’s a coursing current of sexual violence, arguably effective anti-colonialist commentary, and real-life animal killings that makes CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST so confrontationaly icky. TERRIFIER 3 is technically gorier, but it’s nowhere near as graphic.
Peter Jackson’s groundbreakingly gory BRAINDEAD and Juan Piquer Simón’s PIECES (a direct influence on Art’s tour de force shower rampage) are only as funny as TERRIFIER 3, but never as bleak; when Art hammers a plastic tube into a darling mother’s throat so he can feed her hungry rats to cave out from her chest, and then parades the tied-up corpse to her tween daughter? It doesn’t matter that the silly clown is yucking it up throughout, that’s viscerally upsetting shit. The intro, wherein Art brutally hacks apart a sleeping family via the child daughter’s POV, landed like a boulder in my stomach. But it’s not AUGUST UNDERGROUND. Are the AUGUST UNDERGROUND weirdo fans also TERRIFIER fans? Certainly. TERRIFIER 3 beat JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX at the box office because the way you outgross The Clown Movie That Turns You Into a School Shooter is by making The Clown Movie for School Shooters. But extreme horror isn’t Leone’s vision either. There’s a light layer of joie de vivre in its serial killing mascot, and a degree of meta-textual anarchy that runs counter to Toe Tag Pictures’ diabolical pursuit of replicated snuff. The thrill isn’t the sight alone of someone’s guts torn from their belly, it’s that Art the Clown is the one doing it for you and a rabid audience of fellow ne’er-do-wells. That’s entertainment!
The TERRIFIERs fall short of the intellectual ambition of MARTYRS and its New French Extremity cousins, all pompously austere and literally about violence. TERRIFIER 3 is at most about Damien Leone fulfilling a cancer-free Make-a-Wish. This hasn’t stopped a bewildered me from trying to figure out just why now of all times an ultra-low-budget splatter-slasher is resonating this widely. There’s a temptation to connect this carnage to that we see from overseas via Telegram chains: novice reporters filming the mutilated bodies of bombed toddlers. But it’s so pat, so insultingly self-centered to focus inward like that. It’s my qualm with the popularly accepted analysis of 2000s torture porn, positioning HOSTEL or SAW as a counter-cultural response to 9/11, Abu Ghraib, and the rape of Iraq. Simply put, these films barely evoke “this is what we do to others,” rather “this is what they may do to us,” ultimately only furthering the fomenting xenophobia. There’s a chilling pointlessness to Art the Clown: a representation of detached ironic nihilism as a tidal wave of tortuous despair. He’s here to do bits and eat your raw beating heart. To thread him into the larger tapestry is to look like a major fucking loser, by design. You’re looking way too into it, weirdo, just let it rip.
Are you starting to catch the vibe on why it’s so popular?
Is TERRIFIER 3 the most violent horror movie ever made? Even adjusted for the subjective scale of screen violences, probably not, though it’s up there. However, it’s easily the most fittingly violent chiller for the early 2020s: a testament to our growing distrust in mainstream offerings and our short-term-memory-addled addiction to the remnants of our excess. We’re fast approaching the goon cave era of horror cinema. It’s pretty fucking believable that this reigned as the number one movie in this of all countries, in this election lead-up of all election lead-ups, in this uncontested international rise of right-wing fanaticism. Gimme one big bucket of double-fried offals, with all the fixings. Enjoy the gruesome sights while you still can, we’ve got neoliberal fascism versus classical fascism next week. Happy Halloween!
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