Review: ‘Terrifier 3’ is thoroughly vicious, utterly ill-intentioned, and unreservedly disgusting

If you reached the third installment of the Terrifier franchise due to morbid curiosity, good news. Terrifier 3 is the most vicious Art the Clown has ever been. However, if you wish these movies had something more than blood and guts, great news. Damien Leone has actually cooked up a cohesive experience this time.

Released in 2016, the first Terrifier was less a movie than an aesthetic experiment Leone devised to test how much raw violence audiences could withstand. There was barely a script, and characters made questionable decisions for the sake of giving Art another vicious kill. If Terrifier worked somehow, it’s because Art’s design is incredibly memorable, and Leone is a wizard when it comes to practical effects. It’s just amazing what Leone can do with a fraction of the budget big Hollywood studios spend to create far less impressive special effects.

With 2022’s Terrifier 2, Leone took Art and tried to draft a whole mythology for his now-franchise. An actual script and the presence of the marvelous final girl Sienna Shaw (Lauren LaVera) helped the sequel become a box-office hit. Terrifier 2 proved that word-of-mouth and Leone’s unwavering commitment to his unrated artistic vision could mobilize the horror community as few movies could. Yet, the sequel script is still a mess, filled with moving parts that don’t quite fit together.

Terrifier 3 is the movie that cements Art the Clown’s place in cinema history. With it, Leone takes a step back to streamline the lore and build a solid foundation for the future. Plus, after three movies, Art the Clown keeps surprising moviegoers by coming up with new disgusting ways to torture his victims. It’s the best of both worlds, as Terrifier 3 demonstrates Leone has matured as a filmmaker while still ensuring the violence is the franchise’s true star.

Set five years after the events of Terrifier 2, the threequel brings Art the Clown back for a new killing spree. As expected, the villain crosses paths with Sienna, who’s destined to serve as humanity’s last line of defense against the killer clown. It’s a simple premise but an effective one.

For most of its runtime, Terrifier 3 follows two parallel storylines. First, we have Art stretching his murderous muscles and spreading destruction as he inches closer to Sienna, his primary target. Meanwhile, Sienna tries to cope with the traumatic experience of Terrifier 2 until she can no longer avoid her fateful encounter with Art. On the Art side, Leone goes completely psycho by crafting some of the most disturbing kills in the franchise. As for Sienna, even if she faces her fair share of horrors, having some breathing time to prepare allows LaVera to flaunt her talent. 

In the previous movie, LaVera was still growing into the role of a final girl. Now, she’s fully acclimated with the Terrifier franchise and has embraced her place as a horror celebrity. She knows why fans love her performance in Terrifier 2 and has sharpened her acting skills to give the people what they want. LaVera deftly employs her incredible range to showcase the emotional turmoil of a character who’s petrified of re-encountering her attacker, whilst knowing she has the responsibility to fight evil once again. As such, she elevates Terrifier 3 simply by being a part of it.

As brilliant as LaVera is, David Howard Thornton is still the scene-stealer. Even if Mike Giannelli helped to craft Art the Clown in 2011’s All Hallow’s Eve, Thornton has made the character his own in the Terrifier trilogy. There’s something mesmerizing in the way Thornton plays Art, a being who’s goofy in one moment and ghastly in the next. With exaggerated facial expressions and keen attention to body language, Thornton allows Art to be simultaneously hilarious and frightening, a combination representing the essence of the Terrifier movies. So, regardless of the carnage, Art always has the time of his life, and Thornton is great at showing how entertaining murder can be.

To be blunt, Terrifier 3 does not have a latent theme, and this is not the kind of production trying to spread a message. Leone’s movies keep gathering audiences because it meets the demand of viewers wanting to challenge themselves to watch the most horrific scenes ever. Yes, horror is a powerful vehicle for dealing with trauma and repressed compulsions. Nevertheless, the genre is also popular because it is fun – for some of us – to gape awestruck at the devious ways filmmakers can grind up bodies on the silver screen. The sick fascination with death and destruction is part of what keeps the horror wheel turning, and Terrifier has become so popular precisely because it’s unashamed to celebrate these dark urges.

As with its predecessor, Terrifier 3 celebrates horror in its purest form. It’s no wonder the threequel even takes revenge on Christmas for always rushing in to the detriment of Halloween, by putting Art in Santa’s costume and having him slash his way through Christmas Eve. Terrifier 3 also includes nods to some of the most iconic moments of horror history, recreating scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. In addition, the whole winter setting is heavily inspired by Bob Clark’s Black Christmas. Besides being a filmmaker, Leone is also a huge horror fan, so he aims to pay homage to the masters who came before him.

Of course, the nastiness of Terrifier 3 means this is not a movie for everybody. Reports of people getting sick or fleeing their screening are often exaggerated for marketing purposes, and that’s also the case for the threequel. But there is some truth behind these rumors. Some scenes of Terrifier 3 hit hard, even for those among us who are used to watching gorefests. For example, this reviewer saw two people crying and one in shock when the lights turned on at the end of the screening – for good reason, as the movie’s final sequence is nothing short of vile. That means it’s best to prepare your nerves (and stomach) if you choose to catch Leone’s new movie in theaters.

Still, Terrifier 3 is not made for the masses. It’s a niche movie for a niche audience. Even though Terrifier 3’s budget surpasses the second movie more than tenfold, it was produced with less than $3 million, practically pennies by Hollywood standards. It will quickly turn a profit, and Leone will have all the money he needs to keep making this kind of movie for many years. Good. We need all sorts of productions for the sake of the industry, especially independent ones made with such passion.