Director/Screenplay/Visual Effects/Makeup Effects – Damien Leone, Producer – Phil Falcone, Photography – George Steuber, Music – Paul Wiley. Production Company – Dark Age Cinema.
Jenna Kanell (Tara), Samantha Scaffidi (Victoria), David Howard Thornton (Art the Clown), Catherine Corcoran (Dawn), Pooya Mosheni (Cat Lady), Matt McAllister (Mike the Exterminator), Katie McGuire (Monica Brown), Gino Cafarelli (Steve), Cory Duval (Coroner), Michael Leavy (Exterminator #2)
Tara and her fiend Dawn are returning home from a Halloween party when they are followed by Art, a sinister clown. The clown enters a pizzeria after them, sitting nearby and saying nothing. They leave to find their car has a flat tire. Tara calls her sister Victoria to come and pick them up. While they are waiting, Tara needs to go to the bathroom and persuades an exterminator to let her into a nearby building. However, Art the Clown pursues them, brutally slaughtering the staff of the pizzeria and everyone that he comes across.
Damien Leone is a genre director on the rise in the 2010s/20s. Leone first appeared with the anthology All Hallow’s Eve (2013), followed by Frankenstein vs the Mummy (2015) and then enjoyed reasonable success with Terrifier and sequels Terrifier 2 (2022) and Terrifier 3 (2024). In these, and in films for others, Leone also provides the makeup effects. I missed Terrifier when it first came out and thought after it was onto the third film in the series that maybe it was time to get around to checking the original out.
I made the initial assumption that Terrifier had been made to jump aboard the bandwagon created by the remake of It (2017), which saw quite a number of other copycat killer clown films. (For more detail see Killer Clown Films). However, a look at the release dates shows that this was not the case and Terrifier came out twelve months before It premiered, not to mention that Damien Leone made the genesis of the film several years earlier as the short film Terrifier (2011), which is included in All Hallow’s Eve.
I found All Hallow’s Eve distinctly average but was surprised by Terrifier. In the space of two films, Damien Leone has improved markedly and does a surprisingly reasonable job. The clown is introduced with immediately creepy effect – particularly in the way that it follows the girls into the pizzeria and sits in the next booth saying nothing. A good deal of the effect is achieved by the casting of David Howard Thornton as Art the Clown. Thornton is a tall beanpole figure and has a great ability to use his angular figure to weird mime effect.
Damien Leone is more than willing to push an edge with the film. In the pizzeria scenes, we get the grotesque image of the owner’s head placed on the counter with candles coming out of various facial orifices and the assistant being multiply stabbed in the face as we see them gasping on the floor with their tongue waggling through the wound torn in the side of their face. In one scene, Michael Leavy has his throat slit from behind and then his head tilted back and torn off. There is a nasty scene where a nude Catherine Corcoran is strung upside down and David Howard Thornton cuts her body in two right down the middle (although the nitpicker in me did manage to wonder how easily this would be to do using merely a regular hacksaw – one suspects bone and in particular the head would not cut through as easily as it is shown doing).
Damien Leone shows considerable directorial confidence with Terrifier. He builds quite reasonable tension out of the various scenes. In an era when most horror is watered down and anodysed to sell to the teen horror market and streaming networks, Damien Leone approaches the material with an admirable ferocity and without any compromise pushes the gore to a level it hasn’t been for some years.
Trailer here