Introduction
One of the biggest news stories in the movie landscape of 2024 was that Terrifier 3 managed to beat Joker 2 at the box office on its opening weekend. This was a factoid I just couldn’t let go of at the time. “Really?” says I, “Those little indie horror movies with the clown guy beat the big clown movie?” Surely it had to do more with Joker 2’s awfulness than Terrifier 3’s quality, no? I haven’t seen Joker 2 and I don’t really plan to, but as I looked more into the situation I discovered that while Joker 2 not being what people wanted was part of the puzzle, the part I was missing was that Terrifier as a franchise had been slowly but surely building a dead-icated fanbase of gorehounds and horror freaks. It beating Joker at the box office wasn’t just because DC fucked up, but because the audience had spoken: Art the Clown > Joker.

And so began my trip into the Terrifier movies… the “real” ones I guess. I know there’s some additional prototype-esque movies like the original short film and All Hallows Eve but to be perfectly honest, I couldn’t be arsed.

Terrifier
The first Terrifier is the kind of movie that makes me wonder how this became a franchise in the first place. Much like the first Friday The 13th, there isn’t much to this and what is there is often times cheap and underwhelming. Such is the life of a small budget indie film, I guess. The plot is pretty thin, as these things tend to be, but I won’t fault it for that. It’s about as substantial as it needs to be: two characters get sidetracked from their Halloween shenanigans and end up the target of Art the Clown, a mysterious guy in a clown suit who seems to take delight in being very strange and being very murderous.

So if the plot’s not all that interesting, the characters are flat, and it has all the other usual low budget filmmaking foibles, what exactly was it that made people latch on to it? I think I can chop it up into 2 points. One – the gore, and two – Art himself. Speaking on the first point, I’ll flat out admit that gore doesn’t really do much for me these days. In my younger years I would have thought all these graphic scenes were kino, but I’m much too old and sensitive to really enjoy watching people get their innards ripped out. But I consider that a point in the movie’s favor that it’s so absurdly gory and violent and I don’t find it campy or silly, I just find it gross and disturbing. Recent horror movies, especially in the slasher genre, tend to use blood and gore less for its impact and shock value and more for its gleeful excessiveness. Evil Dead is a good example where the effects are so excessive that it becomes silly, hence why Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness are pure campy nonsense. Terrifier doesn’t play that game. Terrifier remembers that reminding the audience what their insides look like is inherently disturbing, and presents that disturbance in as brutal and blunt method as possible. And what a gore fest it is. Limbs are torn apart, someone is sawed in half, corpses are mutilated, Art doesn’t just kill people, he makes art out of it.

Which brings us to my second point, that Art the Clown is just so goddamn invigorating as a slasher. The actor that portrays Art is David Howard Thorton, who I have never heard of before this but god damn do I know his name now. It feels like I’m watching Robert Englund play Freddy in his prime, before the Nightmare series went off the rails. This is someone who truly understands the character of Art and puts his whole ass into it. Art’s big, manic grin, those bright expressive eyes he has, not to mention every little mannerism and tick his body language conveys, it’s a wonderful performance that gives Art so much more charm than he has any right to have. Art is simultaneously horrifying, creepy, and kind of funny, without being silly. It’s a fine line, but somehow Terrifier manages to be funny without being sarcastic, ironic, or over the top, something that horror comedies really need to get over, if you ask me. The trick is, again, in Thorton’s performance of Art, who takes such sick glee in murdering people. It’s hard not to laugh when Art does something like gesture to his work (read: recently disfigured corpse), and relish in the screams of his horrified audience as he mouths his own sick laughter. It becomes darkly humorous, but never unintentionally humorous. There’s no ironic eyerolling or sarcastic “I’ve seen enough scary movies to know where this is going!” nonsense here, it’s just genuine horror and black comedy as far as the eye can see.

So that’s Terrifier 1, a low budget gore fest that managed to work its way into cult status by being sufficiently gory and charming.

Terrifier 2
I wasn’t sure what I was expecting with Terrifier 2 but I’m not sure I was expecting a story. If Terrifier 1 is Friday the 13th, Terrifier 2 is Nightmare on Elm Street. By that I mean, there is far more emphasis on the characters and their relationships/goals this time around than simply letting Art run rampant in a small location for 90 minutes. The characters this time around are Sienna, her brother Jonathan, and their surrounding circle of friends. Sienna is a creative young girl working on a Halloween costume as a tribute to her late father, while her brother is me as a teenager, what with all his obsessive readings on serial killers and true crime and a bunch of sick as hell Overkill posters on his wall. Together they become Art’s next targets while trying to uncover the mystery of how their late father may have had prior knowledge of Art and more specifically, how to defeat him.

Nightmare on Elm Street was the only thing on my mind as I watched Terrifier 2. Everything about the dialogue, the casting, and the direction reeks of Wes Craven worship. Not to mention that the expanded lore about Sienna and her role as some vague hero to Art’s villainy feels straight out of Nightmare 4. Not to mention that blaring synth music, which if you ask me, is far too hi fi for this kind of 80s worship. I seem to recall those synths not sounding anywhere near as loud and deep, production wise. My gripes about synth music aside, the important thing about all this comparison is that Terrifier doesn’t use Nightmare as a means of parody or blind worship, it uses the structure and pacing to bring out the best of its own story. Case in point: all this character building wouldn’t really matter if I found the characters dumb and annoying and I don’t. In fact I like Sienna and Jonathan quite a lot and wanted to see them succeed. The lore situation is one I’m torn on. See I’ve been dancing around it but a significant chunk of this movie’s runtime is dedicated to our characters discovering a magic sword that is capable of killing Art for good… somehow. It’s very abstract and not totally clear. Part of that is intentional, I think, as our characters are dealing with supernatural forces as best they can. We the audience only understand so much because they only understand so much, this is their first time reading into Demonology, give them a break. But that does mean a good chunk of this runtime feels needlessly drawn out and overcomplicated, as we get lengthy scenes investigating Sienna’s father and what, if anything, he knew about Art and the sword, and then come out of it not knowing much more than when we started. It feels like a lot of effort in the wrong place at times, which would be a much bigger problem if the rest of the movie wasn’t exactly what you wanted from a Terrifier sequel.

Yes, rest assured, that while the foundation is a bit different, Terrifier 2 is still as blunt and brutal as it could possibly be. I’m kind of at a loss of what to say otherwise, honestly. As good as the material is, it’s also very similar to Terrifier 1. IE, Art is still scary yet charming, and the gore effects are still outrageous and vile. I guess I could complain that there are a few scenes that more outwardly humorous, which isn’t something I really want from this franchise, but I can let those slide because A – they’re pretty funny, and B – most of them are just Art continuing to fuck with people in between his heavy murdering schedule, which is not all that different from what he was already doing.

So when all is said and done, Terrifier 2 is decent but bloated. A decedent, excessive, victory lap for a horror franchise that came from nothing but succeeded through pure fan support.

Terrifier 3
And so we come to the thing that made me lose sleep at night as I hyper-fixated on a single fact of life for far too long. Was it worth it? Meh. As already stated I’m not as big a fan of slashers as I used to be, so I didn’t really expect Terrifier 3 to somehow win me over as the secret Really Good One™. So where exactly are we? Well, it’s been 5 years since Art’s last massacre and Sienna and Jonathan are putting their lives back together slowly but surely. Jonathan is in college, doing the college thing, while Sienna has recently been released from an institution and has come to live with her aunt and uncle. Meanwhile, Art is on the loose once again along with his new partner in bloody crime, Victoria.

It’s yet another bloody affair, this time with a Christmas backdrop and… yeah I’m running out words already. Again, much like Terrifier 2, there’s only so much I can really say about Terrifier 3 since the foundational parts of the scenes have already been established. Art is enjoyable, the kills are properly bloody and gory, not much else really needs to be said. I guess this is the part where I’m supposed to call it “formulaic” but I hate how that word is used nowadays. A formula works when it’s a good formula, as it does here. I guess if you use formulaic in a derogatory manner, the Christmas setting does do a bit to help alleviate that. The film gets plenty of milage out of Art in a Santa outfit, screwing with mall shoppers and what not. I was more surprised by the fact that there isn’t anything remotely cynical about the Christmas holiday in here. It’s such low hanging fruit, to make a Christmas horror movie that is not only Christmas themed, but thinks it’s as funny and satirical as A Christmas Story. So every Christmas themed scene is punctuated with bored mall Santas and screaming, greedy children. But no, Terrifier 3 is pretty sincere when it comes to Christmas as a holiday, probably because that’s where the horror is supposed to come from. It’s the time of year where everyone is supposed to be nice and thankful and giving – the perfect setup for a maniac like Art to bastardize.

So there’s that but then there’s the expanded lore with Sienna and her hero… thing (persona?) (character?). Whatever it is, it’s back and still not all that clear, though this time around there is a bit more blunt angel/devil/Christ/antichrist imagery at play, so I guess that ties in with Christmas and all that? Compared to Terrifier 2, Terrifier 3 isn’t all that much different but it also doesn’t really do anything wrong. Part of me wants to chastise the ending for feeling a bit rushed but considering we have a much more reasonable 2 hr runtime instead of a 2.5 hr runtime I guess I won’t chastise it for that. I guess it just feels rushed because so many characters get unceremoniously killed off at the 11th hour, like they forgot what kind of movie they were making and had to film all the death scenes in one go before the money ran out. So the fat has been trimmed a bit, but there’s still some stretch marks, I guess it could be worse.

Conclusion
So after all that, what have we learned? Not much of substance, I guess, but it really does bare repeating that it’s nice to see a horror franchise like this sprouting from genuine fan interest, and having the quality to maintain that momentum. I have to admit after Terrifier 3, I’m not sure I’ll bother with the already in development Terrifier 4. I just have better things to do with my time, tbh. But regardless if I do or don’t, I’m glad fans of this franchise will get what they want. That’s how things are supposed to work. You, the artist, make something genuine and cool, and we, the audience, lap it up like animals, and the cycle continues.