Spoilers below for any horror fans who haven’t yet watched Terrifier 3 — read our review — so be warned!
Anybody who sits down for one of Damien Leone’s films, both in and out of the Terrifier franchise, probably isn’t looking for subtly introspective and meandering odysseys through the human condition. We want to see body parts going this way, and blood spurts going that way, and Art the Clown’s kinetic smile and wide eyes soaking it all in. The grosser, the better, and having a bigger budget meant Terrifier 3 could reach previously untapped extremes.
Leone and star David Howard Thornton’s gifts with gore and practical effects helped the bloody sequel hit #1 at the box office in its debut weekend, and I’m curious to see how Art the Clown’s impact on the genre will affect upcoming horror movies’ nastiness quotient. But I can’t imagine anything I see in the foreseeable future will out-gross a Terrifier 3 scene that hasn’t left the surface of my subconscious since I watched it for its world premiere at Fantastic Fest 2024 in Austin.
Since I’m not gonna get rid of this blemished memory anyway, I might as well talk about how disturbingly magnificent it is. And just in case anybody thinks I’m talking about that opening sequence that caused audience walkouts over Art killing children, let me be clear that I’m not. As awful as that sequence was in theory, it was a jubilant walk in the park compared to what came later.
Yes, I'm 100% Talking About The Scene With The Tube And The Rats And The Throat And The Yuck
For all the depraved acts that Terrifier's main villain has pulled off, including peeing on a faux Santa, the way Art the Clown took out Sienna and Jonathan's aunt Jess felt like someone combined the game MouseTrap with a Wiki article about ways to kill Sims characters, and then vomited a bunch of gasoline and garbage all over it in order to...win?
I should have expected rats to be part of the movie's nastiest moment, considering how often the little buggers were shown throughout, but I don't think I can blame myself for being unprepared. Yes, even amidst the carnage done to Greg. Because who can truly predict an order of events like this:
- Art jam-hammers a thick plastic tube down Jess' throat, essentially killing her
- Art then forces live rats down into the tube, with a blowtorch ensuring any hesitance the rodents feel is only temporary
- Instead of just, I dunno, allowing that fucked-up biosystem to exist without further trauma, Art cuts Jess' throat, allowing the rats to complete the circuit by pouring out of the bloody wound
I'm sure some of the echoey din that surrounds my messy memory is my own voice hooting and hollering as the scene played out. I'm sure I reacted in some way to the reveal of Jonathan's head, but it was probably something like, "Wow, that is a shock to see with the same eyes that just witnessed that fucking rat tube neck nightmare." Everything now must stand in comparison to Art the Clown's transgressions.
I can easily see how that would be one of the scenes that studio execs might ask him to tone down during whatever meetings he had prior to sticking to the indie-filmmaking route for Terrifier 3. Not that it's any less inherently disturbing to see Victoria stabbing her genitals as masturbation, or to see Art sodomizing someone with a chainsaw. But maybe those would have stuck around my head more if either of them also involved a tube and some rats. That's the recipe right there.
Will Damien Leone manage to top Art's atrocities with what is presumably the final Terrifier film entry? Maybe in some ways, but not in blowing away the expectation that I'm not about to watch rats bursting through neck flaps. I'm pretty sure the third film nailed that one.
