BLOGTOBER 10/26/2022: TERRIFIER 2 (and various other TERRIFIERS)
I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the Art the Clown phenomenon for a minute now, and I may be developing a kind of begrudging respect for it, but I still don’t know if I really get it. The thing that keeps me from dismissing it outright as just a bunch of edgelord nonsense is that even at their worst, these movies seem like a ton of work to make, featuring elaborate gore gags that would be a huge pain in the ass for a small, independent crew to create. On their tiny budgetary scale, movies like ALL HALLOW’S EVE and TERRIFIER 1 & 2 really have to run on love and desire, which I think are the most important ingredients in any production. What I struggle with is the everything-else part: I’m not sure these movies are motivated by anything other than the urge to offend, which is kind of lame when it stands alone. The best thing about them for me, personally, is that they challenge me to question if I really am offended by them for reasons other than their prurient nature—and if so, how and why.
The Art the Clown trilogy is less like a collection of three movies starring a central character, and more like a single movie that has been gestating over the course of three releases. TERRIFIER 2 is inarguably the most creative and mature (am I really saying this?) of the three, amalgamating choice elements of its two predecessors into something that is more like a “real movie” and less like an excuse to try out a bunch of fucked-up ideas. And I don’t mean to shit on the idea of making a movie as a sandbox for special effects; people have been doing that from the earliest origins of the horror genre. But, there’s something a little different about modern projects that should benefit from the films that have gone before. I find it hard not to judge movies a little more harshly if they’ve come out during my own lifetime. I assume that those filmmakers know what I know, and I might expect them to use that knowledge a certain way.
When Joe Bob Briggs ran John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN on The Last Drive-In, he remarked (approximately) that it was the first time a violent slasher movie starred a psychopath, where audiences didn’t have to worry that the film itself was made BY psychopaths, unlike the gnarlier material that circulated in the Times Square grindhouses of the 1970s. HALLOWEEN was obviously made by UCLA-trained professionals with mainstream aspirations, and if it suffered from accusations of misogyny and sadism, this was because it was being compared to more mainstream fare by people who saw it in suburban theaters; those critics didn’t have the context of the world’s many LAST HOUSEs (ON THE LEFT, or ON DEAD END STREET, or wherever), movies made by former pornographers and angry young men whose main motivation, besides making a quick and dirty buck, was just to be extremely antisocial. As a modern viewer, when I watch something like HOUSE ON THE EDGE OF THE PARK, I understand that it comes from a different universe than the one I live in; it’s darker, more desperate, forged by different historical and socioeconomic forces, and I relish the opportunity to delve into that psycho-social space without being directly subjected to the grim reality from whence it came. It’s all sort of academic for me. Nowadays, people who make really antisocial movies are all nerds; their movies tend to be an act of fandom, and even if they’re trying to one-up young Sam Raimi or Peter Jackson in the fucked-uppedness department, you can tell where they’re coming from culturally. You don’t have to risk life and limb to see their movies in the woebegone grindhouses of yesteryear, and if you’ve even heard of them, you’re probably a nerd, too. All this can make these productions less threatening and more familiar, regardless of how demented their content is.
As a brief aside, though: Apparently there are reports going around of people vomiting and fainting in theatrical audiences for TERRIFIER 2, and who knows if that’s true or just an exciting rumor, but it’s astounding to me that A) a movie like this is playing in the kinds of theaters that serve vulnerable normie viewers to begin with, and b) the rumor of this visceral audience response has been repeated in USA Today. I mean when I was growing up, if something like EVIL DEAD or DEAD ALIVE turned up in an extremely mainstream publication, it would be because of the Satanic Panic, it would be because the 700 Club was going after it or something. And in my mind, the TERRIFIER series is in a sub-basement way beneath the level of EVIL DEAD; it’s from a grimy, underground place that’s barely even connected to the world where fans of SCREAM or Chucky live. The fact that it’s in movie theaters when fewer and fewer films are getting theatrical releases at all is wild enough to me, but a spotlight in USA Today is way, way beyond my comprehension. It’s like if Olaf Ittenbach’s BURNING MOON were reviewed by Leonard Maltin. I almost love that this is happening. It’s like, am I on another planet?
Anyway.
Where was I?
Oh yeah, whether it’s fair or not, I tend to hold modern creators of “fucked up” movies to a different standard than their predecessors. I think the new kids can be accused of lacking the innocence of the exploitation artists of previous decades. Someone like Herschell Gordon Lewis would have been aware of the rising tide of social change, but he wasn’t raised with political correctness as the norm; he was an entrepreneur who knew that the then-new splatter subgenre would be a must-see novelty for contemporary audiences. And, on some level, misogynistic anger was ordinary and unquestioned. On the other hand, when you make a movie in 2016 at the beginning of the Trump era where a crazed killer saws a teenage girl in half vagina-first, it has a different vibe. The ironic pleasure of seeing a really uninhibited film from a more ignorant era is nowhere to be found, and you have to ask yourself: What the fuck is this movie’s problem?
To be really, really clear, I don’t think that media should be constrained to saying whatever we think is good for society in real life. I think artists have as much right to say whatever they want, as audiences have to criticize it as harshly as they like, or to simply change the channel. (I’d put a boundary on this only where we’re talking about out in the open political propaganda whose obvious motivation is a call to action, but fortunately, that’s not what I’m dealing with in this piece) There is no level on which I’m suggesting that filmmaker Damien Leone shouldn’t be doing what he does, and in our intensely moralizing cultural moment, I hope that nothing I say about his movies is taken as a recommendation to censure him. I just find it impossible to talk about his invention of Art the Clown without addressing the extreme, misogynistic hostility that pours out of these projects. It’s probably reasonable to assume that creators of this ilk stage gonzo attacks on female victims out of an affectionate nostalgia for films like MANIAC and THE TOOLBOX MURDERS that so worried second wave feminists. In the case of the TERRIFIER movies, though, one might feel like they push things past the point of homage and into what can come off as a real love of the thought of chopping up girls.
Damien Leone’s 2013 anthology film ALL HALLOW’S EVE is best known as a container for his 2011 short TERRIFIER, in which a young, horror-loving costume designer is tormented by the silent, psychotic Art the Clown. In that segment, after decorating a gas station bathroom with his own excretia, Art hounds the young woman, whipping her with a scourge made out of all sorts of sharp objects, and eventually amputating her limbs and carving slurs like SLUT and CUNT all over what remains of her body. Some of these images made their way into the feature version of TERRIFIER five years later, though notably not the latter bit, which—and I know this is going to make me sound insane considering the context—is just really unnecessary. Art the Clown functions best as a chaos agent who dismantles everyone and everything in his way purely for his own amusement, so there’s something off about him focusing on a hatred of attractive young women specifically. You kind of want Art to be like a slasher movie version of Bugs Bunny; when he expresses this incel obsession with women as sources of sexual frustration, it’s limiting and distracting. It feels like something the movie insists on to its own detriment…and like, why?
2016’s TERRIFIER may have disposed of the idea of vandalizing a woman’s body with “whore”-type epithets, but it sticks with the notion of targeting attractive girls and taking away their beauty to punish them. Sure, there are a few male victims in this movie, but who could possibly remember them when the movie’s centerpiece is a nude teenage girl who Art bisects with a hacksaw, beginning at her crotch? The doomed men don’t quite get the same gender-specific treatment as a bag lady whose severed breasts Art parades around in, or the girl whose face Art eats, leaving her as a circus freak version of herself whose outrageous ugliness drives her insane. TERRIFIER moves so single-mindedly from one gore gag to another, without anything resembling character or plot development, that it’s hard not to focus on the rather specific spectacle of violence against women and their femininity.
By contrast, 2022’s TERRIFIER 2 is a masterpiece of dramaturgy. Sure, it takes almost two and a half hours to make its point (?!), but this movie has distinct characters, a story, and more experimentation to offer than its predecessors. Interestingly, it also represents a culmination of all of Damien Leone’s creative work. All three have an opening salvo that involves a bunch of literal shit, a cat o’ nine tails scene, and the idea of women losing their minds when they lose their attractiveness. TERRIFIER 2 also brings the realization of failed plans Leone had for his first short, THE 9TH CIRCLE, which was originally meant to involve an angel figure battling Art the Clown. Finally, the latest film blows up a detail from the least of the three components of ALL HALLOW’S EVE, and makes it a central piece of the puzzle: The middle section of the anthology features a woman being terrorized by an alien invader, but a stray piece of that story is that her absent husband makes disturbing paintings featuring Art. That’s a loose thread in ALL HALLOW’S, but in TERRIFIER 2 it becomes the key to the protagonist’s destiny. I may not love these movies, but I respect Leone’s long-term focus, and it has brought him a long way from his humbler origins.
TERRIFIER 2 finds aspiring costume designer Sienna (the very appealing Laura LaVera) painstakingly assembling a She-Ra-like Halloween costume based on her late father’s designs. Sienna and her little brother Jonathan (Elliott Fullam) have both inherited his interest in dark fantasy, but where Sienna channels it into productively chasing after her career goals, Jonathan is haunted by their father’s visions. He pores over an old sketch book containing images suggestive of the Miles County Massacre that took place in the first TERRIFIER film, and plans to go as Art the Clown for Halloween. Sienna and their mother Barbara (Sarah Voigt) worry that Jonathan is a burgeoning psycho, but we see him as a sensitive young man who his ambivalently drawn to what frightens him—a relatable characteristic for any horror fan—and moreover, these images are all he has left of his dad, who committed suicide after a battle with brain cancer. The family speculates that their patriarch’s disturbing visions resulted from his tumor, but both Sienna and Jonathan suffer similarly: while Jonathan fixates helplessly on Art, Sienna has disturbing nightmares about the clown, and is already being medicated for psychological issues. Art (David Howard Thornton who, let’s face it, makes these movies), meanwhile, is having his own familial experience with a new character credited as the Little Pale Girl (Amelie McLain), a psychotic tot made in Art’s image who accompanies him on his new killing spree. Only Sienna and Jonathan can see the Pale Girl, suggesting that she is the product of whatever supernatural force resurrected Art at the end of the first TERRIFIER film; furthermore, it becomes clear that Jonathan and Sienna’s father was not deranged by illness, but he had actually channeled a vision of how his children could put a stop to the clown’s rampage.
Whether or not this story achieves real coherence is beside the point, which I posit is about how you channel your id material. The kids’ father was tormented by it unto death; Art and his daughter (?) enjoy it shamelessly; Jonathan tries to understand what scares him; Sienna makes herself into an avenging angel that can defeat it. It’s an interesting meditation for a series of movies that appear to be all about pure aggression and the pleasure of stirring people up. After fifteen years of hard work, Damien Leone has refined his vision into an essay on the faces of horror fandom: Many people are happy to accuse horror fans of psychopathy, ignoring the fact that fans are often sensitive types who use the genre to safely explore difficult feelings and experiences. Sure, some of us turn into assholes, but others find paths that are creative and productive, not destructive. And this is how, after hours of sometimes-painful viewing and chewing, I have somehow found my way to finding something nice to say about the TERRIFIER series. I may not have enjoyed it, but I came to respect it (or at least, the incredible work ethic required to get it done), and I think maybe I finally get it. Still and all, I’m glad I can finally stop watching it. Onto the next!
