TERRIFIER 2: Delivers Good Old Fashioned Blood And Guts

Art, the silent killer clown with the rictus smile and the trash bag full of rusty tools, is back. While Terrifier 2 lacks some of the tension of the original, in part because of its strangely languorous pacing, this long, surreal sequel makes up for it with scene after scene of showstopping gore.

The first Terrifier (2016, the year of creepy clowns), a micro-budget slasher in the style of Rob Zombie by director Damien Leone, is, in some ways, full of ideas. Some of its fascinations include our culture’s inured relationship to violence, beauty and our desperate desire for it in the social media age, ugliness and our perverse attraction to it. Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton), the mass murderer in question, serves as a locus for these anxieties with his unsettlingly ravenous, frozen grimace that draws attention and derision in equal measure. These ideas come together when in an early scene one of Art’s soon-to-be-victims, Dawn (Catherine Corcoran), mockingly forces him to pose for a selfie with her–– which he eventually replicates using her phone and her dismembered body, smile still firmly in place. There are also gestures towards investigations of all the old Freudian pathologies–– absent parents for example (Art strikes up a perverse infantile bond with a maternal figure who lacks a child), or queerness (he later dons the skin of this woman’s chest as well as her hair and parades around in an unnecessary allusion to Buffalo Bill of The Silence of the Lambs–– yikes, but I digress). Terrifier 2, like its predecessor, plays with these themes the same way Art plays with his victim’s bodies–– with enthusiasm, only to drop them when something more interesting comes along.

Not that it’s that deep to begin with. The franchise’s primary focus is gore, and lots of it–– and the movie’s great at it! Terrifier delivers impeccable, creative carnage in large quantities on a tiny budget, and its villain is memorably, well, terrifying. Art’s mimelike movements oscillate between the stillness of a waxwork and sudden, disturbing moments of agility.

Where the first film is direct in its delivery of thrills, however, this film is deliberately dreamlike. Following a cold open that picks up precisely where the first film left off (namely in an unfortunate mortician’s operating room) and demonstrating an immediate mastery for the art of visera-squishing, the film, and Art shift gears. With his trash bag over his shoulder, he goes to the laundromat to wash his latest victim off his clown suit, the dead man’s spare change in hand. He disrobes and settles in to wait in a series of still closeups, laughing with silent gusto at violent headlines he sees in the paper while the sole other patron sleeps–– only to meet another clown, this time a young girl (Amelie McLain, whose eruptively diarrheal way of introducing herself gets at another kind of fascination with the “splatter” part of splatter film). During a rousing game of pattycake, the sleeping man awakens to see Art naked but for his mask, oversized shoes, and a generous coating of blood, clapping hands with thin air. Art puts his clown suit back on and heads out, leaving the man’s corpse behind, new imaginary friend in tow. 

This sequence’s grotesque surrealism marks the tone of much of the film’s almost two hour and a half hour runtime, largely to great effect. The film technically follows a high school girl, Sienna (a delightfully plucky Lauren LaVera), her younger brother, Elliot (Elliott Fullam), and their newly widowed mother, Barbara (Sarah Voigt, and yes they are explicitly “coming to get her”). The troubled family bickers and panics its way through the couple of days leading up to Halloween as Art stalks them, ostensibly because of some sort of demonic curse prophesied by their recently deceased artist father that never receives a full explanation. As All Hallows Eve creeps closer, Sienna, assigned the role of avenging angel (with a suitably skimpy, kickass costume to match), experiences gleefully trippy nightmares and hallucinations in the children’s television style of Sesame Street as directed by John Wayne Gacy (to go into further detail here would be to spoil one of the film’s highlights). As the film progresses, the plot itself becomes largely irrelevant. Drinks get spilled, teens get killed, and chaos ensues. The fun of the film lies in frequent moments of unhinged childish glee as the characters and their friends careen through hyper-violent dreamscapes real and imagined, drugged and sober, from carnivals to costume parties, Spirit Halloweens to elaborate family dinners (wink wink). 

This dreamy stylistic advantage is also the film’s ultimate limitation: loose pacing aids to the sense of the family’s plight as Art’s own personal phantasmagoria for the film’s first half, but undercuts the more traditional scares upon which later scenes rely for lack of compelling narrative. 

Ultimately, though, through it all, Art the Clown is having the time of his eternal life: the scene in the laundromat crystalizes the cheerfully murderous relish for the meat and potatoes of this kind of filmmaking (in this case lots of meat…and some potatoes): blood and guts in as many ways as possible as creatively as possible. The film harkens back to a simpler era in horror characterized by horny teens, anonymous masked killers, and breathless media accounts of the depravity of it all–– and based on reports of fans fainting/throwing up in the theater, Terrifier 2‘s got all three! When John Carpenter, master of classic ’80s horror, was asked about his thoughts on “elevated horror,” his answer was simple: “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Films like Midsommar and It Follows deliver an entirely different satisfaction than films like Terrifier 2, and both kinds are equally important to the horror ecosystem. Anyway, this film has demonic musical numbers, organs and bodily fluids of all kinds, an ungodly act involving mashed potatoes, and buckets on buckets of blood: Now that’s Art.

Terrifier 2 is in theaters and available to stream as of October 6th.

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