Terrifier 3 is the newest film in the Terrifier franchise, written and directed by Damien Leone. Leone, along with Jason Baker, John Caglione Jr., Brianna Loydgren, Kyle Roberts, and Ryan Keith Ward handle all the special practical and makeup effects.
I need to give the whole FX team their props and mention them all by name, because they did an AMAZING job on this, depending on your tolerance level for extreme simulated violence and gore. More on that later.
Terrifier 3 also stars Lauren LaVera as Sienna, David Howard Thornton as Art the Clown, Antonella Rose as Gabbie, Elliott Fullam as Jonathan, Samantha Scaffidi as Victoria Heyes, Margaret Anne Florence as Jessica, and Bryce Johnson as Greg as the main cast. There are some pretty cool relatively quick cameos from folks like Chris Jericho (WWE Raw, AEW Dynamite, Dark Match), Jason Patric (The Lost Boys, Entourage), Clint Howard (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Halloween 2007), Daniel Roebuck (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., The Man In The High Castle), and horror icon Tom Savini (Django Unchained, Day Of The Dead 1985)!
The film starts off with Art savagely, graphically murdering a family on Christmas Eve, kids included!
That’s how the film starts.
It then picks up pretty much right after the end of the second film in the series, and tells the ongoing story of the battle between Sienna and Art that was established in the 2nd film. This time, Art is accompanied by Victoria Heyes, who was disfigured by Art in the first Terrifier film. She went crazy after he ate her face and left her for dead. The mental break somehow compelled her to now join him in his violent, depraved shenanigans!
Art and Victoria sequester themselves in an abandoned house and lie dormant for a number of years. When construction workers enter the building and discover the bodies, they somehow reawaken both Art and Victoria and spark a killing spree that doesn’t stop until the end of the film!
Without going into deep spoilers, I can say with complete confidence that this is some of the best splatterpunk gore I’ve ever seen in an actual theater. Art and Victoria (mostly Art) do some incredibly complex, very violent things to the bodies of their victims. Subtlety, nuance, and restraint are not in Art’s vocabulary AT ALL! ANYONE can get it, whether you’re a terrible person or someone who wouldn’t harm a fly, whether you’re a fit, nubile college student or an harmless old man, Art will savagely mutilate your body for no reason other than he can.
I mentioned Leone and his team of FX and makeup artists in the beginning because I wanted to make sure that they are properly named and recognized. While Leone does most of the actual FX, his team helps out, and it shows! People are torn apart, flash frozen then shattered, stabbed, slashed open, violently force fed, even exploded in very graphic, extremely realistic looking ways! The inclusion of horror effects icon Tom Savini in this with a cameo was fairly spot on, as a lot of the FX work is reminiscent of his groundbreaking, genre-defining FX work during the early 70s-late 90s. This film is ABSOLUTELY a love letter to gorehounds like this reviewer; extreme splatterpunk horror is one of my favorite subgenres of horror, and this film delivers the gore in SPADES! It’s very reminiscent of films in that subgenre like Adam Chaplin, Premutos, and Peter Jackson’s Braindead (yes, THAT Peter Jackson, the guy who made all The Lord Of The Rings films).
And there’s one kill in particular (shower scene!!!!) that made my inner gorehound squeal with glee as it played out on screen. Art does something with a chainsaw to a man that is very reminiscent of the hacksaw kill in the first Terrifier film, and wow…just…WOW! I’ve seen all kinds of extreme gore and don’t ever usualy have any problem with it. But this kill? This shower scene kill? I had to cover my eyes for a quick second. ME, a self professed gorehound and lover of transgressive cinema, ***I*** had to close my eyes for a second while that shower scene played out.
Extremely effective practical effects are on display throughout this film. There’s literally nothing else in theaters in 2024 that comes even remotely close to this in terms of how violent it is.
Cinematographer George Steuber uses Panavision anamorphic lenses to give this film a nostalgic, almost vintage feel with subtle lens flares present. It feels like an 80s flick, but with a modern sheen to it. Editors Chris DiBerardino and Matt Provenzano give us colors that are tastefully heavily saturated, and the overall look seems to be sporting a nice, smooth film grain. The cinematographer in me was just as floored by some of the shot compositions as was the gorehound in me by the kills! Also, shout out to my friend Olga Turka, this film’s production designer. If you read this, just know how immensely proud of you I am! Also, I caught your picture on the back of the book at the end in the bus scene. Clever!
As far as the story and plot go, it’s somewhat confusing unless you’ve seen both of the previous films in the franchise. I mean, you could still kind of understand what’s going on, but there are some major story beats that tie directly into very specific things that happened in prior films. This film attempts to explain as much as it can about the lore surrounding Art and Sienna’s relationship, but it won’t make much sense to you if you don’t know why Sienna and Art have a relationship in the way it was explained in the second film. It’s definitely watchable and you can follow along with the plot serviceably, but, much like most of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, if you haven’t seen the prior films, you’ll probably be asking a ton of questions as to why certain things are happening on screen.
And speaking of things happening on screen, the way Leone ends this is WIDE open for a Terrifier 4. In fact, he has already confirmed that a 4th film is coming. To which I say “BRING IT ON!”
As much as I enjoyed this film, I have to be intellectually honest and admit that it really is made mainly for fans of the franchise. Art has an almost rabid following, and Leone knows this. David Howard Thornton plays Art with an expert command of body language and expression. Art is mute and never makes a sound, so all his communication is conveyed strictly through body language and expressions, and a few props like a squeaky horn. Thornton gives Art an almost loveable quality, even as he rips partially severed limbs from college kids’ bodies and silently, expressively laughs at their abject misery! There are parts of this film where you feel both dread for the characters that are unfortunate enough to come across him, AND a sick sense of humor that subtly permeates each ridiculously gory kill scene as Art gives us that signature wicked smile. There are some things that Art does both before he kills people and WHILE he’s killing them that are legitimately funny.
Leone and Thornton are actually quite active and approachable on social media, and have their ears to the streets, so to speak. So I suspect that when Leone made the third film, he actually listened to what we the fans wanted, and gave it to us in spades. Unfortunately, this means that most mainstream audiences will be turned off by the wanton, depraved, EXTREME gore on display. However, because the fanbase is so strong, it almost doesn’t matter; this film beat out Joker 2, a film with a much larger budget ($2M for T3 vs $300M for J2) with far more recognizable characters and actors, by MILLIONS of dollars in their first weekend!
WE ARE LEGION!
WE HAVE SPOKEN WITH OUR DOLLARS!
It’s not all flowers and puppies though. There are some pretty glaring plot holes, and things that just don’t make any sense, even in-universe (none of these children wanting to sit on Santa’s lap notices that Santa is a scary looking clown with a bloody beard and bloodstains all over his clothes? How do hands mangled severely enough to expose meat and bone work well enough to not only hold a sword, but use it effectively? An active college dorm full of college kids is somehow oblivious to two people screaming at the top of their lungs while being brutally turned into succotash with a loud ass chainsaw?), but that is almost irrelevant. You don’t watch a Terrifier film for a gripping story; you come for the kills!
And booooyyyyyyyy does it deliver. SHEEESH!!!!
Terrifier 3 was a very entertaining, balls to the wall, in-your-face, unapologetically violent (borderline NEEDLESSLY so) entry into the splatterpunk genre that is destined to become a cult classic, and firmly solidifies Art The Clown as THE most sadistic killer of all of the major horror icons like Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, Jason Vorhees, etc. Those guys will kill you, usually relatively quickly. Art? Nah, he’s gonna take his time and prolong your suffering for as long as possible, and will find insanely painful ways to do it. In fact, there are scenes where someone gets stabbed in the neck and bleeds out, where Art pushes two girls out of the way, causing them to fall hard to the ground, where a guy gets shot in the head, killing him instantly, and a bunch of people get blown up.
They were LUCKY.
