I haven't been back to see the film: I thought it was tedious, childish garbage, easily the worst film of the year and quite possibly the decade and I'm absolutely not putting myself through that again. Indeed, the more I think about it the more it bothers me: not just the pointless callousness, the sadistic brutality and the wanton wallowing in gory excess, but the joy with which it's been received. How come I didn't get it? How come I emerged from the cinema not just bored out of my mind but actively offended? Does the film count as actually evil? Hard to say, honestly, but I think it's interesting that the auteur's name is Damien.
But there were two particular arguments made on social media in Terrifier 3's favour that I frankly don't understand. The first is the defence of Art The Clown's odious murder of young children, which for most of the Great Horror Icons is never part of their routines. Now I'm no horror newcomer: I've been watching splatter and gore movies since the 1980s and very, very rarely have I been tempted to bail on the grounds of grotesque bad taste; the only times I have abandoned the film have mostly been projection problems and only once have I upped and walked solely because the film was just unwatchable rubbish. Admittedly DVDs and streams have a lower tolerance threshold and they will get switched off if they're plain bad movies. But the specific moments at which I seriously questioned whether I could just go home now, were the two moments when Art casually murdered small children. And they are children, rather than the countless teens in slasher movies, from Scream to Friday The 13th to A Nightmare On Elm Street. Yes, technically at least some of those are indeed "kids", but those in Terrifier 3 are single-digit-aged, going to the Mall with Mummy to see Santa, and getting blown up by a parcel bomb.
Those defending this particular line being crossed have not only cited numerous other movies in which kids have been killed, but pointed out that yes, Art is evil and horror is all about crossing the lines, and kudos to Damien Leone for vaulting over that particular line, for smashing that particular taboo. And it's true that kids get killed in horror movies all the time - plenty in Stephen King alone, from Pet Sematary and Children Of The Corn to It and Salem's Lot. But usually there's some kind of a reason rather than merely the villain's enjoyment of it. Conal Cochrane in Halloween 3 isn't planning to slaughter countless thousands of children just for the lols: he has some nonsensical plan to sacrifice them because of his old Oirish paganism. The shark in Jaws does eat Alex Kintner, but it's a shark. (It also eats the dog.) The death in Hereditary is an accident caused in part by a drug-addled driver. And so on. In Die Hard With A Vengeance, Jeremy Irons' villain is threatening to blow up a school, but the bomb is actually a fake: "Of course not, I'm...not a monster." Whilst in Die Hard 2, William Sadler's villain crashes a jet full of innocent passengers (including children) merely to teach John McClane a lesson in that otherwise ridiculously enjoyable film's only real misstep.
I found it curious that the two instances of pedicide in Terrifier 3 mirrored the exact moment I first felt that urge to wave the white flag: watching Hobo With A Shotgun, specifically when the villain's goons board a school bus and kill all the children with a flamethrower. In Terrifier 3, Art leaves a parcel bomb in Santa's Grotto. Where's the joke in that? Where's the humour? Why is that so "funny"? What is it that makes Art such a supposedly colourful and attractive character, when he's slaughtering primary schoolers for his own personal amusement and nothing else? It's the gloating sadism that makes me uncomfortable: Art The Clown and Damien Leone both know exactly what they're doing and are enjoying it, perhaps a little too much. In the same way that those venerable old video nasties The House On The Edge Of The Park, Last House On The Left and I Spit On Your Grave seem to be enjoying their sexual violence rather more than they should, and are expecting the audience to enjoy it as well.
The second argument in Terrifier 3's supposed favour is that it's raking in an absolute shedload at the box-office: internationally it's taken more than $60m and counting on a $2m budget. It's the highest grossing Unrated movie of all time, it knocked Joker: Folie A Deux off the top of the charts. Well, that may well be true - in fact I don't doubt it for a second - but obviously something was going to displace Joker 2: it wasn't going to sit there forever. Terrifier 3 is currently at #7 in the US (and no longer placing at all in the UK), knocked down the rankings by Smile 2 and the new Venom movie and Conclave the following week. More importantly: just because it's reached the top of the charts doesn't mean it's any good. The Exorcist: Believer reached #1 at the US box office. Tenet reached #1. All three of the Fifty Shades movies reached #1. Hell, even The Flash and Indiana Jones 5, two of last year's worst films, reached #1. Conversely, untold hundreds of great movies have failed to reach #1, or even chart. There's absolutely no correlation between box-office and quality.
And why should we give a damn about the numbers anyway? We're not accountants, we're not studio bean counters. Furthermore, this idea that Terrifier 3's financial success is indicative of horror's lucrative potential is entirely redundant given that horror is pretty much the only reliable genre there is. Look, the horror audience will almost always turn out: the films are pretty much critic-proof, and they don't cost $200 million plus the way that Marvel and DC films seem to (and to far less return on the investment). A low-budget slasher movie is a much better risk than an expensive superhero epic: how the major studios don't go bust spending such ridiculous amounts of money, when there simply aren't enough people in the world to put their films into profit, is beyond me.
But hey, I'm not an accountant or a studio bean counter. I'm a customer and consumer, a longtime aficionado of the genre, from slashers to hauntings to aliens to mad scientists to the remorseless undead, from social relevance to scattered entrails. I'm absolutely not averse to paint-the-room-red gore. But in this particular instance I'm not just deeply uncomfortable, but baffled as to Terrifier 3's appeal and applause. And whilst I felt it unlikely after the appalling Terrifier 2 that I'd bother with this third one, it's now an absolute certainty that I'll never sit through any more of these wretched films.
