Terrifier 2 (2022)

“They never found the body... what if he decides to come back here?” – Jonathan

So, THIS is the film I heard so much about last Halloween? The film that I couldn’t find on streaming, and all physical media copies had sold out everywhere? Wow. Now I understand why.

Writer/producer/director Damien Leone has come a long, long way in a short time and this is his coming-of-age movie, I think. Given the budget of his earlier All Hallows Eve and the first Terrifier, with their impressively their rapid-fire pace and slim running times, Terrifier 2 is, to say the very least, ambitious. An old fashioned, nasty gorefest in the same style as the earlier entries, but with a running time of two hours and twenty minutes or so. That’s two hours and twenty minutes of unrelenting gore and sadism that would make a Saw movie blush. But the plot moves along swiftly and the movie feels much shorter.

We pick up where Terrifier ended, in the morgue with a mysteriously resurrected Art the Clown (again, marvellously mimed by David Howard Thornton) murdering the coroner. Hitting him in the head with a hammer, so his eye comes flying out, which Art tries to pop in his own empty socket (you’ll recall he lost an eye in the last film) in a moment of physical mime comedy, before discarding it with a shrug. This is just the beginning of Art’s atrocities this time around.

Leaving the Morgue, he goes to a laundrette to wash his blood splattered clown suit, while sitting there naked, interacting with a young girl clown, who’s a sort of Harley Quinn to Art’s Joker. This is The Little Pale Girl (Amelie McLain) as another customer looks on. The Little Pale Girl is visible only to Art, and we don’t know what the other customer says to Art, but in the next scene he’s been killed with a broken off broomstick rammed into the top of his head.

But, of course the events of the last film were revealed to have been a flashback to the year before. So, now we come to the current day and the interview with the lone survivor of the previous Halloween, the horribly mutilated Victoria (Samantha Scaffidi) has been broadcast, and she has turned on and slaughtered the interviewer offscreen as we’ve already seen last time. The news has now broken and we’re up to date.

On to the story at hand – it’s Halloween, and Barbara (Sarah Voigt) a widow, has two teenaged children each with their own mental health issues. The older girl Sienna (Lauren LaVera) is a talented costume designer and cosplayer who has built a Warrior Woman costume designed by her late father to wear on Halloween. Her younger brother Jonathan (Elliot Fullam) is insisting on wearing an Art the Clown costume, having developed an obsession with the mass murderer after seeing some drawings of him in his late father’s sketchbook.

This family kind of wanders into Art’s sights from the moment Art sees Sienna at a costume shop buying a replacement set of angel wings for her costume because the original ones were burned in a mysterious fire in her bedroom the previous night.

Aided and abetted by The Little Pale Girl, Art cleaves his way through Sienna’s friends with his makeshift weapons carried in a black plastic refuse bag. He gouges, he claws, he castrates, he flays, stabs, shoots, skins alive… it’s a virtual catalogue of the worst possible ways to die, and given the scant $250,000 budget of the entire film, I’ll never understand how Leone manages to pull off the effects to the level they’re at. Some of the deaths, as I mentioned earlier, are more cringe inducing than those we see in the much higher budgeted Saw movies – and they’re gross beyond belief.

Normally, I’d say that the castration is the worst, especially when the severed member is rubbed against a window. But one unlucky victim has her eyes gouged, her brain exposed, the skin peeled off her back, her arm dislocated at the shoulder, then twisted and torn off – before Art has another idea and pops down to the kitchen to get some bleach to douse on the poor girl, and then a heavy sprinkling of table salt.

The final showdown takes place between Sienna coming to Jonathan’s rescue and Art in an old, deserted amusement park, and Art is finally put down by being decapitated – but The Little Pale Girl appears and inexplicably carries the head away without any attempt to attack the kids, who by now would be exhausted and easy targets.

But there’s a sting.

It’s a nasty one that makes no sense at all, but hey, it might when we see Terrifier 3, which is currently filming.

Halfway through the credit, we visit Victoria that same night in a psychiatric hospital, who graphically gives birth to Art’s severed head. (No, you didn’t read that wrong – it’s what happens.)

These films are nasty, there’s no doubt about that. But they carry with them the same kind of fascination that makes us slow down and look when we pass the mangled remains of a car at the side of the road after an accident. And they show that the kind of twisted genius in low budget independent horror that gave Sam Raimi a career with his Evil Dead in 1982 is still alive and well.

And that wraps up Shocktober 2023. We did it. Another 13 Screams done and dusted. See you in eleven months when I’ll be digging deep into the darkest corners of the archives once again. My selection process has already begun.

Don’t forget, there’s a Special Shocktober Edition of Piercing the Veil available right over here.

And may all your nightmares have a happy ending in the final reel.