Terrifier 3 decks the halls with bowels and folly.
Whatever else Terrifier 3 is, it’s a personal triumph for Art the Clown and his creator Damien Leone. What began as a low-budget cult sensation has transformed into a full-blown franchise as Art the Clown’s rise from underground horror icon to near mainstream menace comes to pass. After the breakout success of Terrifier 2, expectations were high for this third instalment to push the boundaries even further. Despite the Christmas-themed carnage, however, and a few visually arresting moments, Terrifier 3 notably struggles to recapture the inventive spark of its predecessors, instead falling into the trap of repetition, with a half-formed plot that doesn’t come together and a reliance on archly provocative shock-value gore that’s a little too familiar to shock as much as it did before.
Picking up pretty much where Terrifier 2 left off, Terrifier 3 finds Sienna (Lauren LaVera) trying to recover from her traumatic encounter with Art (David Howard Thornton) while Art (David Howard Thornton) is trying to reunite his head (rebirthed by a demon-possessed Victoria (Samantha Scaffidi)) with his body following his encounter with Sienna. As Sienna returns to her aunt’s house for the Holidays, Art and Victoria are inadvertently revived from their unexplained hibernation and set out to wreak holiday havoc on the Christmas crowds, heading inexorably towards another showdown with Sienna.
Having been benched in the sequel only to deliver a gruesome coda, Terrifier 3 puts Victoria back at the centre of the action, as the vocal demonic counterpart to Art. While the idea of a more fleshed-out co-villain should be the icing on the Christmas cake, her verbose presence ends up undercutting the potency of Art’s menace. Art’s absolute silence, his defining characteristic – aside from the extreme sadism – that made him so terrifying, is overshadowed by Victoria’s often expository chattering. The dynamic shift effectively demotes Art from the central figure of malevolent menace to something closer to a henchman, taking orders and playing second fiddle to an overly chatty supervisor who’s there to do his annual performance review. The eerie unpredictability and tension that accompanied Art’s silence is replaced by a more prosaic almost Evil Dead-esque loquaciousness, and the result is the antagonists are diminished rather than enhanced.
David Howard Thornton’s performance as Art is still a masterclass in understated terror, but Terrifier 3 dulls his edge with a plot that seems more concerned with piling on gore than pushing its characters forward, as the momentum built by the end of the second film suggested. The Christmas setting, while visually interesting, feels more like a gimmick than a fully integral theme. There’s something undeniably striking about a chainsaw-wielding Santa clown, but beyond that initial shock, the film doesn’t dig into the potential subversion of holiday cheer in any meaningful way.
Christmas is there to amplify and enhance the shock value of the action we’re offered, the cinematic equivalent of a padded bra or rolled up sock shoved down the boxer shorts, fooling us into thinking what we’re being shown is more substantive than it really is. While some of Art’s kills this time are definitely shocking, they’re also dispiritingly routine. A bombing is horrific, of course, but it’s not really Art’s signature brand of horrific, is it? At least it’s a little more creative than the perfunctory way a couple of his victims meet their end: a single bullet to the head each. Even when Art does rouse himself to the edge of glory gory, the kills – including the lauded (and leaked on YouTube) “shower scene” – lack that spark of grisly genius that was the hallmark of the first two films. Chain-sawing longitudinally through the crotch? Been there. Severing off limbs one by one? Seen that. The practical effects are still undeniably brilliant but at times so clumsily shot that you can’t get a real sense of what’s going on.
Perhaps Art was distracted from his main task by a rival butchering job, this one being done in the editing suite. Having played a game of having Art and Victoria slowly but inexorably close in on Sienna and her family, the finale suddenly goes for broke in a disjointed and borderline incoherent rush of blood to the head (and other extremities). For a franchise that has always thrived on the spectacle of its violence – the grotesque how being the whole point – it’s utterly baffling that several of the truly significant character deaths happen off-screen in narrative jolts forward that almost feel like they merit a silent movie-style “Scene Missing” intertitle. Sure, we get to see the aftermath of these slaughters in grisly fashion, but the decision to skip over the actual kills feels like a betrayal of what made the franchise so notorious. For a series that made its name by pushing boundaries in its carnage, choosing not to show these moments in full detail feels like a fundamental misstep. It’s not just disappointing—it’s downright uncharacteristic of the Terrifier brand, which has built its reputation on the extreme creativity and execution of its kills.
While the film delivers on its promise of gore, there’s evidence that Art the Clown’s brand of mayhem could grow stale before his place in the mainstream horror pantheon is assured. For all its blood-soaked spectacle, Terrifier 3 leaves you wondering whether the franchise has run out of steam and whether the tales of faitings, vomiting and certification board pearl-clutching are cynical ploys to prop up the movie’s mystique. Then again, with the denouement having pared down the cast back down to the bones, a potential Terrifier 4 could see Art, like all great movie monsters, rise again.