Conventional wisdom may dictate that you need a guy dressed up as a bat to properly defeat the Joker. But this past weekend, the indie distributor Cineverse fought fire with fire – or fought one deadly clown with another, as Terrifier 3 knocked the ill-regarded Joker sequel out of the top spot at the box office. (For that matter, ex-Batman Michael Keaton did also outshine Joker: Folie à Deux, with the sixth weekend of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.) For those who only have room in their head to keep track of one psychotic clown at a time, Terrifier is a homegrown slasher-movie franchise that began in earnest with a barely released practical-effects calling card: the first Terrifier feature, which played in a handful of theaters in 2018. (A shorter version appeared in the earlier anthology film All Hallows’ Eve.) A vastly more elaborate but still low-budget sequel followed in 2022; now a third film, still only a $2m production, has outgrossed its predecessor in a single weekend, handily taking the number one spot. It’s on track to become one of the biggest horror movies of the year.
The new entry continues the, ah, adventures of Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton), a silent killer outfitted in black-and-white face paint and an accompanying clown costume, pantomiming his way through a variety of intensely grisly, sometimes stomach-churning murders. Though the movies aren’t terrifically clear about this, Art is a serial killer during most of the first film, then resurrected by a demonic entity that makes him near impossible to kill in the sequels. Not that anyone has much of a chance to try: the typical Art the Clown encounter involves him pestering, vexing or otherwise confounding people who think he’s just a weirdo in a costume before he whips a weapon out of his garbage bag and commences murders that can be, quite literally, torturously drawn out (several of the “kills” are paced out like action or dance sequences) or, on occasion, extremely concise (sometimes he just shoots people).
