Review: Terrifier 3 (2024)

Terrifier 3 (2024)

Not rated

Score: 4 out of 5

With Terrifier 3, the little indie splatter horror franchise that could has entered "franchise mode". On top of its advertising, its merchandising, its tie-in single by Ice Nine Kills, and its staggering box-office success, the movie itself makes Art the Clown as much the main character as its returning heroine Sienna Shaw, with nearly every kill now a horrifying set piece of explosive carnage and Art's sidekick from the last movie, the ambiguously demonic Little Pale Girl, upgraded to a co-villain in her own right as she possesses somebody and joins in on the action herself. The best comparison I can think of is A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, though I'd argue that this is the better movie of the two by a wide margin, one that not only cleans up the biggest flaw that held back its predecessor but also manages to be a twisted, explosive celebration of practical effects work unbound by the MPA (as in, they just up and released this unrated knowing damn well it would've gotten an NC-17 the second they showed up at the MPA's offices). It's a big, swaggering splatterfest that's as bonkers as its killer clown villain, and while it does unfortunately introduce some new flaws that leave me wondering if Damien Leone, the writer, director, and main visionary behind this series, is getting lost in the weeds a bit with his creation, this is otherwise one hell of an experience.

Set five years after the events of the last movie, our protagonist Sienna Shaw, who has spent her time in and out of psychiatric care thanks to what she experienced in her last encounter with Art the Clown, has just left the hospital to live with her aunt Jess, uncle Greg, and little cousin Gabbie. The idea of a slasher sequel focusing on how traumatized the final girl has become is not a new idea (all the way back in the '90s, Scream 2 and Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later built their heroines' arcs around it), but this movie does it well, in its characteristic fashion. Lauren LaVera gets another great opportunity to play Sienna as more than just the "tough chick" horror heroine, somebody who can undoubtedly still kick Art's ass but has also been left a psychological wreck by all the things she's witnessed. She has visions of her dead friends blaming her for their deaths, the last movie's implications that she was going insane all but spelled out in the text now, and she recoils when Gabbie goes snooping in her diary and reads about some of the things she described in there. We get a flashback to Sienna's childhood, her father played by Jason Patric in a cameo, illustrating how she loved him and driving home how much his decline and ultimate death broke her. I find it amusing how the Terrifier films, with their in-your-face violence and lack of subtlety, are sometimes seen as a rejoinder to the "elevated horror" boom of the last ten years, particularly how many such films use their monsters and demons as metaphors for some trauma in the protagonists' pasts, because Sienna's arc in these movies treads very similar waters -- and, for my money, more or less pulls it off. In two movies, Sienna Shaw has become one of the all-time great horror heroines, and LaVera is central to why.

It also helps, of course, to have a real monster for your heroine to face off against. And here, we have not one, but two of them. I've already sung David Howard Thornton's praises for his performance as Art the Clown before, and he largely sticks to what worked in the past, combining great physical comedy with a mean streak a mile wide to make for a sick, sadistic villain who treats everything like one big joke and is clearly enjoying himself as he hunts and torments his victims. At times, Art feels almost like a silent slasher version of Deadpool, a guy who's in on the joke and feels like he wants to let everybody else in on it too. The Little Pale Girl also makes a return, in a sense, this time possessing the first film's lone survivor Victoria Hayes, who begins the film institutionalized after Art had mutilated her face and driven her insane only for Art to break her out. If Art is a slasher version of the Joker, then the possessed Victoria is his Harley Quinn, a female counterpart who is not only just as vicious and terrifying but also serves as his "voice" throughout the film, being the one who directly taunts people through words as opposed to just gestures. Samantha Scaffidi is playing a character almost wholly different from what she was in the first movie, unrecognizable both literally due to her mangled face and figuratively as she partakes in the violence rather than trying to survive it, and she turned out to be the film's secret weapon, somebody who kept the scares grounded even as Art takes the Freddy Krueger route of becoming a more overtly comedic killer. Victoria brought most of the film's genuine scares here versus Art's more cartoonish carnage, and she proved to be a very welcome addition to not only the lore but also, more importantly, the movie as a whole.

That's not to say that Art isn't scary anymore, though. As I've said when discussing the prior films, sheer visceral excess has a weight to it all its own, and when paired with the more comedic elements of his character, that lends him the feeling of a sick, degenerate troll for whom nothing actually matters except his own amusement. This is a movie that happily crosses lines that other slashers wouldn't dare tread near, a gross display of viscera that offers Leone another chance to show off his special effects craftsmanship with the kind of set piece kills that feel like they were concocted by a schoolyard full of kids in a contest to come up with the sickest ways to die. We get a guy getting the skin on his head ripped off, liquid nitrogen being used to freeze a man's flesh before it's smashed off with a hammer, live rats being shoved down a woman's throat and then eating their way out through her neck, a shower scene to rival the infamous bedroom scene from the second film (...who says that doesn't fit there?), beheadings, dismemberments, the works, as well as Art actually "going there" when it comes to one of horror's biggest taboos. These movies are being hyped up at this point as gauntlets for seasoned horror fans to run (and shock others with), and while the tone is too lighthearted for it to really hang with the grossest examples of splatter horror, make no mistake: the warnings that theaters are putting up for this are there for a reason.

The pacing is tighter this time around, showing that Leone has learned from one of the main criticisms of the last movie. It's still just over two hours long, but it moves a lot quicker than before, each hour respectively feeling like the first two acts of a movie that's setting up for a smashing finale but still delivering the goods where it matters. The plot builds on the second film's implications that there was something more cosmic going on than just a simple slasher story, explicitly naming the Little Pale Girl as a demon and strongly implying that Sienna too has an angel in her corner, ultimately ending on a cliffhanger and leaving a lot of open questions that the fourth movie promises to answer. The added lore did a lot to flesh out the story, put some fun twists on a lot of slasher tropes (the final girl, the killer coming back from the dead), and got me interested in seeing the next one. That said, not only does it create a risk of continuity lockout for people who haven't seen any of the other films, especially with how the opening hinges so much on characters and events from the second film, it also naturally means that this movie's own story is incomplete. A lot hinges on whether the fourth movie sticks the landing, and right now, all I can say is this: at least they didn't try to expand on Art's backstory the way the Nightmare sequels did Freddy's or the Halloween sequels did Michael Myers'. His whole deal boils down to the fact that he was such an evil fuckin' bastard in life (which, if you've seen any of these movies... yeah) that the forces of darkness took a liking to him and revived him as their champion to keep killing. It's a simple explanation that preserves his mystique and doesn't detract from what makes him so enjoyable to watch, the kind of thing you'd expect a slasher fan to come up with if they were asked to develop the lore around a slasher villain, and I appreciated it.

The Bottom Line

Terrifier 3 isn't without its flaws, but it's still the best film in the series thus far. If Art the Clown isn't a bona fide horror icon at this point, then it's only because he's still fairly new. Check it out if you've got the stomach.