SPOILER ALERT: This story contains minor spoilers for “Terrifier 3,” opening in theaters Friday.
Writer-director Damien Leone, the mastermind of the “Terrifier” series, is such an upbeat guy that, in another life, it’s easy to imagine him as a life coach, a trainer, a teacher. Conversation with him is peppered with lessons and inspiration that came to him through shooting his latest film, “Terrifier 3”:
“You never know where inspiration is going to hit you.”
“You have to go and make the quickest, best decisions you can.”
Related Stories
“I’ll pull him aside and say, ‘I’m literally feeling magic here. This is wonderful.’ And that doesn’t happen often.”
Popular on Variety
The other shoe drops when realizing that Leone’s positivity is in service of one of the goriest horror movies ever made. The unrated “Terrifier 3” unleashes the unhinged Art the Clown on Christmas, where he once again stalks final girl Sienna Shaw (Lauren LaVera). Along the way, the murderous clown kills scores of people, often dressed as Santa as he desecrates bodies left and right.
Yet there is a method to Leone’s madness, as he perfectly formulates the films to show gorehounds something new and extreme. That’s how he landed on one of the film’s signature setpieces: a take on Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic shower scene in “Psycho.”
“One of the scenes I imagine people are going to talk about when they leave this film is there’s a shower massacre,” he says. “One of my favorite movies of all time is ‘Psycho,’ so I said to myself, ‘If Alfred Hitchcock was making that today, would he shoot it the same way? Would he be a little more graphic?’ I said, ‘I know if I was given the opportunity to make “Psycho” today and I did that shower scene, I would show everything imaginable that the knife could do’. I know no one’s gonna let me make ‘Psycho,’ and I didn’t want to just blatantly give Art the Clown a knife in a shower scene. So I said, ‘How do I take that scene and make it my own? Let’s give him a chainsaw instead, because it’s more savage than a knife, and let’s make it two people instead of one person.'”
Leone’s ambitious vision was supplemented by a significant bump in finances. After “Terrifier 2” made nearly $16 million at the box office from a $250,000 investment, “Terrifier 3” leveled up to a $2 million budget — still wildly low by Hollywood standards, but it made a world of difference for Leone and his team.
“One of the reasons why ‘Terrifier 2’ took years to make, aside from the pandemic setting us back, was I had to do all the special effects with my producing partner, Phil [Falcone], and it’s a lot,” he says. “It was a huge undertaking. That was more special effects, more gags than I ever wrote in a film before, so we would have to break for weeks at a time, go into his basement, create the effects, and then go back to shooting. It played out that way on and off for the entire duration of filming. That’s really no way to make a movie, and we knew we couldn’t do that again.”
The higher budget allowed him to hire Christien Tinsley of Tinsley Studio, a special effects makup pro who has worked on productions like “Passion of the Christ” and “No Country for Old Men.” It was a game-changer for the film.
“That was unfathomable, that I could have somebody of that caliber jump into the ‘Terrifier’ world and create those special effects,” Leone says. “It was so cool, and that enabled me to spend more time with my actors on set, with my director of photography, and work on the the look of the film and the production value.”
David Howard Thornton, who portrays silent antagonist Art the Clown, says working with Tinsley allowed him to bring even more depth to his character’s notoriously outlandish facial expressions.
“They resculpted my mask,” he tells Variety. “In the first two films, I was using the mask that was molded off of Mike Giannelli, who was originally Art the Clown’s face from “All Hallows’ Eve” [Leone’s film that introduced the character]. That one wasn’t molded to fit my face, so we had to make it fit the best we could. This time, we had a new one that fit my face and was made from a different material. We used foam latex and, because it’s much thinner, it allows for more range of expression. You can see every movement my face makes, so I wanted to utilize that as best as possible on this, and Damian said, ‘Just go wild with the facial expressions.’ He’s always bigger, bigger, bigger — ‘Go as big as you can, especially the eyes.’ I had a lot of fun playing around with that.”
Despite the advantages, Leone says the money did bring new challenges they didn’t face in the first two microbudget films.
“You’re spread even more thin because now you have three times the amount of people and amount of questions every day,” he says. “You have to just keep jumping from department to department. We had to deal with more union regulations, and we never really had to deal with them before. We weren’t on anybody’s radar, and now we’re on everybody’s radar. We also had to shoot the film much quicker, because the clock is going, you’re off to the races and sometimes you just want to call ‘time out’ and see if everything’s working.”
Sometimes those decisions have to deal with lines of decency. Although Art the Clown devotees might appreciate the fact that nothing seems to be taboo, Leone says he is mindful when kids die in his films.
“I’m always looking for lines to get up to, to push the boundary,” he says. “Maybe just step right over it. But you can absolutely fall into a level of extreme distaste that I’m trying not to do. There’s a scene in the beginning where Art murders a child offscreen and you just hear it. I could have shown that and the glorious way that we executed the scene. I would never do that, because to me, that’s just completely off-putting and you’re going to alienate a large majority of your audience. It’s like you’re trying to shock the audience so much it just becomes desperate. I think it’s my job as an artist to try and walk that line in a more interesting way, in a more responsible way.”
For horror diehards able to make it through the whole bloody affair of “Terrifier 3,” there is a cliffhanger that will segue immediately into a fourth film, which Leone has confirmed is in development. While he won’t reveal too many details, he uses his signature enthusiasm to tease the next chapter.
“It will certainly be an epic showdown, an epic closure to this Art the Clown saga,” he says. “The idea I’m toying with in my head would probably be in some regards the most experimental, so I can’t dive into it too much. Some really, really crazy things will happen in the next one.”
