Damien Leone’s Terrifier (2016) admirably stretched a shoestring budget of $35,000 to create a throwback grindhouse aesthetic with viciously gory practical effects. Its villain, a silent mime-like clown named Art (David Howard Thornton), has the look to become an iconic slasher, clad in white and black, his inky greasepaint smile stretching wide in amusement as he gleefully dismembers young people. But the film, a feature-length spinoff of Leone’s 2013 Art the Clown-featuring anthology All Hallows’ Eve, is essentially plotless and feels largely like an aimless exercise in mean-spirited brutality, as we’ve previously argued here in Streaming Hell.
Enter Terrifier 2. Equipped with a significantly larger production budget of a $250,000, Leone appears to have produced the film he originally wanted to make, his original bare-bones approach now fleshed-out with character development, a creepy sidekick, a healthy dose of jet-black humor to go with its buckets of blood, and even some killer clown lore to boot. Throw in a pulsing synthwave soundtrack, and we’re left with a stylishly over-the-top gorefest that’s a hell of a lot more fun than it has any right to be.
Though technically a true sequel – it opens immediately after the events of the previous film’s Miles County Massacre and then skips ahead a year to the next Halloween – Terrifier 2 shares a similar enhanced-retread approach with that of Evil Dead 2. Sam Raimi’s 1987 sequel to his gory 1981 film The Evil Dead (which hewed much closer to straight horror) imbued its gore with a healthy dose of comedy. Leone taps into some of that here. Evil Dead 2 was also similarly produced with a near tenfold increase in budget and attracted a much wider audience through its excessive gore, which was as funny as it was ultra-violent. Here, Leone utilizes essentially the same premise as he did last time – killer clown loves to gruesomely kill – but does so with far more craft and flair.
Terrifier 2 gets to the grim humor right off the bat, as upon escaping the morgue from which he’s inexplicably resurrected, Art heads to a local laundromat to wash the copious bloodstains out of his clown getup. Such a mundane task amusingly contrasts with the superhuman or even supernatural natures of iconic slashers. After all, how is Michael’s mask still white and his jumpsuit relatively free of blood and viscera? Does Freddy use fabric softener on those sweaters? Do Leatherface’s domestic duties include doing separate loads of shirts and skins? At the laundromat, Art meets the Little Pale Girl (Amelie McLain), a perpetually tilt-headed specter wearing a similar clown getup and sporting the same unnerving perma-grin. From there, we move forward a year to the next Halloween, and the franchise’s first foray into genuine character-building begins.
High schooler Sienna (Lauren LaVera) is grieving the recent loss of her father to a brain tumor and is still somewhat traumatized by the events of the Miles County Massacre one year prior. She’s horrified with the lurid fascination that little bro Jonathan (Elliott Fullam) has developed for Art, the boy even wanting to dress as the clown for Halloween. Isn’t it as sick and inappropriate as dressing like Jeffrey Dahmer or Charles Manson, she argues, to which Jonathan points out that Manson technically never killed anyone; he’s that kind of weird middle-schooler. Jonathan’s fascination only grows when he discovers their late father had frequently drawn Art’s freakish image in a sketchbook leading up to his death.
Sienna suffers a panic attack when her friends joke about how the hideously maimed Vicky (the final girl from the first film) recently attacked and mutilated a talk show host. Meanwhile, Jonathan spots Art and the Little Pale Girl, who is invisible to most other folks, playing with a dead opossum in the hallway of the school. Sienna starts having nightmares about Art—including one where he mows down a children’s show cast with a machine gun, in an active shooter parallel that’s perhaps the film’s only indefensibly distasteful moment. The situation escalates from there when she awakes to find that the wings she had crafted as part of her angelic warrior princess costume that her father had designed are now aflame in her bedroom.
As unsavory by definition as it is for a slasher to resort to the detached efficiency of gun violence, Art’s later use of a shotgun does lead to one of the film’s biggest laughs, when upon seating the ensuing corpse at the head of the dinner table, he shoves a spoonful of mashed potatoes into the gaping blast crater of its face. But the scene everyone was talking about a year ago, upon the release of Leone’s film and amid its shocking climb to a $15 million box office, involves the protracted bedroom mutilation of Sienna’s friend Allie (Casey Hartnett). She survives for such an outlandishly long time that the scene cannot be taken seriously. And that’s what makes this sequel so much more enjoyable and accessible than the pointless brutality of the first film—how can any horror junkie not chuckle as Art slaps literal salt in her wounds like a pie to the face.
The film’s humor and fleshed-out characters are actually a sticking point with some horror hounds, who online have bemoaned the second film as trying to explain Art’s existence or incorporate useless teen melodrama filler when the first film depicted Art, like Michael and company before him, as killing for no reason. The film does suffer from a bit of bloat. Clocking in at 138 minutes, it’s at least a half hour too long. A lot of that time is spent on building the foundation of killer clown lore, and in shaping Sienna to be the almost otherworldly heroine who is solely capable of slaying the dragon, so to speak. However, the length does also allow for long stretches of reprieve from the bloodshed, so the film seems less like a constant onslaught of creative violence, making the kills hit that much harder.
In fact, the teen melodrama calls back to the same approach by ‘80s slashers, to which Leone clearly aspires to pay homage. Impressively, he also does the makeup for these films, and his practical effects rival those of Tom Savini, one of Leone’s influences, even if he also clearly feels the urge to continually one-up himself with his kills in a way that’s both oddly admirable and somewhat eye-rolling. In interviews, he clearly revels in the dubious theatergoer claims that some patrons were vomiting or passing out in the aisles. And he’s already on the Terrifier 3 promotional circuit (it’ll be released next year and incorporate a Christmas theme) claiming that his new film’s most extreme kill scene is too much for Hollywood to touch.
Obnoxious as it may be to boast about how one’s work is so “controversial” and “extreme,” and as dreadful as the first Terrifier was at times—though Thornton’s silent performance as Art has always been at least superficially compelling—Leone is onto something with this sequel. The film looks and sounds like ‘80s slashers, without wholly going into throwback horror mode like Ti West so often does with ‘70s horror. There’s something oddly comforting about extreme gore with a clownlike humor to it, especially with such a vivid, atmospheric color palette and killer soundtrack. This is obscene slapstick, but if pornography is defined as lacking in artistic merit, then the torture porn of the first Terrifier film is transformed here into something with considerable merit, as lowbrow and disgusting as the whole thing may be.
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