The little horror movie series that could, Terrifier has taken both the terrifying Art the Clown and its creator, writer/director/special effects artist Damien Leone, to gory heights as each film pushes the boundaries on what it is to truly unnerve genre audiences.
As Terrifier 3 massacres its way into Australian theatres this weekend (you can read our review here) – and following reports of mass fainting spells and audience puking – our own Peter Gray spoke with the enthusiastic filmmaker about expanding on the mythology of Art the Clown, what lines of depravity even he won’t cross on screen, and the forceful performance of the series’ worthy final girl, Lauren LaVera.
Congratulations on everything this series has done. Art the clown has become this horror icon in a small matter of years. How do you approach this character now? The mythology of him, whilst keeping the story fresh and unpredictable? Did you always have the idea of where Art was going from the very beginning? Or did it just kind of expand as the stories were coming about?
It definitely expands as I write them. I always have ideas as sort-of safety nets, but I’m constantly thinking, and I’m constantly trying to come up with better ideas or different directions. You never know when inspiration is going to hit you and it’s going to force you to go into a radically new direction, or something. I always say, “Until the film is ripped from my hands and it’s on the screen with the credits rolling…anything could change at any moment.” I always do have a forward plan. But with Art’s character, it’s essential that we always check some boxes in order for him to keep working the way he’s working. And that’s just always getting very inventive with the kills. David Howard Thornton and I, he plays Art the Clown, we always try and inject the right amount of levity into the character, sometimes even pushing the boundaries of the levity, seeing if we can get away with a little more.
(We’re) trying to make him more human, if possible. These are things that we notice the audience really responds to, and then we just kind of organically keep following that. That’s the trajectory that’s been working so far, but the one thing I always make sure that we constantly keep doing, and I always remind David, is that we can’t go too far into that hokey comedic direction. First and foremost, this character has to be scary and disturbing and sadistic and cruel. That is what he ultimately is. We have to be true to that character. We have to be genuine. And once we start leaning in and just going for laughs above everything else, we’re dead and this character is dead. So once I make sure we’re checking those boxes and Art’s safety net, then I could take bolder risks with the story, or try and go in new directions and just take big swings. That doesn’t mean that they’re going to hit. A lot of the time they don’t hit. But I’m also not interested in just repeating the same movie over and over again, and just brining in a new group of people that Art’s just going to murder again each movie. It’s just the same redundant movie. I’m trying to do something more interesting for me personally as an artist, and hopefully people feel the same.
I felt like this was possibly the meanest Terrifier yet, and I mean that in the best way possible. The first film and the second film have their big set pieces of the girl being split in half and then the bedroom sequence, and then with this one I felt like the chainsaw shower is maybe the biggest set piece, but at the same time the beginning is really horrific, and then there’s that attic sequence with the glass shard. I love horror so much and I had such a visceral reaction to this. Were there ideas in this film that you had thought of for previous films that you couldn’t execute for whatever reason? Or did all of these death scenes come about between films two and three?
Well there are two kill scenes in particular that I’d had in my back pocket for a while. I’ll say *Spoiler alert*, but the first one was….I was always reluctant to give Art the Clown a chainsaw, because it’s too sacred to Leatherface. I never wanted to give him that weapon. I felt like we had to prove ourselves, if anything, for a couple of movies before I felt that he was worthy to get a chainsaw. I kept seeing chainsaw movies, and they weren’t all necessarily Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies, but any movie involving a chainsaw…and I said if I ever got to do a scene with a chainsaw, I would make it 10 times worse. Where is the ultimate chainsaw murder scene? So once we got here, I was like, “I want to do it. I want to do that.” I always wanted to do a scene that was an homage to Psycho, which is the ultimate kill scene of all time. So that’s kind of where that one came from.
And then there’s a scene involving rats at the end of the movie, which was inspired by the novel “American Psycho.”
I was going to ask about that. I remember reading that and thinking how this will never get filmed. Obviously the film (American Psycho) went in a different direction. But when the rats started being introduced to the scene I thought, “This is so Patrick Bateman.” That’s awesome that’s the inspiration.
I’ve known about that scene since the movie came out. The year the movie came out, me and my buddy, we were in high school, and we were obsessed with the movie. He went off and read the book. I actually never read the book, and he just told me everything that was in it. He just said, “Dude, you won’t believe how much more insane and graphic and horrific the book is. It’s nothing like the movie.” When he told me about that scene, it scarred me and just never left me. I knew the only way to deal with something that scars me is to scar other people. So I said, “I’m going to use that one day.”
It’s a perfect example of when people ask me, “Do you have a line that you won’t cross?” It’s 1000 times worse in the book, and it’s sexual in the book, and I would never do that. To me, that’s too far. Even the way (the scene) is shot in (Terrifier 3) you see some thing, but it’s also that the cuts are so fast where it’s almost subliminal. If you watch that scene again, it’s more the audience piecing it together as to what’s really happening in their minds.
It’s interesting you mentioning about the lines that won’t be crossed. Ever since the trailer came out there was the implication of killing kids, and obviously the opening to this film is very brutal and disturbing, but we never actually see it happen on screen. We know kids are in danger. We know kids are dying. It’s messed up. But we never see it happening. That for you is one of those things you don’t need to show.
And that’s just genuinely me as an artist. I didn’t have to listen to anybody (when making this film). Nobody told me that I couldn’t do it. My crew and everybody trust me so much that, if I was going to show it, they’d be there. They wouldn’t necessarily agree with it, but they would be there to shoot it. I think maybe most of them. Maybe we’d lose one or two of them, but it was just always going to be that way. To me, it’s too off-putting to go that graphically violent with murdering a kid.
There’s been child murder in movies since…you know, I’ve been watching movies since I was a kid and I’m still scarred by seeing Alex Kintner get eaten by the shark in Jaws. That’s more graphic than what we show. The idea of what we’re doing is so horrible that you don’t need to show the graphic. You get the same impact. It’s hearing it or seeing the aftermath. So yeah, I do have lines. I cross a lot of people’s lines, (but) I do have a personal taste meter, and I don’t want to alienate too many people, which is very easy to do. It’s tricky for us as the Terrifier team to push the boundaries, but also try and maintain this level of mass appeal, especially for the sake of Art the Clown.
Casual horror fans should be able to enjoy this character, and they shouldn’t be turned off by this really niche graphic violence, even though I know it’s going to happen. Everyone’s got a layer of taste, and I know we’re stepping people’s boundaries. But it could be worse. That’s my point. It could be worse.
It’s so amazing to see what can be done practically, and with Tom Savini making an appearance in this, was he someone who has influenced the practical effects approach for you? How have you seen it change with each film? Obviously, the bigger the budget, that allows more things to happen.
Oh sure. Well, Savini is my ultimate inspiration. My ultimate hero. I discovered a documentary on him when I was like seven, eight years old. That changed my life. It really did. I wanted to make monsters and do special effects when I saw that. I pretty much never stopped chasing that. And that led me into being a filmmaker. Of course, we’ve gotten a bigger budget. The budgets have grown as we’ve been making these movies. I was the makeup effects artist on Terrifier and Terrifier 2. I did all the effects. I had an assistant. My producing partner, Phil Falcone, would help me. Terrifier 3 was the first time we had enough money where I could hire an actual makeup effects studio that’s Hollywood tier. So we hired Christien Tinsley’s team to come in and do the effects. He did the effects on Passion of the Christ, No Country For Old Men, Westworld, Renfield, The Assassination of Jesse James…like these huge, big movies. But also one of the reasons I wanted to work with him is because he doesn’t typically work on this type of film. He world on films more grounded in reality. Violent and graphic, but more grounded.
I think it was a nice flavour to inject into the Terrifier world and let him go crazy for the first time, They had so much fun working on this. And then as the movies progress, the technology has been progressing in terms of practical effects technology, but especially visual effects. So now I actually will design practical effects to be augmented by so V effects, so we can accomplish things that we couldn’t accomplish back in the day, Like an example of this is, if you have a dummy, say Art the Clown’s hacking someone up with an axe, and it can’t possibly be a person, because it’s a real axe and you’re hacking a dummy to pieces, I could digitally put the actor’s face onto the dummy. Now you can see the face looking around and reacting as his head is getting chopped off. The only way to do that back in the day was you’d have to build an animatronic head, or a puppet head, which never looked as good.
Those are the things that I like to do, and a lot of the time practical effects don’t go right, and you only have a certain amount of time on set. Especially if you have to do a reset that could cost you three hours out of your day that you did not have planned for special effects; Sometimes you have to rely on your VFX team to come in and they have to do some tweaking and stuff. There was a nice amount of digital tweaks to some of our practicals that are so good, they’re invisible. You wouldn’t know that they’re there. And that’s a testament to my VFX team, who are absolutely incredible.
And I obviously have to ask about Sienna. From 2 to 3, Sienna’s character has just gone through so much. And Lauren LaVera’s performance in this is next level. Just the absolute commitment is insane. The ending of the film is so heartbreaking in a lot of ways. When she came in for Terrifier 2, did you have an idea as to her connection to Art and that family bond? Did you know she was going to become such a warrior?
Yeah, for sure. I even knew where the story between Art and Sienna ends. I knew that when I was writing Terrifier 2, which is another greay safety net to know where my end zone is and the direction that I have to go. It’s just a matter of how many movies do I need to fit between, or can I fit in between, before I reach that. But, my God, Lauren LaVera, I mean, you said it, we were all so aware of the next level of performance she was achieving in this. I can’t tell you how many times people would come up to me on set after her takes or when we would break for lunch, and they would come over and be like, “My God, I have chills,” or “Holy shit, she’s so good.” She cares so much about this character. She puts her heart and soul into this. And this one, in particular, this is a very dark chapter in Sienna’s life. A very vulnerable chapter, and a very intense one. I mean, the finale of this movie is one of the darkest, most grueling scenes, and it was one of the most grueling shoots I’ve ever had to be a part of, just because of where everybody’s headspace was. Even though we’re always having fun on set, and we’re all a family, but at the same time you have to respect the actors. They’re in that headspace. You don’t really want to joke in between takes, and so you got to just be respectful and feel out the energy of the room. You can be stuck in that dark energy for quite some time. It’s not a pretty place to be, but it was an essential part of her journey, especially where she finds herself and how desperately they’re trying to break her character in the worst way imaginable.
Yeah, some of those reveals were like, “Oh that’s going to send her off!” It’s awesome that in just two films, even after just Terrifier 2, she has already asserted herself in the canon of final girl legends.
Thank you for saying that. I feel the exact same way. And I don’t typically feel that way about my characters. I actually feel, I don’t know what the right word is, but uncomfortable still when people say so blatantly that Art is an icon. Icon gets thrown out too easily these days. Very too easily. I say, you have to wait another 10 years. If (Art) still has legs and people are still talking about him, and getting tattoos (of him), dressing up as him…if he’s still in those conversations, then I’ll feel more comfortable. I honestly believe that Lauren deserves to be there already in the pantheon of final girls. I’m not saying how many final girls, but she deserves to be in that discussion. She’s that good.
Terrifier 3 is now screening in Australian theatres.
