Terrifier 2
Damien Leone will go down as an inspiration for many young cinephiles. He is a true indepedent filmmaker, whose sophomore feature film, Terrifier, was an effective slasher film whose sole purpose was to showcase as many gnarly and graphic death scenes as a $35k budget could afford. Three years after its release and word-of-mouth success spread by hardcore genre fans, Leone managed to greenlight a sequel, bringing back the deranged Art the Clown and scoring a massive success on crowdfunding platforms, more than quadrupling his initial budget and securing production by Dark Age Cinema and Fuzz on the Lens Production, as well as distribution by Bloody Disgusting.
Terrifier 2 is bloodier, nastier, and more ambitious film than the 2016 original. Everything is bigger, including its runtime – now double the length – but its core has remained the same, for better and worse. The charm of this gorefest, which secured its spot as the biggest surprise hit of 2022’s Halloween season, is its return to a DIY approach to the violence. Art the Clown, masterfully portrayed by David Howard Thornton, is unlike other slasher killers: while Freddy Krueger plays nightmarish mind games and both Michael Myers and Jason Vorhees seem ambivalent to the havoc they cause, Art is an artist who paints with his weapons. He takes absolute glee in using a wide variety of common utensils to inflict as much pain as possible to his victims, and the practical effects that Leone himself helped create do not shy away from the sheer brutality of the acts.
Calling Terrifier 2 a splatterfest would be an understatement. This sequel is downright sadistic, with its central villain literally pouring salt on people’s wounds to silently laugh at their screams. As vile and disgusting as this may be, Leone manages to do a better job in balancing out the violence with some much needed dark humor. Art the Clown gets a new companion in this film, a ghostly and equally mute Pale Little Girl played by the creepy Amelie McLain, and their shenanigans are admittedly quite amusing, from playfully tossing a possum’s carcass at each other to handing out candies to children out of a freshly-cut severed head.
References to other horror classics are abound in here, from dream sequences straight out of An American Werewolf in London to a climax inside a haunted mansion that shares quite a few similarities with The Guest. Said climax is one of the biggest problems with Terrifier 2, and admittedly its only real flaw: the running time. It is commendable that Leone spent more time developing Sienna and Jonathan Shaw (Lauren LaVera and Elliott Fullam respectively), the brother-sister lead duo, and their family dynamic. It is also appreciated that, with a bigger budget, he went as far out as he could with touching on more of the lore of Art the Clown and his supernatural origins. Sadly, with its extreme levels of violence and painfully drawn out conclusion, the length is felt in the worst way possible, leading to exhaustion and tiredness before the 2-hour mark.
With a tighter script and editing – something that allegedly will be present in the just-announced Terrifier 3 – Damien Leone’s Terrifier 2 would have been the true horror cult classic that it so clearly wants to be. Still, despite spending more time than needed in expanding characters’ backstories and motivations, this is a refreshingly shocking and upsetting slasher that pulls no punches and fully embraces its low-budget roots to create a gleefully upsetting experience that is best experienced with a crowd. Not for the faint-hearted though, as every single kill is so ridiculously painful and detailed that it is understandable that quite a few audience members felt sick during this cinematic event.