Here is a film that opens with a self-contained prologue that gleefully sets its stall out, fair and square. The scene is a family home at Christmas time, the victims are said family, and the perpetrator is Art the Clown, dressed as Santa, wielding an axe. The rules of the film are also made plain: anyone can die and being a cute kid won’t save you, but while some victims are innocent, others earn their bloody endings – at least by the logic of horror movies. (In the case of this opening scene, the husband who tells his wife “I have to be up in three hours, you handle this” is justly marked for death.)
Is Terrifier 3 sophisticated cinema? Not exactly, but this stuff isn’t as easy to pull off as it looks. The number of horror films that promise to sicken your soul and shrivel your stomach is enormous, but the proportion that actually do so, particularly for veteran horror-watchers, is small. I’m pleased to report that Terrifier 3 is genuinely gruesome; your own mileage may vary, but it’s not for the faint of heart. Art isn’t a deranged finance bro like American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman – he’s a demon clown after all – but he’s just as interested in the lethal potential of a diverse array of tools including axes, bombs, dry ice, claw hammers, chainsaws, live rats, his bare hands, teeth, etc and writer-director Damien Leone delights in showing every gory second of the graphic mayhem and gratuitous cruelty.
