Hi all, happy December, and welcome to the first So Desensitized Christmas post of 2025! We’re starting off strong with the most recent installment (until the fourth one comes out anyway) of the goriest horror franchise ever - Damien Leone’s Terrifier. Now, you all know what I think about Damien Leone and the place the Terrifier franchise holds in modern pop culture as I discussed in The Terrifier Paradox, but each movie is individually doing something different, and the third one does something we haven’t had in a good long while - it adds to the fine, storied tradition of Christmas horror. I’ve discussed Christmas horror before on here with my essay on A Christmas Carol (which ended up being my first professionally published work!), but Terrifier 3 occupies a different sort of space than most Christmas horror while still honoring the subgenre’s origins in most ways. 

For one, it’s an installment in what is legitimately the goriest horror franchise ever. Bloodier than Saw, more depraved than Texas Chain Saw, giving even The Thing a run for its grant funded Antarctic research money, Terrifier is for the real sickos and not most anyone else. It’s the ultimate in (formerly) low budget gross-out horror. And its real claim to this particular fame is, in fact, Terrifier 3. It’s really difficult to adequately communicate exactly the import of Terrifier 3 to the current horror renaissance, but I’m here to try.

So, remember my post about The Exorcist? And how there was all this reaction when it came out? Women fainting, heart attacks, a massive opening weekend despite competing with The Sting and being released the day after Christmas? Something so terrifying that audiences were warned away for health reasons, for fear that Satan would possess them if they saw that little girl’s head turn all the way around on her neck? Almost the exact same thing happened with Terrifier 3. The London premier had several walk-outs in the first ten minutes, people so impacted by the brutal, festive, cold open that they had to leave, couldn’t even bear to see the rest. It was banned from viewing by people under eighteen in France, promptly following its French opening. In America, theaters showing it were issued signs, informing audiences that the film contained “Extreme violence and excessive gore”, and to find a staff member if they were feeling unwell, as staff trained in first aid were on site. Which is (I hope) not something you normally see at movies. The thing I’m getting at here is that not only did Terrifier 3 bring the absolute best and bloodiest of the newest slasher icon - other than Frendo the clown, of course - it also brought shock back to horror. And in a Christmas movie at that. Sure, Terrifier and Terrifier 2 pulled the franchise up to the place that meant Terrifier 3 could be a big of a release as it was, but Terrifier 3 put Art the Clown on the map. Tell me you went to any big box store last Halloween and didn’t see Art somewhere. But more than that, really, Terrifier 3 proved the whole original point of this blog.

Let’s take another moment to look back at The Exorcist, shall we? It’s very of its time, an obvious Manson movie about a little girl falling to devilish influences that are actually just puberty, and being brought back to light and innocence by a priest, a man of God. It brought the special effects, the makeup, the shaking bed, all of it. And it shocked the culture that it clawed its way into, still shaking from the images of teenage girls with crosses carved on their foreheads, wishing and hoping that it was all over, that it couldn’t be their little girl. The Exorcist made the profit and shocked the crowds, sure, but more importantly it showed those same crowds that their world was no longer safe. And, since then, there’s been a lot of discussion about whether or not something like that could ever happen again. In this modern day and age of in-school violence, internet predation, and rights being stripped away, would we really still be shocked to learn that it’s not a safe world? Or are we - and forgive me for being a little self-indulgent here - So Desensitized that no movie could do again culturally what The Exorcist did? There’s been a lot of fear and discourse around that idea, that even in a horror renaissance, it can’t be the same, can’t hit like it did before the internet and the guns and the like. In a social media post I was recently, someone criticized modern horror movies for not being gross anymore, and instead being, and this is a close to verbatim as I can get “the personification of your trauma chasing you through your $5 million high-rise apartment”. Then Terrifier 3 hacked and slashed its way onto the scene, establishing very firmly that, no, it’s sometimes still a bloody clown with a hacksaw.

It’s very rare that critical discussions like that are disproven, because art is, no matter what Damien Leone might have to say, subjective, and means different things to different people. But Terrifier 3 did exactly that - disproved actual years of critical discourse over modern horror and whether or not it’s trash. (It’s not, it’s just different, and, surprising no one, critics and snobby film people had the exact same things to say in the eighties, too.) Terrifier 3 gave absolutely no quarter to either the ‘you can’t do anything these days’ crowd or the ‘modern horror isn’t gory anymore, where’s the blood’ crowd. It showed, definitively, that phenomena like The Exorcist can still happen. Movies still impact people, even when we know the world isn’t safe. We’re not so jaded that a clown dressed as Santa murdering children on Christmas doesn’t gross anyone out. Horror is still scary, and bloody, and personal. All the classic narratives still work. Your heroine can still spend most of the movie being horribly injured and look great the whole time. Take a deep breath. Modern media isn’t sterilized. There’s still goo and violence. Have a drink of bloody milk. You’ll be fine.

But now, you might be asking, what does this have to do with Christmas, other than the simple fact of Terrifier 3 being a Christmas horror movie? And the short answer to that is, well, it’s more impactful in its violence given that it’s set during a time of joy, cheer, family, and all that. Killing people horribly on Halloween is expected. But on Christmas? That’s just cruel. So that’s the short answer. The long answer, however, is complicated.

Terrifier 3 specifically is a very interesting case of Christmas horror, considering the history of it. Some of the earliest Christmas horror was meant to add a little bit of darkness to this celebration of light through ghost stories. Perhaps the most famous of these being A Christmas Carol, which served more than anything to kick-start the subgenre as we know it today (thanks, Charlie). While it was the first of the genre, though, A Christmas Carol is also one of the last examples of Christmas horror where Christmas was at all important to the plot. Even hallmarks like Black Christmas and Gremlins are only set at Christmas in the same way a coming-of-age story might be set in the fall. Christmas adds an atmosphere, but the fact of the season doesn’t actually impact the plot other than to, as I mentioned above, juxtapose the cruelty of the violence occurring, against the joy and light of the season. Terrifier 3 manages to do both things at once. Obviously the sheer level of gore against the cheery season does serve as a thematic juxtaposition, but the larger narrative is heavily influenced by the heroine (Sienna Shaw) trying to figure out how to fit into a family after, y’know her mom being murdered and having been set to a mental hospital. So, of course, Christmas is a good setting to have her settle into and then have aggressively disrupted by a murder mime.

But, Christmas aside, the fact alone that Terrifier 3, the goriest horror movie on record is not only a big-budget success that had humble beginnings, but the highest grossing unrated movie ever, is pretty damn important. Especially in terms of whether or not modern horror has been sterilized, or that audiences won’t react to gore anymore. It proves that, believe it or not, horror still hits. People like horror, and people like goo. New slasher icons can still be successful, reboots aren’t all we have, and the era of modern horror minimalism that never really happened can come to an end in people’s minds. Praise be to Art the Clown. And, by extension, David Howard Thornton, who carries every single one of those movies on his back.

Thanks for reading all! Bit of a short one this time, because, believe it or not, December is not less busy than November. I’ll see you next time for…more Christmas horror! Happy reading, stay spooky, and go to the library!🎄🪓🔪🩸