So much has been said of the Terrifier franchise’s ‘glow-up’, moving from a rough-around the edges labour of love with a budget under $55,000, to more polished $2 million production for its latest outing. But the very best of the box office juggernaut that is Terrifier 3 comes when it doesn’t concern itself with the trappings of conventional narrative cinema at all – subverting Yuletide expectations to give us the Christmas present we never realised we needed.
The best way to see Terrifier 3 might be with no prior knowledge of its lore. I don’t just mean the experiences of its recurring characters in parts one or two, but the rags to riches journey of the franchise’s creator, Damien Leone. It’s not something I will be going into here, not because I don’t care – I love nothing more than to see an indy filmmaker come good – but because everyone’s probably already heard about it.
I’m not here to patronise it for how much ‘better’ it may look than the earlier exploits of Art the Clown, or how Leone might or might not have ironed out the bugs from those first ventures. I’m not interested in how this outing might have worked better in terms of balancing a plot with obscene amounts of gory pratfall. I think it might be more interesting to just think about Terrifier 3 in isolation. What are its strengths, and what does it say about us that those strengths helped it to rake in $88 million in theatres?
Cartoon violence
Circling back to my opening contention, then, I think watching Terrifier 3 without any prior knowledge is the best way forward, because it is at its weakest when it tries to live up to mainstream expectations. When it tries to be ‘good’ by conventional standards. When it tries to build a Hollywood-style sequence between its other episodes.
In contrast, Terrifier 3 is at its strongest when it leans into the impossibilities of its chief antagonist. Art the Clown (brought to life here by an incredible silent-era performance from David Howard Thornton) is Michael Myers through the lens of a Tex Avery cartoon. As much as his mischievous physicality takes cues from Marcel Marceau or Charlie Chaplin, he exists beyond the logistics of reality in a way that more closely resembles a rogue Looney Tune.
Nobody ever asks how Wile E. Coyote can afford the elaborate gadgets he orders from Acme in his fruitless pursuit of Road Runner. It doesn’t matter where Bugs Bunny gets anvils from to hand to his adversary teetering over a cliff-edge (or how he is able to lift it himself). Likewise, we don’t need to know how Art has suddenly got his grubby paws on an aerosolised flask of liquid nitrogen. It only matters how he puts it to use – and how he exports these cartoonish happenstances to use in an genre we don’t expect it. That’s the franchise’s most successful thematic joke – we’re seeing what would happen if we applied the absurdity of a Warner Brothers cartoon to the savage ‘reality’ of a slasher horror; drawing on a kind of absurdity already present in the genre (Michael Myers can be shot, set on fire, blown up, and still return next Halloween), but making it overt.
When Leone gives into the pressure to explain why his infamous clown has returned again, despite being decapitated in part two, it feels a little unnecessary. And the more lore the film tries to deliver to ‘make sense’, the more laboured and grating these attempts become. That’s a minor point, however, because there are very few cracks which David Howard Thornton’s acting cannot immediately paper over – his facial expressions seemingly painted on by Chuck Jones, sinking from childlike wonder to stonie-faced rage in a hilarious heartbeat.
While that probably is what has carried the franchise this far anyway, that kind of performance works especially well in a Christmas film. And this is where Terrifier 3 really comes into its own – story and all.
The opening scene sees a jolly man dressed in red sneak into a family home on Christmas eve. After placing a bulging sack on the floor, he draws an axe from its cloth, and proceeds to butcher the entire family (mostly offscreen). Coated in a fine mist of gore, Art proceeds to put his feet up, and exaggeratedly munch through the cookies and warm milk the parents had left out for ‘Santa’ – making sure to wash the dishes despite the disgusting state of the rest of the house, for an extra comedic beat.
The thing is, what I just described doesn’t sound especially funny. If anything it sounds mean-spirited and unnervingly cruel. But by some Christmas miracle, it never actually comes across that way – and perhaps that’s thanks to Leone’s understanding of the audience’s evolving attitude to the ‘season of goodwill’ in a world which increasingly resembles a year-round version of The Purge. This isn’t just a family that Art is wiping out. It’s the perfect family, a bourgeois holiday archetype that has grown increasingly distasteful over the years.
The spirit of the season
Amid a colossal fall in living standards across North America and Europe, Christmas’ annual propaganda still expects us to relate to its old expectations. With inflation driven by price-gauging corporate vampires and parasitic landlords having far outpaced the wages suppressed by our miserly bosses, holiday depictions of warm American suburbia might as well have been beamed to most of us live from Mars – but they come with the implicit suggestion that if we aren’t having that sainted middle-class experience, maybe we ought to be trying a little harder.
The perfect lives of Christmas families are so divorced from our lived experience, then, that materially those expectations have become a millstone rather than an aspiration to most of us – one which we’re keen to cast off. Beyond that, though, with the general disappearance of a ‘middle’ in society’s wage structure, there’s also the fact that the blissful, dependable stability being sold by Christmas propaganda is only a reality for the C-suite. The recent murder of Brian Thompson suggests those people aren’t exactly flavour of the month – so is it any surprise that audiences were so willing to indulge in festive bloodlust with Terrifier 3?
As the plot moves on, Leone’s story seems to lean into this inclination further, with the introduction of our protagonist Sienna (Lauren LaVera), and her surviving family. Having survived the events of Terrifier 2, Sienna has been left traumatised, to the extent she has spent the intervening period in a mental health facility – but she arrives in this story looking to make the best of Christmas with her aunt, uncle and cousin, who also live in a cosy suburban paradise. But from the moment the survivor of a bloody massacre forgets to mask her haunted expression during dinner, those loving family members begin quietly discussing how she her failure to move on might be ruining their Christmas, and how after breaking down into tears at the mall, she might be “better off” being committed.
Things don’t work out for these characters, oddly enough. But it doesn’t feel like we’re really invited to root for them, anyway – which more traditional Hollywood fare might insist on.
Here, Leone might be giving us more than simply subversion of Hollywood’s holiday archetypes. He seems to tapping into our collective desire for something bad to happen to a small section of society, and is determined to unapologetically deliver on that front. These are people who might feign sympathy for the plight for the ‘less fortunate’, but the moment it inconveniences them would consign their own flesh and blood to the trash heap. A teflon-coated demographic who might bleat support for Democrats of Republicans in November, but are financially comfortable to that they will remain untouched by either horrific outcome in December. A class who, for the most part, only get hurt in the fantasies of others.
Of course, seeing them hurt just this once, in glorious, gore-drenched detail this one time doesn’t materially change the way things are for most of us. But as the seasonal sluice opens to drown us in tone-deaf feel-good content once more, Terrifier 3 might just help to keep us sane… ish. To that end, Art has delivered us the perfect present for Christmas 2024, truly befitting of this age of collapse.
Happy Holidays.