Terrifier 3

Terrifier 3 opens a few days before Christmas in a cheery home occupied by a nuclear family. The youngest child wakes her sleeping parents, having heard footsteps on the roof. Mom brings the girl back to bed, explaining that the sounds were probably an elf. That’s when Mom hears something too. The house is settling, she reasons. Dread builds when Mom finds the front door ajar, yet she thinks nothing of it. Meanwhile, hoping to get a look at the visitor from the North Pole, the little girl sneaks downstairs to find a jolly man with a bag standing in front of their shimmering tree. But that’s not Santa Claus; it’s writer-director Damien Leone’s fiendish creation: Art the Clown, the sadistic purveyor of blood and gore who has become a cult icon for his unrelenting splatterfest appeal. Those familiar with the series won’t be surprised when Art, played by David Howard Thornton, proceeds to dismember this entire family, starting with the parents, their oldest son, and then, undoubtedly, the little girl (but that’s off-screen). If one were to ask Leone whether anything is sacred in his book, the answer would be a resounding “No!” That, of course, is the point. If you can accept his approach, you might be able to get into Terrifier 3’s groove. Then again, if you’re reading this review, chances are you’re familiar with the series and don’t need convincing.

However, even for this admirer of Terrifier (2016) and Terrifier 2 (2022), Leone’s third installment of his low-budget spectacle tested my limits—not in terms of its gore, which is arguably at its most vile here, but in its tonality. While the original was a lean and mean slasher with underdeveloped characters and a simplistic plot, the first sequel raised the bar, introducing not only a richer sense of potential victims but also an elaborate mythology accented by a maddening and often funny touch of Lynchian surreality, which turned the experience into a fucked-up funhouse nightmare. Leone dials down the macabre humor and leans into the story here, establishing even more mythology and themes of trauma for the last movie’s two sibling survivors, the badass Sienna (Lauren LaVera, excellent once again) and gangly Jonathan (Elliot Fullam). Apart from a few isolated sequences where Art’s antics prove amusingly twisted, much of Terrifier 3 plays with a self-seriousness that lessens the fun, making the extended murder and torture scenes more abrasive than those in the first two entries.

During a flashback that explains how Art the Clown survived Terrifier 2, despite Sienna decapitating him, the third in the series follows his headless corpse until its rendezvous with Victoria (Samantha Scaffidi). One of Art’s horribly scarred victims from the first movie, Victoria has since been possessed by a demon and birthed a new head for Art, who now serves as the Victoria-demon’s partner in crime. After finding an abandoned building to recover, they resolve to lie dormant for five years. That’s about the time that Sienna is released from her latest stint in a mental institution, having been thoroughly disturbed by her experiences with Art and haunted by the notion of his return. She takes refuge with her supportive Aunt Jess (Margaret Anne Florence) and untrusting Uncle Greg (Bryce Johnson), whose snooping daughter Gabbie (Antonella Rose) adores Sienna. With a Christmastime country house worthy of a Hallmark movie to call home, Sienna should feel at ease, but she can’t shake the feeling that Art will return.

Sure enough, that’s just what happens. Art and Victoria awake from their slumber and seek out Sienna and Jonathan. The latter has gone off to college and wants to forget what happened to him, but his roommate’s girlfriend (Alexa Blair Robertson), a nosy and invasive true crime enthusiast, wants to interview him for her podcast. Sienna tries to convince her aunt and uncle that Art will return, but they think she’s schizophrenic, possibly even a threat.

Serving as editor, Leone effectively cross-cuts between scenes with Sienna and others with Art, building tension and anticipation for their eventual showdown—all emotionally amplified by a genuine bond between Sienna and Gabbie, and compounded by the danger that no child is safe in this movie. In the last decade, Leone has grown as a filmmaker and storyteller, deploying a narrative structure that might be called novelistic in Terrifier 3. Though he’s constantly flashing back, diving into Sienna’s memories of her father (Jason Patric), and cutting to various subplots, it all manages to flow quite well.

However, an almost indefinable joy is missing from the proceedings, apart from one or two sequences where Art the Clown seems to be entertaining himself. “Joy” might be the wrong word, but it’s a quality that finds the killer clown savoring his over-the-top escapades, leading to a contagious sense of horror movie pleasure. It’s not that one agrees with Art’s behavior, but one finds an extratextual appreciation for how far Leone will go in presenting Art as a maniac who treats murder like a punchline. A sequence where Art appears starstruck when meeting a mall Santa (Daniel Roebuck) at a bar produces some laughs. Alternatively, the scene where the podcaster gets her comeuppance pushes limits, offering shots of male genital mutilation to counter the notorious vaginal hacksaw kill from the original movie. Elsewhere, Victoria uses a shard of glass in a manner that makes a similar scene in Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (1972) look subtle. These gross-outs are no more gnarly than those in the first two entries, but somehow, Terrifier 3 feels more mean-spirited and less funny.

Maybe it’s Leone’s persistent need to out-gross himself and push the viewer’s buttons, but I got the sense that the director was trying too hard in this one. You can feel him dialing back the absurdist humor and amplifying the purely torturous aspects, leaving the material even crueler than the other films in this series. It’s not that anyone interested in watching Terrifier 3 will be offended by the sight of blood and guts, nor even the scene where Art blows up children visiting Santa at a mall. The tone feels nastier than before, and the Victoria-demon’s presence amplifies it, but not in a good way. She adopts the role of a taunting, hellish figure. What works about Art alone, both in terms of scares and humor, is his silence. His disturbingly pantomimed laughs and jester routine allow the viewer’s imagination to wonder about his motivations. With Victoria, there’s no mystery or uncanniness, and her tormenting dialogue cheapens the otherwise frightening mood with familiar nonsense about possessions and a journey to Hell.

Although Terrifier 3 makes good use of its Christmas backdrop—contributing to a long line of holiday horror from Black Christmas (1974, 2006, 2019) to the various Silent Night, Deadly Night movies—the movie gets bogged down by its almost spiteful tone. Leone has come a long way since his first installment, but his attempts to deepen the material with themes of PTSD and inclusion of the annoying Victoria rob this sequel of the franchise’s chilling, unknowable quality. Regardless, the low-budget production, which cost $2 million and earned nearly triple that on its opening night, will warrant another sequel. Leone leaves room for one with an open-ended conclusion. Here’s hoping the filmmaker concentrates less on purveying a viscous atmosphere and returns the series to its carnivalesque terror. The distinction might seem almost imperceptible, but it’s the difference between leaving the theater feeling yucky and feeling one’s taste for extreme horror was satisfied.

(Note: This review was originally suggested and posted to Patreon on October 15, 2024.)