How I Found Meaning in Art
The following essay discusses extreme violence and general gross behavior
(only within the context of movies)
You Have Been Warned
“To me, bad taste is what entertainment is all about. If someone vomits watching one of my films, it's like getting a standing ovation. But one must remember that there is such a thing as good bad taste and bad bad taste. It's easy to disgust someone; I could make a ninety-minute film of people getting their limbs hacked off, but this would only be bad bad taste and not very stylish or original. To understand bad taste one must have very good taste. Good bad taste can be creatively nauseating but must, at the same time, appeal to the especially twisted sense of humor, which is anything but universal.”
-John Waters
Terrifier 2 (A Shock to the Senses)
Having little knowledge of the franchise, I went into 2022’s Terrifier 2 with a healthy amount of worry and skepticism mostly on the basis of its reputation as the most vomit-inducing film that year. When I left the theater, I was overwhelmed by a movie whose transgressiveness and tastelessness was so extreme as to offend even my sensibilities, and despite all that, it was a film that I found myself loving. The truly horrific antics of Art the Clown and his heroic foil in the form of Sienna Shaw captivated me for the film’s hilariously excessive runtime, and despite how deliberately offensive to the senses it was (in its gore, low budget, and poorly applied digital grain), I found myself loving it far more than I (a woman of good taste) should have. The past few years had been particularly miserable for a lot of mainstream horror and legacy slashers, even if the indie/arthouse scene had been thriving with entries such as The Babadook, It Follows, Get Out, The Witch, The Lighthouse, Annihilation, Hereditary, Mad God, etc.
These films were all fantastic, with many of them embedding themselves into the public consciousness, but even so, there was something that was missing for me. The “elevated horror” of these films was often deeply effective and affecting to me, and yet there was still something missing, a certain je ne sais quoi. Ever since I was old enough to watch them, I’d developed a very deep affinity for the slasher genre, beginning with the classics of Halloween and Texas Chain Saw Massacre and soon spreading to the likes of Giallo movies and low-budget gore-fests like 1980’s Maniac or 1992’s Dead Alive (not a slasher but the spirit remains). Elevated horror was great, but I wanted that bit of bad taste, that trashiness and low budget crappiness that is nigh part and parcel with slashers and other exploitation films. Don’t get me wrong, I always gravitate towards the “fine” examples of the genre a la Halloween, Suspiria, those films that have something to say as Art (as a woman of good taste should).
So imagine my frustration with David Gordon Green’s Halloween (2018), Halloween Kills (2021), and Halloween Ends (2022), films that began with a genuinely interesting exploration of the 1978 classic (conveniently writing out all those truly awful sequels), and ultimately fell into a confused battle between trying to wrench Halloween as a concept into the realm of elevated horror, or an attempt to have a persistent mess of gore and enough murdered teens to satisfy the most bloodthirsty of 80s slasher icons. Michael wears neither the mask of elevated horror nor the mask of exploitation well, and the movies ultimately proved to be more an exercise in why we should stop dredging up this character. I left Halloween Ends having no clue what I had watched or why, the most memorable part of the experience having been throwing up popcorn due to a developing migraine about halfway through.
Several weeks later, I am entering the theater for Terrifier 2, a film that seems to have caused numerous filmgoers to have varyingly: thrown up (legitimately), walked out, or passed out. Within its opening minutes, we see the blood-splattered and freshly resurrected Art the Clown break apart a mortician’s jaw with a hammer, pop out the man’s eye, place it into his own eye socket (having lost one in the prior film), and present this disgusting act to his victim like a magician pulling a coin from thin air. He then fully smashes the remainder of the man’s face in, splits open the top of his skull like a baked potato and yanks out his brain (just for the fun of it). Following this brutal dismemberment and erasure of a person’s humanity through more gore than is imaginable through text alone, Art gathers various sharp and acidic objects from throughout the morgue, and sets off to get himself cleaned up. While his costume washes at the laundromat, he is greeted by a demonic mirror of himself in the form of a little clown girl who shits on the floor and plays Patty Cake with him.
I am, needless to say, completely hooked. The theater audience has already halved in this 10 minute span (though I blame the people who ordered hotdogs walking in as a partial contributor). As if this bizarre and gory silent-film-esque performance wasn’t already enough to hypnotize me for the remaining 2 hours and 10 minutes, the introduction to Sienna Shaw, a young woman preparing her Valkyrie Halloween costume to the most deliciously amorphous 80s synthwave music locked me in for the long haul. While the movie did struggle in its pacing and attempts to deliver its story, the slow creeping horror of Art and his massacre of Sienna’s friends and family was riveting to me, both from Art’s antics as a dude who just loves cutting people into more pieces than you can fucking imagine, and through Sienna growing to realize her inner strength and her ultimate refusal to let Art and his demonic compatriot take everything from her.
I laughed when, after one of the most horrific and astoundingly evil murder scenes ever conceived (without a doubt the source of the film’s faint-worthy reputation), Art briefly left his somehow-still-alive victim for a moment, only to come back and literally rub salt and bleach in her wounds. I was amazed to be watching a film that could relish something that legitimately awful, and I was appalled at myself for finding something like that funny. What is wrong with you, I thought. That’s terrible, you know better. But goddamn if his Urkel-esque “Did I do that?” shrug when the victim’s mother arrived home didn’t yank out another legitimate peal of laughter from me.
The movie continued much like this, offering shock value, scares, laughs, and a surprising amount of heart in a disturbing and messy package. This was a movie that dared to have a 10-minute combination dream sequence and musical number with the most irritatingly catchy theme song for a slasher film… Ever? I think it’s safe to say so. As much as the gargantuan third act dragged to hell and back (literally!), I was riveted. I had no clue what the film was saying, or if it was even trying to say anything, but surely Sienna being killed and coming back to life with the power of love meant something, right? A film so overloaded with violence and pain and literal shit had to be saying something… right? David Howard Thornton was giving a silent slapstick performance to make Buster Keaton blush (while also holding his own against the slasher greats of old) for something, surely. Lauren LaVera’s heart and ultimate brutal determination facing off against the most appalling and evil villain you could imagine. A film with this much unwieldy heart and vision and determination to do Whatever The Fuck They Could with $250k and a dream had to mean something? I definitely wanted it to.
On the other hand, this was a film loaded to the brim with the brutal deaths of women where men got off fairly light, some borderline uncanny valley performances, a horrible digital grain effect that could sometimes look solid and other times look straight up messy, the aforementioned Third Act That Wouldn’t Die, and so on. My experience of Terrifier 2 was not only peaks and valleys based off my emotional and intellectual reaction, but peaks and valleys of how I felt about myself for loving something this Bad that much . The film stuck with me for months and nearly made it into my top 10 movies of 2022. I was so incredibly happy to see a film that deeply nasty make $15 million on a $250k budget. Maybe I wasn’t alone in finding that trashy enigma so fun. Nonetheless, that persistent reluctance to admit to myself just how much I truly Loved that nasty freak movie for nasty freaks remained.
The Interim (Terrifier 1)
Somewhere between 22-24 I went back to watch the original Terrifier which truly epitomizes Waters’ hypothetical 90 (84) minute film of people getting their limbs hacked off. After the gargantuan, surreal, and supernatural vision of 2, the original (a) seemed tame in comparison and (b) lacked a lot of the things I had found myself loving in 2, outside of a small cluster of goofy introductions for Art’s personality quirks. The best I could say about Terrifier is that creator Damien Leone had clearly listened to the many criticisms of the film as he prepared for work on Terrifier 2, giving the sequel things like Actual Protagonists, a Semi-Coherent Plot, and More Than 2 Filming Locations.
Towards the end of 2023, the teaser trailer for Terrifier 3 dropped, revealing Art in… a Santa costume? The artist in me panged with worry and the sicko in me thirsted for a Yuletide massacre, and I put Terrifier 3 out of my mind as work and life and Transing My Goddamn Gender all became major priorities. I saw lots of excellent movies in 2024, including Monkey Man, Furiosa, I Saw the TV Glow, and Longlegs. The latter two proved to be excellent and strikingly unique horror fare, and my thirst for trash had also been somewhat slaked by Malignant and Barbarian, films that I watched time and again with friends.
Then came October 11th. A Chris Stuckmann review pops into my youtube subscriptions. Somehow, the day had already come. I realized I hadn’t even seen a trailer for the movie and pulled it up, only to be taken aback by what I saw. The Christmas theming was something they were clearly embracing wholeheartedly, but more than that, the plot looked legitimately… interesting? A true continuation of 2’s fragmented threads of compelling story? Sienna and her brother Jonathan making a genuine attempt to heal from the unbelievable trauma inflicted on them in the prior movie? And above all: this looked like a capital Fs Feature Film, no longer inhibited by 5 and 6 figure budgets. My blood was afire, and I spent the next day’s choral retreat anxiously waiting for it to be done so I could go see what was suddenly my most anticipated movie of the year.
Terrifier 3 (at last)
The moment I knew something was different was when (during the film’s finally well-paced climax) was when I found myself tearing up. I’d felt a broad range of extreme emotions with the prior films, but always mixed with a heavy tinge of pure bafflement. Somehow, the movie had fully hooked me into the narrative it was telling, and as I watched one of the most insane and climactic fight sequences of any slasher film to date, I realized that I wholeheartedly adored Terrifier 3. What had changed? What took a woman of good taste like myself and found her loving a movie that among other things:
Ax-murders a sleeping 6 year old in the first 4 minutes
Features a demon masturbating with a shard of glass to a man’s face being degloved
Brutally tortures and murders a jolly old Santa performer
Bombs a different mall Santa killing at least 5 people including children
Features a woman being whipped with a family member’s intestines
And many, many more capital A Atrocities!
This is not, as the youth say, a particularly demure or mindful movie. Why, in a year where George Miller had crafted a massive and beautifully abstract revenge epic, where Dev Patel had a brilliant action/directorial debut, and where Jane Schoenbrun had seemingly effortlessly portrayed so much of the pain of gender dysphoria and transness in the closet, why oh why was this the movie that I proceeded to see three four times in the theater?
I’m really not sure where to start. In some ways, Terrifier 3’s success at actually being a well-crafted movie with legitimate planting and payoff, a solid emotional arc for hero and villain alike, all the stuff you’d enjoy from a Motion Picture – these successes somehow make T3 more difficult to talk about because content this extreme is almost never paired with things like an Actual Plot. How do I begin to talk about the emotional and narrative effectiveness of the scene where a woman is force-fed live rats down her throat? Because by god is that horrible, horrible scene a crux of the film’s climax. How can I talk about the aforementioned scalping and masturbation scene as a legitimately unsettling portrayal of the demonic in film? It certainly is that, and is a fantastic tone-setter for the film’s approach to demons as something truly inhumanly sadistic (later paid off in that climax). But also: Jesus Fucking Christ! How can we talk about something like this? I’m going to start with the film’s Atlas, carrying the film’s emotional core on her shoulders: Lauren LaVera as Sienna Shaw.
Sienna
I’ve already touched on her somewhat, but Sienna Shaw is a truly striking Final Girl. Terrifier 2 sees her as a young woman whose comic book artist father has recently passed away as a result of a horrible brain tumor that deeply affected his behavior, causing an obsession with Art the Clown’s murder spree as well as abusive behavior towards his family. While she obviously struggles with complicated feelings as a result of that, the audience finds her creating a costume as homage to a special character he designed for her, an armored Valkyrie she eventually embodies as she finds the strength to fight against Art’s torment and massacre of her friends/family.
LaVera reads Sienna as someone who is far more invested in protecting those close to her than herself, perhaps best exemplified during 2’s climax when she uses her body as a shield to protect her brother from Art’s improvised cat o'nine tails (see below). When she is initially targeted by Art, her terror overwhelms her, but the moment that someone she cares about is put in danger, her fear dissipates and is replaced by a brutal, desperate resolve. The excellent deep dive on director Damien Leone’s output by youtuber Gracie Fitzpeter goes into much more detail on this front, but Sienna’s role as a final girl is subverted in 2 when Art succeeds in killing her – a death she manages to escape when hearing her brother in danger once more, quite literally managing to triumph over the most sadistic and hedonistic slasher villain of all time through the power of love and family – and this is where 2 falters, and 3 truly begins to excel.
In 2, Sienna’s family unit is (quite understandably) struggling with the complex and difficult feelings brought about by the loss of her father, a man who they all loved but who was unrecognizable by the end of his life. This is realistic for the narrative, but its portrayal of a deeply strained family dynamic makes the deep love they all have for each other only come out in fits and spurts, otherwise obscured by the stresses of daily life and the encroaching shadow of the Miles County Clown. Sienna’s ultimate protection of her baby brother is vital and beautiful to the film’s arc, but given her obvious frustrations with his behavior throughout almost all the film prior, their bond is less in focus than I feel Leone was aiming for.
By contrast, 3 (set five years after 2) sees Sienna visiting her aunt, uncle, and younger cousin Gabby to celebrate Christmas with them. From the moment Gabby charges around a corner to grasp Sienna in a bear hug only an adoring younger cousin could give, Sienna’s family and her love for them is centered. As rightfully traumatized as she is by the events of 2, haunted by the bloody and ruined visages of her friends at family dinner, she remains connected to the people she loves. The threatening arc throughout Terrifier 3 is the worry of when Art’s Yuletide shenanigans will finally collide with Sienna once more, if he will finish the job he started in 2.
For the first time in the series, Terrifier 3 has a genuine warmth to it in Sienna’s time with her family, and we see even before the film’s climax how determined she is to protect them (hiding her diary of her pain and trauma from Gabby, doing her best to ignore the hallucinations or visions of Art’s massacre even as they impinge on the precious moments with the ones she loves). The previous movie’s events almost broke Sienna-- as they would anyone-- and yet despite all of the suffering she went through, she still rejoices in the presence of her family. Her aunt Jess reminds her of her mother, and the two reminisce over cocoa. She does makeup with Gabby, expressing her artistic side in a way she hasn’t gotten to god knows how long. Dreamlike flashbacks to when her father created the Valkyrie for her (accompanied by the bittersweet strains of perpetual by my head is empty) add further depth to the warm memories she carries of him. The family is well and truly warm and cozy, a proper Christmas setting for Sienna’s half of the film.
Through some miracle of screenwriting, Terrifier 3 features what may well be the most empathetic portrayal I’ve seen in a slasher of a protagonist dealing with their trauma from a previous movie. Sienna does struggle, and when she catches a glimpse of what could only be her nemesis at the mall, she begins to break down – and despite this, she holds herself together as best she can to once again protect her baby cousin. One of the film’s most moving scenes is when Gabby (a perpetual snoop) is revealed to have read Sienna’s diary anyways, resulting in Sienna sitting down and having an honest conversation. She is sick, she sees things that are not there, but that doesn’t mean that she does not love her family deeply.
She will try to protect them from the danger that grows ever more imminent through her love, unlike (coincidental example I swear) the treatment of Laurie Strode in Halloween 2018, a woman who pushes away all her family members and paranoically prepares for a day that may never come in an attempt to wage war on the demons of her past. Sienna knows the supernatural truth of what she saw, but holds on to every last vestige of sanity she can in her attempts to live a normal life and have a happy Christmas. She has hope that things might change for the better (while still knowing that death may come back bearing his maniacal grin).
Her only true confidante is her brother Jonathan, himself dealing with significant trauma (and the hounding of a “true-crime-enthusiast" who will be discussed later), but ultimately faring a hair better than his older sister. After all, he only saw the shotgunned remains of his mother’s face force-fed mashed potatoes and had his leg feasted on by Art, to say nothing of the haunting visage of the Little Pale Girl who followed him time and again. We see later in the film that Jonathan is also barely holding on, battening down on his first year of college studies and desperately hoping to just get through it. What I love about the scene where the siblings reunite is how Jonathan ultimately believes Sienna, but just as much struggles with the impossibility of the truth: a seemingly immortal serial killer clown aided and abetted by a demonic clown girl was beheaded by his sister, but may yet live and seek to cause further mayhem and suffering. They’ve seen things no one should or could see, and they try to hold on regardless of that.
In a way, the depiction of trauma in the Shaw siblings’ is as sympathetic as anything I’ve seen even in significantly classier movies. Their trauma is deeply real and valid, but they are able to hold on through each other and the people they love. They only come close to “losing it” when the impossible threat of the once-beheaded Art becomes too real to deny, and even then they are totally in the right! After Art’s mall bombings comes on the news, Sienna completely breaks down, but only in the sake of the express goal of saving her family: Get Jonathan off of campus, and get the family the fuck out of town.
Incredibly reasonable, if you’ve seen what she’s seen-- and yet the Doubting Thomas of her uncle Greg, who feared for his daughter’s safety around a girl struggling with her mental stability, is wholly believable himself. This is the last movie in the world you could call grounded, and yet its emotional core for more or less the entire cast is as logical as you could expect a slasher to be. “Why would the mall bombing suspect be a five-years-dead serial killer who hasn’t surfaced since?” is doubtless the question running through Greg and Aunt Jess’s mind as Sienna grows more manic. We live in terrible times, and despite their overt horrificness compared to any other slasher, Art’s crimes do not really compare to the wave of dead children we have seen at home and abroad.
It is heartwrenchingly, disturbingly rational to look at a violent act of mass terror committed just before Christmas, and assume it is “merely” the act of some heinous individual looking for 15 minutes of fame, and not a demonically resurrected serial killer seeking to cause as much pain and suffering as he can. Walter Chaw’s review of the movie touches on this disconnect between Art’s violence and the violence we see every day (particularly in light of the genocide in Palestine), and I highly encourage giving that a read, even if I will later disagree with a core aspect of his interpretation.
Sienna is an emotional and intellectual antithesis to the nightmare that does its damndest to haunt her throughout Terrifier 3, and the fact that she is ultimately successful until the devastating final act (we’ll get to it and my tears eventually) is such an excellent indication of her character. Sienna is Love, and she will protect those around her at any cost, suffer any injury, to stand against the nihilistic and brutal hatred represented by someone like Art, which we will see in much more detail later on. With all that said, all that dancing around, with him lurking around so many facets of discussion thus far, it’s time to talk in detail about him. For a guy who doesn’t speak, he sure makes a lot of noise. All the way from Miles County, please welcome!
Art the Clown!!!
Chaw’s review is an excellent sum of Art as a character, even if I find it flattens him in some ways. Equal parts slasher mascot and Bugs Bunny-style trickster, Art the Clown is a sadist who constantly seeks to create the most theatrical of kills, turning back and winking at the audience and treating each kill as its own series of specialized gags. Terrifying and upsetting as it is, the moment in the first film when seemingly-Final Girl Tara Heyes is absolutely beating his ass, only for him to whip out a gun and instantly end the fight carries massive punchline energy. As a slasher villain, Art relishes violence more than any other of his ilk. Michael is cold and deliberate, Jason is unthinking and brutish, Freddy is intensely creative above all, and Leatherface has anxiety. Art perhaps most closely follows in the line of Giallo killers with his sadism, though he far surpasses them in eclecticism of kill styles. The leering and gory gaze of Lucio Fulci’s camera, showing off the most disgusting images imaginable at the time, seems to almost be his baseline, committing The Worst He Can Think Of and laughing at his handiwork – all the while challenging us to laugh with him. If Freddy’s show is an act for his victims, Art is doubtless putting on the show for us.
As a comedic figure, Art’s relishing of so many deaths is his great strength, as a villain, the cruelty and arbitrariness of his violence is what makes him just as effective. He inhabits a genre that often seeks to provide some hint of motivation for its murderous denizens, but we live in a world where violence is deeply senseless, and he reflects precisely that.. As Fitzpeter discusses, one of the most Terrifying aspects of his character is how often he selects victims at random. In Terrifier, Tara and Dawn’s only crimes were to have reached their car the same time Art crossed the street, in Terrifier 2, Allie’s death (the aforementioned Worst Thing I Have Ever Seen) is but a side distraction for him, her fate sealed by bumping into him at the entrance to a costume shop.
The inadvertent moralizing of the past few decades of slashers has no role in Art’s world, in some ways returning to Halloween’s roots with Michael choosing Laurie and her friends at random. While Art and Sienna have a broader supernatural connection that draws him to her for 2 and 3’s respective climaxes, his trajectory is broad and joyously senseless as he slices, dices, stabs, crushes, pulls, saws, axes, freezes, hammers, skins, whips, scalps, salts, bleaches, shoots, bombs, chainsaws, and pisses his way through the franchise. 3’s brilliant cold open reflects that senselessness and cruelty perfectly: The family’s only crime was to have existed, and one by one they are butchered in a sequence he seems to have planned specifically to cause the most torment possible to the last woman standing. First a sleeping child is butchered with an ax, then a man in bed with his wife, after which Art gives her just enough time to see the remains of her husband and child before bringing her life to an abrupt end. And then of course, as a true Santa would, he sits down to enjoy the milk and cookies that were left out for him, before finding the other child hiding and (presumably) finishing her off.
Why open your film this way? Well, in part to introduce the Christmas theming – the cut to reveal Art in his Santa costume partway through the husband’s death is both a visceral shock and punchline, and as the wife’s axed apart body hits the ground, the blasting strains of O Come All Ye Faithful completely overtake the soundscape. Art is playing his role as Santa in the only way he knows how: incredible violence, but still giving a friendly smile and wave to the little girl in the cabinet. Her sleeping older brother did nothing other than exist, and he was rewarded with almost 15 seconds of offscreen butchering. This is both tone-setter and establishing of ground rules: this movie is going to be cruel, and it’s not interested in playing by the standard rules of its genre. It’s also incredibly funny if you overlap with the film’s intended audience, pictured below:
This violence is rightly not to everyone’s tastes. Indeed, I’d argue that most people are reasonable and even morally correct to not enjoy a movie that butchers a sleeping family for the act of existing, but this is also so, so much my shit. The morgue murder and laundromat was its own striking ode to bad taste in 2’s cold open, but the concise brutality of this sequence is something that I genuinely admire, a perfect thesis statement for Art as a murderer and clown all in one.
Regarding Chaw’s commentary on violence, we live in an era where the slasher film’s roots often struggle to carry an impact in the way they once did. A soulless killer stabbing his way through a few bratty and/or traumatized teenagers isn’t going to cut it, we experience god knows how many mass atrocities on a regular basis. The broader perception of the world seems much crueler now – and perhaps it takes someone as goddamned sadistic and unbeholden to the rules of his genre as Art to shock us into that genuine horror space.
Children are off limits in a way that teens have never been – even the joyously nasty Evil Dead Rise in 2023 spent its entire runtime baiting the death of the youngest child while pulling away at the last possible second, ultimately cheapening every moment of danger she is put in during the climax. It is in the moral right to have not killed the 8 year old, but it did also make me sigh and tune out for every point of danger she was put in because I knew it would be toothless. By contrast, 3’s immediate dismemberment of a six year old sets up that the moment Sienna’s loveable baby cousin is introduced, Gabby is not safe. Even before the final act, the threat of Art looms large as she learns about Sienna’s traumas, to say nothing of the gory remains of Brooke juxtaposed against her during one of Sienna’s hallucinations
It is in this space of transgressive shock and cruelty that Art’s second trick appears: The fun he has, and consequently invites us to have. His ultraviolence may be horrifying, but his behavior through so much of them is well and truly Clownish. We’ve been shocked into horror, and now he invites us to laugh. There is also a notable contrast in his frame compared to the vast majority of film killers; his body is small, lacking the hulking brutality of a Jason or Leatherface, making his surprising strength and Looney Tunes garbage bag of sharp objects all the more of a surprise. Doubly so when he is as liable to pull out a horn to honk as a hammer to crush with.
It is interesting then, despite this air of total transgression and violation of the body that Art carries with him, that he is so decidedly nonsexual. Serial killers in film/real life are often driven by psychosexual impulse, but for both Thornton and Leone, Art is an asexual creature. He does do a particularly brutal act of drag in the first film, but it is all part of the show for his upcoming victim. The conclusion to this point is simple, but it is interesting nonetheless: Violence in film can be fun and funny (depending on your proclivities), sexual violence cannot.
This is not to say that (for example) a penis or vagina is immune to being chain/hacksawed – merely that Art’s goal is to split the whole person in half lengthwise, and not that he is aiming for that specific sexual humiliation we might otherwise associate with the involvement of genitalia in murder. Can we decouple that from being sexual? With both Art and the camera’s disinterest in leering, I’d argue so. This is less clear in the first film with the hacksaw scene and the Cat Lady drag sequence, but given 2 and 3’s approach to sexuality and the gaze of the camera during these scenes of violence, I’d argue that these transgressions are simply incidental on the path towards a total destruction of the human body and the absolute annihilation of what a person once was.
This is, of course, horrifying and disgusting in its own right, but with Art’s winking nods to the camera, it reminds us that this is only a movie, that there is a certain safety in that. It is nauseating, but in pushing the tone and material so far, beyond the limits of my own imagination in terms of ways for someone to die, this is the ground where horror becomes comedy. Terrifier 3 offers a healthy dose of sympathetic and less likable victims, allowing for a range of emotional reactions – not that anyone deserves even a 10th of what Art will do to them, but the film has its cake (kills that are genuinely emotionally distressing) and eats it too (kills that are just as disgusting but are allowed to veer into the realm of hilarity). And that idiom is something I think lies at the heart of why Terrifier 3 is so deeply effective for me: It is constantly straddling so many lines of hilarity and genuine emotion and somehow making it work. And now, some further asides on:
The Marquee Murders
Even seen in a vacuum, the way Art annihilates a body is horrific. What makes the main kills in the first 2 acts of Terrifier 3 so striking is the choice of who he kills. I’ve already discussed the erasure of a peaceful family from existence, but I think it’s worth discussing what comes before (in the film’s chronology, at least): a sweet old Santa performer. On the one hand, this is perhaps an obvious choice for a Christmas slasher, but what I find so interesting about the sequence is the almost mutual respect Art and Santa display for one another. From the moment Art sees him, he is as excited as a child on Christmas day – and over the course of the scene, we see some genuine playfulness and developing fondness between the two (even if it is only drunken jollility on Santa’s part).
Santa sees Art as a true clown and performer, and he himself playing the part of the Jolly Kris Kringle finds kinship in that, giving advice on how to best play Santa (“You can’t be Santa without a real beard,” a moment that really makes one remember that Foreshadowing Is A Literary Device-) and enjoying Art’s clowning for its own sake. When Art abruptly ends the lives of the barkeep and his drinking companion, Santa pleas to whatever part of rationality might remain in his ruined and inhuman mind: “We’re in the same business! You and me… we make people happy…” This does not fall on deaf ears, as Art’s smile grows wider, and after stealing Santa’s outfit, he shows himself off to his restrained victim as if to say “Ain’t I doing good?” Of course, all things must end, and that includes the life of our jolly performer.
While I’ve no doubt this kill was merely Leone thinking “God the liquid nitrogen kill in Jason X was cool, Art should get to do one of those!”, there is something fascinating about the image of Art freezing our Santa and then taking a hammer to shatter a freshly graven image of Christmas wholesomeness. Yuletide violence/grossness is not exactly a stranger to cinema, audiences love it when Santa says cuss words and punches a bitch out. What really sets Art’s contributions apart is how absolutely meticulous he is in deconstructing and appropriating everything that makes Santa Santa, leaving him with only the truth: a man named Charles Johnson who has four beautiful grandchildren that will never see their grandpa again. This scene is the first time since Terrifier’s Cat Lady that a character has managed to have a sustained “dialogue” with Art – no one has gotten to beg for their life, and Art lets Charles do that. Maybe there is some deranged fondness in him somewhere, even if the final punchline of the sequence is Art ripping the beard off Charles’ frozen face and taking it for his own (Real Santa at long last).
Self-inaugurated, Art enacts the gruesome in media res cold open. A demonic being inhabiting the loose form of something wholesome is not a terribly new concept, but Art’s adherence to the aesthetic of Santa is striking – he does indeed take his great big sack and set it at the base of the family’s Christmas tree before their butchering. These details, paired with O Come All Ye Faithful does suggest that as heinously, incomprehensibly evil as Art is, the guy clearly loves Christmas vibes as much as the next person. This detail is buoyed by one of the funniest choices in the film, being that of two diegetic carols and four non-diegetic, the latter all exclusively occur from Art’s POV. This on its own would not be enough to immediately suggest that he is envisioning a joyous carol backing to his escapades – fortunately, I’ve got an ace up my sleeve for that read that I’ll get to much later.
Terrifier 3 does have one concession to good taste amidst the gore, which is that the deaths of all the children do occur offscreen. You’ll note I said all the children; in the midst of everything we’ve talked about I would forgive you for forgetting about the mall bombing. Given the infamously drawn out nature of death in this franchise, that concession is a truly merciful one (that I think works entirely to the film’s benefit). Still, this is a difficult thing to talk about, even in a fictional medium, and so I will advise skipping ahead to the Jonathan And The Shower Scene heading if you don’t want to hear about this scene that almost certainly crosses the line into Too Real for most people.
While Sienna is Christmas shopping with Gabby, an incredible Muzak rendition of Terrifier 2’s Clown Cafe begins hissing its way over the mall speakers (that’s right bitches, Terrifier 3 has LEITMOTIVIC DEVELOPMENT). This is where she sees Art for the first time in five years, and though he has donned a Santa Mask, the bloody fingerless gloves and massive garbage bag can only herald one man. He is not here for Sienna however, and after a polite wave, he vanishes as quickly as he appeared. Unsure if what she saw was real, she quickly attempts to save face, and reunites with Jonathan to express her fears. Art, meanwhile, has other goals: when the mall’s Santa photoshoot goes on break, he seizes the opportunity and luxuriously takes his seat, silently Ho, Ho, Ho-ing and giving friendly waves to the passerby children.
We are, of course, on guard as an audience. Being a child has not ended well in this movie so far, and when a young girl takes his invitation, we steel ourselves for whatever horrible contraption he is sure to take out of his bag. I do not remember if on my first viewing I let out a sigh of relief or grew even more anxious when he removed a toy doll instead. I do know that on every subsequent viewing, I laughed without fail. I laughed even harder at Art’s flummoxed (one could say TERRIFIED?? No) expression when the other children in line realize that Santa is straight up handing out presents, and swarm him. Being a consummate Santa, he has toys aplenty for all the little girls and boys, with one extra special gift in the bottom of his bag.
When Santa’s Elves and mall security take notice, they put a stop to his chicanery immediately. The soundscape abruptly shifts from a diegetic Jingle Bells to a non-diegetic Joy to the World, as Art is removed from his throne building to the big moment. Thornton’s performance is chilling here, shifting from classical clown antics to the maniac who loves nothing more than suffering and despair the minute a boy finds the Big Gift and it proceeds to go off in his face. The abrupt cut of the sound from Handel to the tinnitus ring and electronic drones that define much of Art’s soundscape only further enhances this tonal shift.
This scene is horrible and horribly funny. It is as prototypical a nod to Hitchcock’s bomb under the table as you can get, but deliberately undercuts its suspense with the clownish antics. For a moment you might almost believe that all he wants to do is hand out presents, but as in 2’s Clown Café, the thing this man actually bothers to gift-wrap is a gateway to pure horror. The pain Art inflicts in Terrifier 3 is largely localized (same as in both of its prequels), but in this moment he has grander ambitions. Amidst the droning din we hear the screams and sobs of parents and those children who may have made it out okay. They will never be the same. Maybe we’ll never be the same.
Art thrives off of showing you lines most films would not dare approach and Monty Python Silly Walking across them. From the moment he sits down on the Santa chair, there is only one way the scene could end, and we know it. He knows it too, but he really does seem to be having fun surprising the kids with their myriad gifts (and indeed, would he hand out the bomb when he’s sitting right there? Immortal he may be but it’d surely be quite the process of reconstitution). Horror movies thrive on tropes and unspoken contracts with the audience, and it is films that cross that rule that often live in notoriety. Halloween III: Season of the Witch remains famous to this day largely because of the scene where a child abruptly dies in horrible violent fashion, The Blob remake sits alongside it as well.
Terrifier is overwhelming in its disregard for these rules, and the notoriety stemming from that is what has given the series such grassroots success. Given 3 making (at time of writing) 41 times its budget, there is some clear appeal to this kind of shock value – though I will defend 3 from that diminishing label. The mall scene is almost certainly “too real,” but we live in a time where we face this reality in far more drawn out, and painful detail every day. Here, we see kids and an evil clown having fun before an offscreen evaporation brings everything to an end – it’s safer than the real world. We can experience and process and ultimately move past this scene in a way that the horrors of real life do not permit us to.
Perhaps that’s why the film is such a great comfort to me, and maybe it is that for others as well! Or maybe Terrifier 3’s success is a grand moral indictment of humanity writ large, a bunch of sickos here to watch the worst things imaginable. We at least could rile up a moral panic over material like this in ye olden days, but the world struggles enough maintaining righteous indignation over real world atrocities. Chaw approaches this scene with a more cynical outlook, reading the children as just greedy little freaks about to be fed to the grinder.
I see it differently: these children are genuinely excited by Art as Santa and are amused by his antics, not recognizing that his beard is the Real Deal. The mall has a certain hollowness to it before Art sits resplendent on the throne, but in those moments before it is all blown away, everyone (except the rational parents and employees) is happy. So I will say this: if Art is to inflict mass torment through an act of terrorism, I am glad that his immediate victims died happy and too quickly to know what was happening. Horrible as it is, that is a luxury in these days (and these films). What a horrible thing to write about a film, and yet. There’s something so striking about that, a slasher film sequence that made me laugh, reel in shock, reflect in horror, and ultimately arrive at some twisted peace about it.
I could end this monstrosity of an essay here on that note, but somehow, the bombing of half a dozen children is not the crux of why I love this film so much (strike that somehow, it is good that this scene isn’t why I love this film so much). We’ve been living in the grim for a while - let’s talk about the Showstopper event, the comedic climax before the fall. But before that, we have to talk about Jonathan Shaw.
Jonathan Shaw and the Shower Scene
I’ve already discussed Jonathan’s parallels to Sienna, and the differences in his recovery. Where Sienna is (rightly) too tormented to function for much of the interim between Terrifiers 2 and 3, Jonathan has fared marginally better. He still struggles, is still heavily medicated, but he’s in his first year of college and getting by. Like Sienna, he is trying his damndest to heal from impossible wounds, and at least partially succeeding. A shockingly kind fate for your average slasher survivor.
3’s first scene with him introduces us to his roommate Cole, and Cole’s girlfriend Mia. Mia is the long-ago-aforementioned “True Crime Enthusiast,” a podcaster who is absolutely obsessed with Art’s years-old massacre. It is hinted that she may only have gotten together with Cole specifically for the opportunity to get her marquee headline, an interview with one of the only survivors of the Miles County Clown approaching the 5 year anniversary of 2’s slaughter. Jonathan is rightly unsettled and disinterested by this leering attempt to capitalize on his legitimate trauma, and this was one of the moments when I started to realize how different 3 was from its predecessors. That is beginning to take a genuine moral stance, in a series whose guiding thesis thus far has been “Wouldn’t it fucking suck if the Evilest Clown Ever killed you really hard?”
After the sighting at the mall, Sienna calls up Jonathan and tries to keep herself composed, knowing that the “sick fuck who ruined our lives” is back and ready for business. She doesn’t want to tell him about the truth – that would make her crazy or make them both in complete danger. This veneer slips when Mia, adoring fangirl that she is, sees them in the school’s cafeteria. Overjoyed at the True Survivor, she begins overwhelming Sienna with questions, leading to one of the best moments of LaVera’s performance. She tells the truth: Their bodies and minds are scarred, their lives lying in fractures, and the insult of someone trying to turn that into content is worthy of her incredible blowup.
Taking refuge away from the horrible prying eyes that would seek to uproot their trauma for clicks, Sienna confesses to Jonathan, and here we get a great bit of interim backstory. In the aftermath of 2, having seen the overwhelming and impossible horror, Jonathan threw himself into research trying to explain what he saw, refusing to concede to the rational people around them who doubtless dismissed an immortal clown and a demonic phantom girl as impossible. This is not an uncommon trope for the few survivors of slashers, but I find something so exciting about his proactiveness, and also about the mythos he has (speculatively) unraveled.
In brief: The demonic can only enter the world of Terrifier through a conduit – someone recently deceased, and preferably someone truly evil. Art shooting himself in the head at the end of the first film (and his prompt pre-credits resurrection) is an excellent conduit, a human so monstrous that even the demonic plane wanted in on his action. I like this detail, if Art were wholly demonic from the start it would in some ways write off the impact of his evil, but no, that man hacksawed a woman in half lengthwise entirely for the love of the game. Art’s crimes and Victoria Heyes’ (we’ll get to her) disappearance left the Jonathan of five years ago absolutely convinced of the need to destroy the demon (the little Pale Girl). The intervening years with no sign of Art have of course dulled his conviction about his demonic (and Sienna’s possible angelic) nature, but as reluctant as he is to believe the truth, he decides against telling his family about what they would reasonably see as Sienna’s breakdown. He is rightly terrified by the possibility of her being right, but ultimately has one remaining hope in the sword their father gave her (which Sienna goes to retrieve after their conversation). It beat the hell out of Art once, it can do it again.
We’ll return to Jonathan in the climax, but for now we must focus on our erstwhile podcaster. In one of the film’s funniest scenes, Art is sneaking around the frat they’re at for a party and overhears their conversation about Jonathan, providing mimed commentary as Mia tries to explain her fascination with the case. “What is it like to be in the presence of that kind of evil? … when you look into his eyes, what do you see?” In this moment we see past Mia’s Content Farm facade and see something more genuine, a true desire to understand the nature of Art’s evil. Exploitative her roots may be, but the curiosity does seem to come from a genuine place, distorted by the world where true crime is one of the most profitable and heinous forms of media. A deep dive on “The most famous serial killer since Jack the Ripper” (accompanied by an “aw shucks” hand wave from Art) would of course be a true win for Mia and her podcast.
“But Haden,” I hear you cry, “Terrifier as a franchise is built off the most intense exploitation of violence imaginable. Isn’t it hypocritical for it to frame this as a bad thing?” If 3 had continued with the relatively plot/character-light approach seen in the prior films, I would agree! But with its incredibly earnest depiction of Sienna and Jonathan’s struggles and recovery, I’m far more reticent to label this as hypocritical. And to be more dismissive of that complaint: this is a work of fiction, where cast and crew alike are having fun producing the nastiest things they can think of. True crime is horrible in the real world, and it would remain horrible in the universe of Terrifier, particularly with Mia’s desire to effectively flatten Jonathan and Sienna into their trauma, when their entire existence in the film is attempting to move past those crimes that ruined their lives.
Perhaps it is fitting then that Art selects Mia and Cole for the closest thing to a “moral” death in the franchise to date. He overhears a desire to understand the truth of what it’s like to look into the face of pure evil, and as any good Santa would, he prepares a gift for Mia. While she and Cole bang in the shower, Art reaches into his trash bag of goodies and removes a fucking chainsaw, nodding approvingly. We are trafficking in numerous homages and tropes at this point – horny people get the ax, chainsaw murder for extra fun, and perhaps most surprisingly, a shower murder. Psycho’s shower scene is so famous as to be one of the defining concepts in cinema, a scene everyone who’s seen a movie or two knows of.
One of the first great violations and transgressions of human boundaries in mainstream cinema, something that has implanted itself in the public consciousness for over half a century. There’s a certain audacity in doing a Shower Scene given the legacy of that moment, but is this series anything other than audacious? It’s certainly made its own reputation with its hacksaw and bedroom sequences. Hell, 3 has already established itself with several all-timer sequences, and will continue to top itself. But here, Art escalates everything about the Shower Scene in a feast for the modern era of horror. Instead of one person, we have two. Instead of the kitchen knife, we have a chainsaw. And where before blood was chocolate syrup never once seen on Janet Leigh’s body… Well, we knew we were going to see everything, this is Terrifier after all.
In one of my favorite shots of the film, Art smashes through the glass door of the shower with the chainsaw, its whirring immediately overwhelming the soundscape and his victims. Cole is a gentleman, he throws himself in front of Mia and promptly has his hand and hamstrings obliterated for it. His leg collapses from underneath him and he falls out of the shower, leaving Art and Mia alone for One Special Moment. After chainsawing the majority of her body into an unrecognizable mass of gore, he sits down and removes his garish Christmas party glasses. She is barely holding on, but her eyes widen, and so do his. He smiles for her, as if asking “is it everything you were hoping?” He then stands up and shreds the rest of her into nothingness, and moves on to Cole.
Cole has (in comparison to Mia) been fairly “innocent” in the grand scheme of things, trying to shield Jonathan and Sienna as best he can, perhaps not out of genuine moral opposition, but more just the embarrassment of his girlfriend fangirling over something that should most definitely not be fangirled over. As he tries to crawl away on a ruined arm and leg, Art rips the remainder of one leg off, and prepares his ultimate act of theater for us. The whir of the chainsaw is so loud you might not hear the music begin to fade in:
It’s a Terrifier Christmas!
Sing along and harmonize,
‘Cause the fun’s just getting started,
And the death toll’s on the rise!
For those of you who were worried about 3 not having a theme song to rival the catchiness of the Clown Cafe, consider your worries assuaged. Jon and Al Kaplan have provided an absolute banger and here is my ace in the hole I spoke of. Art has been imagining the most glorious Yuletide backings to his escapades for the majority of the film, and this murder is his pièce de résistance, as he first begins to cleave Cole in half lengthwise from the buttcheeks, and then flips him over and finishes the job, giving a spectacular shot of dick and balls being evaporated before what remains of Cole is absolutely shredded to the strains of It’s a Terrifier Christmas. Equal parts metatextual commentary and self glorification, the song and sequence are a profound punchline and climax to Art’s antics, affirming that these murders are truly a Christmas celebration for him. After his considerable exertion chainsawing Cole into at least a dozen different pieces, he relaxes by laying down and making a blood angel, revealed in the final notes of the song.
Again, the film has its cake and eats it too – Santa and the mall are ultimately distressing, even if they carry moments of punchlines – the Shower Scene (it is 100% worthy of Capital status) is unfiltered gory glory through and through. The previous section may have been titled the Marquee Murders, but this is where everything comes together in a brilliant cavalcade of blood and guts being spread all over the frat house showers. This series relishes violence in a fashion both disturbing and hilarious, and nowhere else is the latter angle more evident than this sequence. And once again: This is not what made me truly fall in love with this movie (though I was hooting and hollering like a maniac the entire time). For that, we must turn to the moment when the horror at last comes a knockin, with Art and the demonic Vicky finally enacting their scheme to destroy Sienna in the most absolute way they can conceive.
The Final Act (The Beating Heart)
I’ve not talked much about Victoria Heyes thus far. Art’s only surviving victim from the first Terrifier, she is possessed by The Little Pale Girl in a mid-credits sequence in 2 and gives birth to Art’s recently severed head, with the two enacting a brutal escape from the mental hospital Vicky was kept in. The two of them go into hibernation, but we get a distinct sense of the demon’s flavor early in the film – while the Little Pale Girl was mute, once in Vicky’s body she is verbose and vulgar. There is so much hatred and sadism in everything Demon Vicky does, including mocking her mutilated appearance to (and this truly unsettles me) what seems to remain of the real woman inside. We do not hear from Vicky Heyes (real) outside of one desperate “help me!” early on, but knowing that she might be in there watching in horror for so much of the film is viscerally uncomfortable, particularly considering Demon Vicky’s further self-mutilation of what rapidly becomes a husk (the aforementioned masturbation to Art scalping a man, which is gross enough on its face I need not elaborate further).
While Art goes on his glorious rampage, Vicky spends much of her time preparing for an unknown ritual, crafting a costume and a crown of thorns. Her behind-the-scenes machinations begin to come to the fold when Sienna’s uncle goes to pick up Jonathan after the mall bombing, with a distorted voice on the phone suggesting something is not altogether right. Meanwhile, Sienna dreams peacefully (aided by medication) of the day her father introduced the Valkyrie to her, a beautiful moment colored by the encroaching visions of the demonic they both seem to share. He promises that he will always be with her, and we cut to the film’s most heavy metal visual, showing the adult Sienna in a fiery backdrop while some horrible burned humanoid with metal fused to its skull forges something for her: pieces of the Valkyrie armor. The creature is aggressive, but chained to a living statue of the virgin Mary that yanks it back after it roars in anger. We will likely not know till the fourth Terrifier, but this is surely her father, yes? Whatever torment he may have fallen to in the afterlife, he is still here, giving Sienna the tools she needs to confront the evil that haunts her.
Speaking of that evil: When Sienna awakes to the sound of her aunt and uncle getting into a vicious argument over what to do in light of her aggressive breakdown, she sneaks downstairs. We knew something was wrong when Vicky’s voice briefly came over the phone, but it is still a shock when she rounds the corner to see the beheaded and split open corpse of her uncle being pinned up by Art on the wall, all the voices having been performed by Demon Vicky. She is absolutely resplendent here, done up in full Pale Girl regalia and wearing the crown of thorns we saw her crafting: “Crazy Lady!” she shouts time and again in a voice that is one part Vicky and one part something darker. Sienna springs into action, screaming for Gabby and rushing to grab the sword she’d retrieved earlier in the film. Ever the protector she is, but she is just a hair too slow, and Art knocks her out.
Sienna awakens tied to a chair, across from her aunt Jess while Art decorates the tree with her uncle Greg’s intestines and caps it with his head. Demon Vicky is overjoyed unwrapping the Christmas presents, taking polaroids of the gory happenings. LaVera gives an astounding and visceral performance in this moment, conveying the deepest rage imaginable all while the duct tape is tied to her mouth. Her aunt is rightly in shambles, struggling to process the cruelty of the acts in front of her. There is also a wrapped up package big enough for a human head sat between them.
Vicky taunts and mocks Sienna and Jess, ripping apart presents and decorations, all the while alluding to that package. This is a game for Vicky and Art, an attempt to invoke the most overwhelming despair. First, the torment of the unknown with the unknown of the package. The mockery of the family’s standard wholesome Christmas gifts, the photographing of them in these broken and compromised positions. The derision might be cheap on its surface, but in tandem with the mess of gore that Art is yanking out of Greg’s crucified corpse, that’s exactly the point. Mockery and total destruction of everything these women held dear. When the gag is removed from Jess’s mouth, she has only one concern, being Gabby’s whereabouts. Demon Vicky is overjoyed to show her, unwrapping the package to reveal a skull being eaten by rats.
“Hi mommy!! We love you! We miss you!”
Jess is adamant. That cannot be her daughter. It never could be. The women are distraught regardless, who wouldn’t be? Jess is sobbing and Sienna is overloaded with pure, unbridled rage. Here, once again, is the cruelty behind these villains. I talked back in the mall scene about how desensitized we have become to violence in slashers culturally, of how far things must be escalated to properly frighten those sickos among us. Now, we return to where slashers took root: the destruction of the home. Art and Vicky seek to take everything from Sienna, a woman seemingly fated to destroy them, in an attempt to destroy her before she ever gets the chance. Her friends. Her uncle. Her mother. Her baby cousin. And her aunt.
I’m going to be light on details here, but I do have to talk about the rats scene. These monsters will take and take and take, and they take Jess from Sienna in front of her in a method so cruel it would make the Spanish Inquisition blush. Before the tube is hammered down her mouth, Jess has a few remaining words for Sienna: “Kill them both. Make them suffer.” That protective rage runs in the family, it seems – in the greatest moment of despair, Jess still wants Sienna to ruin these fuckers. They force Sienna to watch, though the film is mercifully tasteful in what it shows us. For a series that has long relished showing too much, for perhaps its single cruelest and tormenting death, there is a touch of dignity. We see Sienna’s reaction, Jess’s hands as they clutch and spasm, rats going down the tube, but the “glory” moments that other kills relish are done largely through implication. Sienna is the one Vicky and Art need to see this, and her reactions tell us more than enough.
Easily the most disturbing death, and yet the most “traditionally” handled of any in the franchise. A moment of cruelty so intense that even Terrifier balks at showing all of it, but also because here, the gore is not what truly matters. It is breaking Sienna, breaking us, the destruction of her warm home life, ruining baking cookies and drinking cocoa and doing fantasy makeup on your baby cousin. Everything Art has done has been cruel and evil in the most overtly theatrical of fashions, but this death is the most personally evil.
Sienna is in shambles, but Vicky has one mercy(?) for her after transferring the crown of thorns to her head. That skull isn’t Gabby. This reveal is somehow still cruel, with Art trotting the girl out to see the ruined remains of her mother and father, and the knowledge that they only lied to leave Jess in ultimate despair before her death. There is further insult to injury when he places the rat-eaten skull on the mantle, accompanied by a recognizable pair of glasses.
See you soon echoes out, as Sienna rages and screams seeing the remains of her brother. Some people have called his offscreen death cheap, but there is something legitimately horrific about this to me – Sienna is being constantly tormented throughout this scene, and the games Vicky and Art play are designed to break her in as many ways as they can. To know that she doesn’t even have her brother’s entire body and that what remains is unrecognizable, that is a viscerally deep horror and loss for her. There is so much pain and agony in this sequence, even knowing that it was done under much safer and kinder conditions, I am still reminded of the dinner scene in the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre, something so overwhelmed with agony and fear and hate and blood that it feels like an actual snuff film. Incomprehensible horror.
During Sienna’s despair and vows of vengeance, Vicky (played brilliantly by Samantha Scaffidi acting through what must be a painful quantity of makeup) gives an incredible monologue, excerpted here: “That’s it! Kill me! Give it all up! There is no hope! There is no god! LET GO! SO YOU CAN LET ME IN!” Held by the throat, Sienna seems almost like she is giving in to the same possession that overtook Vicky, before screaming and forcing the demon back out. There is so much desperation and rage, and yet, the moment is still driven by love. Gabby is here, and Sienna will never let go as long as she is there and Vicky compliments them both for that. This is what had me truly hypnotized during this climactic sequence – everything about this should break someone. Hell, Sienna is broken, emotionally and physically, and still she holds on. Vicky promises her a world of nothing but pain, where no salvation can be found. This is so often the core world of slashers, where our protagonists exist to die. And yet, despite everything, Sienna refuses. She’s died before, it wasn’t to her liking.
Of course, if killing almost everyone Sienna knows wasn’t enough, the only sensible solution for Art and Vicky is to finish their job. As he holds a knife to Gabby’s throat, she’s given the chance for some last words of her own. “I’m sorry I never got to give you my present.” In that moment we know, and Sienna does too. Gabby the snoop, too curious for her own good, looked at what Sienna brought home after her meeting with Jonathan. She knows it’s their last chance, that what Sienna wrote in her diary is true after all.
Vicky offers a moment of mercy, tossing “Gabby’s” present at the bound Sienna to unwrap. Despite her injuries, when she takes hold of that sword, she slices Art’s throat and lunges for Vicky. She will make these monsters suffer, just as they deserve, just as Jess wanted. Fitzpeter notes how righteous Sienna’s beatdown of Art was in 2, here that feeling is magnified tenfold by the immense personal cruelty she has been forced to witness.
Demon Vicky gets stabbed in the heart, the mouth, and is summarily beheaded. We see that demonic light fade from her remaining eye, and the perhaps supernaturally preserved body rot in real time, dissolving into a mess of pus. Sienna could care less about this, clasping Gabby to her. She isn’t alone. Some-fucking-how, she isn’t alone. This touching moment is interrupted by just about the most spectacular finish this movie could have given us:
Art revs his chainsaw, and he and Sienna enter into a sword vs chainsaw death battle. This scene is brutal and desperate in a way that I can barely begin to sum up, the nemeses doing everything they can to destroy each other. The two bite, body slam, nothing is off limits. As they both are disarmed, Art tries to suffocate Sienna in Greg’s innards, attempting to strangle her with his intestines, she bites through them and he proceeds to whip her with them. This is a categorically insane sequence even by Terrifier standards.
Throughout this scene, Gabby earnestly pleads with the remains of her mother to wake up. Having your cake (the most fucking rad final girl fight ever) and eating it too (child is rightfully sad and horrified). There is tonal whiplash to be sure, but the extremity of the fight is buoyed by the extremity of the emotions and the baselines of violence that have been established in this movie. Sienna will not give up despite everything they have put her through, and Art is unequipped to handle someone this good at fighting back. He luxuriates too much, she wants to end him. His greatest mistake is running to his garbage bag to seek new toys; Sienna beelines for her sword and stabs him to the wall, again and again and again. The demonic light also leaves his eyes, perhaps without Vicky’s presence he can be wounded, can be killed. She would finish the job, but…
Vicky’s decaying body opens up a fucking portal to hell (!!) that begins sucking everything in. Gabby falls and is holding on by a thread, screaming for her cousin. Sienna is forced to leave Art behind, desperately reaching, holding on. She cannot lose Gabby, not after all of this. Holding her sword by the blade, she extends the hilt down to her baby cousin. There is pain, there is suffering, but she will hold on, she will not let Gabby go. And hold on she does – but the sword’s blade slices through her palms, dropping Gabby and itself to an unseen nightmare space, Gabby’s last words of Sienna I love you echoing before the portal closes itself. After almost 30 minutes straight of screaming and blood and pain and desperation, silence.
…
Sienna is alone. She looks over to see that Art has absconded out the window, doubtless wounded, but still out there. As she begins to cry, the strains of perpetual fade in one last time, reminding her and us of the family she has lost but fought for anyway. Sienna Shaw has nothing left but her own resolve, and as she painfully removes the crown of thorns, we also see the stigmata wounds left by the sword close. Her father told her the sword could never hurt her. Small comfort now. She has lost everything except her own hope and resolve and love. “Gabby, I’ll find you.” Words that might ring hollow if it were anyone other than her.
In the film’s epilogue, Art is at a bus station, rocking back and forth. Silent Night is playing. As he gets on the bus, bloodied beyond belief, his usual excitable body language is gone. He is in pain. Thornton has confirmed that T3’s climax has stripped him of his supernatural longevity. Art took almost everything from Sienna, but she did manage to wound him right fucking back. In his grand tradition of weirding people out in public, he stares at a fellow passenger, eyes un-yellowed and human for the first time in years. A smile and one last horn honk close out the movie, with a final reprise of Terrifier Christmas opening the credits.
Postlude: Electing Evil
What a fucking rollercoaster. Rarely has a film been filled with this much pain, this much violence, this much ill regard for dignity and human life. And yet. I was reeling leaving this movie for the first time, my delirious voice messages to my friends flailing and failing trying to sum it up. This is a Real Movie, and I mean that not as clearing of a low bar but as the highest of praise – long ago I said that we almost never get actual movies paired with material this extreme, but hopefully from my word vomit breakdown, I’ve helped to elucidate precisely why I find this monstrosity so successful at that.
Halfway through my third viewing, I was coming to terms with the fact that this was not merely “one of the better movies I’ve seen this year” but my favorite film of 2024. I was feeling guilty about that, I like good taste, Art that says something. But this movie does say things. It does show us things about human will. Sienna Shaw is broken down time and time and time again and she still fucking gets up to slay her demons, even as she plummets into the depths of despair. Art constantly interrogates and jumps across lines of cinematic violence, asking us what we are okay with, what we will laugh at, what will repulse us, transforming filmic violence from horror into comedy and back again. They both end the film alone, but Sienna has hope. She has the love of her family even when they are gone, and the resolve to go to hell and back to rescue her cousin if she has to. And Gabby has that magical sword while she’s trapped in hell, if nothing else. What does Art have?
November 6th. I wake up and cry for hours. The people of my country have either gladly voted for a senseless, malicious evil, or did it out of ignorance and idiocy. I’d been dealing with some shame for loving a film like Terrifier 3; a film that reflects the best and worst, the kindest and the cruelest of people and our imaginations. After seeing that cruelty made manifest, I go see it again, looking for that bizarre comfort it had been giving me. I find it once again. I see the most senseless and violent cruelty inflicted on those who don’t deserve it, and as that pain builds up throughout the film, I admire the strength of those who survived it the last time. And I cheer when the last woman standing puts a sword in the mouth of the demon who tried to take herself from her.
Walter Chaw’s review looks at the film as Pandora’s box, unveiling more horrors than previously imaginable. He says the glimmer of hope for Sienna at the end hurts almost as much as the violence, reminding us that Hope was in the box as well. Maybe I am still naive, less world-weary than he is. But after the intense psychological and emotional wound realizing how much of the country (whether deliberately or not) voted for the extermination of people like me and my friends… I’ll take that glimmer of hope. I will hold on to that righteous and visceral rage, and I will fight.
Because what else can you do against the grinning, silent face of evil?
Post-postlude.
That was a lot! If you’ve made it this far, I hugely appreciate it. I’m hoping to continue writing on a wide variety of topics, hopefully some less off-putting than this one, and if you’d like to see more along those lines, feel free to subscribe!