In 2008, Hollywood makeup artist Damien Leone made his directorial debut with The Ninth Circle. The horror short featured the plight of a woman being kidnapped for a ritual sacrifice by a silent black-and-white clown. Leone thought the clown character could be something special, and after a decade of self-funding his film projects, he made the first Terrifier film for only $35,000. After that movie made over $500,000, Leone used that success to develop 2022’s Terrifier 2, which made $15.7 million–over 60 times its $250,000 budget.
Now, Leone’s Terrifier 3 is a bona fide hit. It took #1 at its first weekend budget, making over eight times its $2.5 million budget. Horror lovers will deeply enjoy this film—it has excellent pacing, fun scares, and a lot of gore and carnage.
Perhaps too much carnage.
Five years after a brutal Halloween massacre by the Miles County Clown, Terrifier 2 survivor Sienna Shaw (Lauren LaVera) is finishing up a stay in a mental health facility right before Christmas. With her mother dead, Sienna heads out to spend the holiday with her aunt, uncle, and tween cousin Gabby (Antonella Rose), as well as her brother and fellow survivor Jonathan (Elliot Fullam) who is finishing up finals at his nearby university. While Gabby is ecstatic over Sienna’s return, her parents worry that the damaged young woman may start acting violently and turn their family upside down.
Speaking of violent, Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) returns to Miles County with a new friend: Vicky, the only survivor of Art’s melee in the first Terrifier who is now both undead and demonically possessed. Wearing a stolen Santa suit and dragging along his signature trash bag of weapons, Art once again pursues Sienna as he spreads some holiday fear.
The story of Terrifier 3 is a definite upgrade from the first two movies. While the first had no real plot and the second had a lot of hinted-at-but-never-spelled-out backstory, Terrifier 3 answers some questions about why Art cannot die and why he is after the Shaw family while still leaving a lot of mysteries to be answered in the next film. The film also goes at a smooth pace and doesn’t overstay its welcome (like the 2-1/2 hour Terrifier 2).
Lauren LaVera gives a terrific performance at Sienna, who sold the character’s trauma and was able to portray someone who was both strong and broken at the same time. Elliot Fullam also improves upon his whiny little brother character from the last movie, though the film doesn’t have him in it enough. Finally, there’s Art, who was funnier than ever in this film but still brought the scares. David Howard Thornton really found his character in Terrifier 3, and unlike many horror killers like Jason and Michael Myers, Art the Clown is fun to watch.
The new characters are mostly endearing: both Gabby and Sienna’s aunt Jess (Margaret Anne Florence) clearly show that they love Sienna but are sometimes frightened by her, and Jonathan’s college roommate Cole (Mason Mecartea) breaks the college bro stereotype and is a genuinely nice guy. There are only two characters that are hard to like. The first is Mia (Alexa Blair), Cole’s insensitive podcaster girlfriend who bluntly harasses Jonathan and Sienna about their past encounter with Art, but she’s intended to be the character the audience isn’t supposed to like.
The second unlikable character is Vicky, who fills in for the pale girl from Terrifier 2 as Art’s accomplice but is a definite downgrade. While still played by Samantha Scaffidi from the first two films, undead demon Vicky is off-putting and without any of the personality or charm she showed in Terrifier—or the gleeful madness Amelie McLain brought to the pale girl. While Vicky’s inclusion makes sense in the story, she feels like an unneeded component overall.
The visual effects are where Terrifier 3 really runs into issues. The problem isn’t that the kills aren’t realistic—they are. So realistic that the camera captures the body heat steaming off spilled blood. So realistic that every cut and hammer blow are wince-inducing. So realistic that audiences are walking out in utter disgust and shock.
The Terrifier series hasn’t been shy about pushing the boundaries of good taste in its previous installments, but this film has Art and Vicky gleefully break longstanding cultural taboos. Christmas brings with it Christian iconography, and Art and Vicky create blasphemous tributes to Jesus on the cross. Small children, a staple of any Christmas movie, are also violently killed, and while kids were murdered by Art in Terrifier 2 and the 2013 anthology All Hallow’s Eve, this is the first film in the series to show the bloody aftermath of children being butchered and blown up. One character commits suicide in an extended scene that is potentially triggering to a suicide survivor.
While Terrifier 3 does push the limit, nothing is beyond the gore of the first and second movies. Although Terrifier 3 breaks a lot of boundaries at once, it isn’t alone: Smile‘s monster kills its victims through suicidal acts; Michael Myers strangles a young boy onscreen in 2018’s Halloween; young Charlie undergoes a brutal decapitation in Hereditary; and It‘s Pennywise almost exclusively targets children as its victims.
Plus, this is a Terrifier movie. The series has been built on excessive kills—they’re expected. While the third movie is arguably the goriest of the trilogy—Art literally makes a snow angel in a pool of blood at one point—this brutality is expected for a modern horror slasher. If anything is off-putting about this film, it’s the amount of sexual content: while the first Terrifier had nudity, this is the first film in the series to include sexual activity. The sexy stuff isn’t nearly as explicit as the gore, but it still feels a bit out of place when compared to the first two Terrifier films and modern horror in general, which has largely left behind the ’70s and ’80s motto of “boobs, butts, and blood” that made so many productions of the time rife with sexism and harassment.
Speaking of sexism in horror, one universally praised element about the film is its equal opportunity splatter. Leone received pushback from some critics reviewing Terrifier and Terrifier 2 because Art seemed to save the meanest kills for the ladies while male characters had relatively quick, simple deaths. While horror is a historically sexist genre, Leone seems to have accepted this criticism as the three most prolonged and brutal kills in Terrifier 3 happen to men. Some terrible things happen to women too (two extensive butcherings and one kill involving rats come to mind), but the slaughter doesn’t feel as one-sided as the previous films did.
Overall, this movie is a great watch for anyone who doesn’t mind gore, sex, or having the innocence of Christmas ruined by a clown in a blood-soaked Santa suit. Every horror movie is expected to push boundaries, but Terrifier 3 goes hard even for a Terrifier film. Anyone triggered by torture, gore, sexual acts, male nudity, and children being put in peril will not have a good time; every other horror fan will find the story, acting, and even the kills to be amazing.
If you do go to see the film in theatres, be aware that the local AMC and Regal theatres are treating Terrifier 3 like an R-rated movie even though it is unrated: no one under 17 can get a ticket unless accompanied by someone over 21.
