Terrifier (2016)
“The clown with the white face and the little black hat! He thinks what he is doing is funny because he's laughing. But I know it's not funny because they're all dead.” – The Cat Lady
Unusually for me, I’m going to issue a little warning about this movie – it’s one of the most graphically gory films I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been watching horror movies for a long, long time. (Well, half a century anyway.) So, if this piece inspires you to seek this movie out, just be prepared to see some things that make Rob Zombie’s movies seem timid, okay?
The background to this film was covered in this Shocktober a few instalments ago. Art the Clown was a character in the ultra-low budget All Hallows Eve. He wasn’t intended to be a recurring character, but in 2016, he got his own movie.
I don’t particularly like clowns. In fact, I don’t know of many people who do, so it baffles me that clowns exist at all. But, our fear of what lurks behind the greasepaint makes for some memorable onscreen scares. Take for example Captain Spaulding, played by Sid Haig or Pennywise, be he played by Tim Curry or Bill Skarsgard. Or take movies like Clownhouse, or Killer Klowns from Outer Space. All great examples of why those painted on smiles creep the hell out of us. (Not to mention the Joker, who has menaced Batman in comic books for over eighty years, becoming perhaps the greatest super villain of all time.)
Well, now we can add Art the Clown to the list of legendary horror movie clowns, with his stark black and white costume, and little black hat. (For some reason, the stupid little black hat gets under my skin.) Like, I guess Michael Myers back in the first Halloween movie in 1978, we know absolutely nothing about him. We have no backstory, we don’t know what triggers him, why the costume, what his motivation is – and this is I think what makes him so effective. Art is absolutely random. Completely insane, a homicidal maniac without a shred of compassion or decency. He’ll slaughter you just because he noticed you. I’ve always found that the random maniacs in horror the most disturbing. Michael Myers lost a lot of him menace when the plot element of Laurie Strode being his sister was introduced in the sequels. It got worse when Rob Zombie started giving the Myers character a semi sympathetic back story. Art suffers none of this baggage. Art just is.
Another interesting facet to Art is his total silence. He says absolutely nothing, but mimes his frustration comically when he’s out of ammunition, or a killing doesn’t go as planned. This comedic element when coupled with the sheer outrageous horror of what he’s doing is hugely effective because we the audience are both repulsed by his actions, while his reactions make us laugh. That’s a hard one to pull off in a film like this but writer, director, editor, special effects guy Damien Leone does so with gusto, with David Howard Thornton under the little black hat lending his considerable mime skills to his portrayal of Art. (Mimes make me feel uncomfortable too.)
Plot? There’s not a great deal of it to discuss. We start out with a TV talk show interview. The subject is a hideously deformed woman who narrowly escaped being murdered the previous year. Off camera, the interviewer is overheard by the interviewee mocking her. In an insane rage, she gouges the interviewer’s eyes out with her thumbs. (I told you it’s gory and it gets a whole lot worse.)
It’s Halloween, and Art is out for a killing spree. He’s put on his makeup, his little hat loaded up a black plastic trash sack with goodies (weapons) and off he goes.
Two friends stumble into his path, Tara (Jenna Kanell) and Dawn (Catherine Corcoran) who are drunk and making their way home from a party. He follows them into a pizzeria, where Dawn starts to tease him, sitting on his lap for a selfie, that kind of thing. The guys running the joint are already a bit hostile to him, and throw him out when he spreads his faeces on their bathroom wall. Thankfully, we don’t see him actually doing that.
When the girls get back to their car, they find that a tyre has been slashed, so Tara calls her sister Victoria (Samantha Scaffidi) to come to their rescue. In the meantime, Tara leaves the car to go and ask if she can use the bathroom in a warehouse they’ve parked beside. Bad move leaving Dawn alone, because that’s when Art strikes and abducts her.
It’s not a good night to be in the warehouse, not with Mike, (Mat McAllister) an exterminator there to kill the rats and an eccentric Cat Lady (Pooya Mohseni), who seems to live there, somewhere in the basement.
Art stalks and captures Tara, ties her to a chair and starts to threaten her with some torture devices before showing her the still alive Dawn, who has been stripped and is hanging upside down. Turning his attention to Dawn, he proceeds to (and I can’t believe I saw this) saw her in half with a hacksaw – lengthwise, starting at the groin.
The rest of the film is a series of chases through the warehouse as Art works his way through the cast, including the newly arrived Victoria. He kills Tara by shooting her several times, the Cat Lady isn’t so lucky, as Art makes a full head and chest piece out of her scalp, face and breasts, Mike gets his head stomped until his eyes literally pop out of their sockets, and so on. Vicky is the final victim, as Art starts to eat her face, but the police arrive just in time. Rather than be taken into custody, Art shoots himself through the mouth.
The final scenes are haunting. At the morgue, Art is still alive. The disfigured woman from the opening scene is revealed to be Victoria, or what’s left of her after the attack, now completely insane after her ordeal. The whole film was a flashback to a year ago.
Okay, the film is distasteful and overly graphic. But I think that ‘s the point here. This isn’t a film for the Conjuring crowd. This is a throwback to the lawless pre home video ratings days, when pretty much anything the film makers could think of was there on your screen. It’s gore for the pure sake of it, with no motivation – there’s no redemption here. A heavenly light isn’t suddenly shone upon Art as he atones for his actions, the victims are in the wrong damn place at the wrong damn time and pay a heavy price.
The movie is a gripping, repulsive experience that has to be seen to be believed. The most unbelievable thing about it is that the whole budget was only $35,000. I’m surprised that this flew completely under my radar until word of mouth about the sequel reached me a year ago. This has all the hallmarks of a future cult horror movie.
But if what I’ve heard is true, the sequel is even gorier. We’ll see in a few days.