This report comes from Fantastic Fest 2024, the annual genre film festival in Austin, Texas. We’ll have more reports from the ground throughout the fest.
Immediately before the world premiere of Terrifier 3, the latest phenomenally gory installment in the cinematic saga of demonic slasher Art the Clown, writer-director Damien Leone asked the audience, “Do you guys have your barf bags ready?”
It was a fair question: Leone openly aims to outdo his previous movies in terms of graphic, ghoulish, extended scenes of torture, and the kind of practical-effects mayhem that turns human bodies into wet meat. And immediately after the premiere of Terrifier 3 at Fantastic Fest, in a Q&A with his core cast members, Leone confirmed he already has plans for the next sequel in the series. When an audience member asked about those plans, Leone chuckled and said, “I love that you’re still thinking about the next one after [watching all] that. So — yes, there will be a Terrifier 4.”
Leone deferred any questions about that sequel — after all, Terrifier 3 hasn’t even hit theaters yet. But the new film, which expands the supernatural lore of the Art the Clown universe, certainly ends in a place expressly designed to make audiences want a fourth chapter.
Terrifier 3 once again pits previous survivor Sienna Shaw (Lauren LaVera) against Art (David Howard Thornton) and his grievously mutilated former victim Vicki (Samantha Scaffidi), who’s become a kind of hyperverbal Harley Quinn to Art’s silent, mime-inspired Joker. The movie implies that while Sienna has spent five years in and out of psychiatric hospitals, trying to process her trauma from the events of Terrifier 2, Art has been quiescent, possibly just waiting for her to reemerge. When she does, moving in with her aunt’s family, Art goes on a new rampage — this time at around the Christmas season.
Why Christmas? “I just thought it would be perfect for this character, all those wonderful holiday tropes, that we could put him into those situations.” Leone said. “That’s one of my favorite subgenres of horror — Christmas horror.” Citing the 1972 Tales from the Crypt anthology movie installment “And All Through the House” and its 1989 Robert Zemeckis remake for the Tales from the Crypt TV show as longtime favorites, he said, “I just love that tone. It’s the perfect marriage of horror and Christmas. So that was a big inspiration.
“And then obviously there’s a lot of Black Christmas homages in this movie. Just that combination of being terrified and cozy at the same time — I mean, there’s nothing cozier than Christmas […] And then [you] just [take as much advantage of] that as possible, and add as much sacrilege.”
The Christmas setting also enabled a sequence (suggested in one of the movie’s more graphic posters and glimpsed in the first trailer) where Art the Clown takes over for a mall Santa, with deadly results. Art actor David Howard Thornton said it was his favorite scene to film, because it was actually shot in a mall, where the production ended up with a live audience of curious bystanders: “I had so much fun. Oh, that was so much fun. All these people in the mall coming to watch, so I had an actual audience there to perform for — it just gave me more to work with. I felt like I was back onstage again.”
Polygon will have more about the conception and shooting of Terrifier 3 closer to the movie’s Oct. 11 release.
