‘Terrifier 3’ and the switch from high to extreme horror

The long sordid (emphasis on sordid) story from writer-director Damien Leone terrorizing franchise – from its beginning in short films starring the now iconic character of Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton), I think it’s safe, to the shocking blockbuster of 2022. Terrorist 2—was helpfully featured in a piece on Bloody Disgusting this week, which I recommend you check out if you’re as baffled by his meandering path to the mainstream as I am. And make no mistake, with today’s launch of Terrorist 3that some box office speculators have predicted will top the charts over the studio’s $200 million bombshell Joker 2 (talk about an October surprise), Art and his sack of gleeful sadism is now fully and bodily dominant.

It’s hard to name (or maybe, for that matter, diagnose) a moment you’re in. But the terrorizing movies, along with other outrageously over-the-top horror films very clearly influenced by the 1980s nasty video era, come to think of it. malignant, barbarianand hell how could anyone look The Substance and don’t think about Brian Yuzna’s 1989 meat fest society?—They represent a very, very harsh turn away from the period of heightened horror we found ourselves in not so long ago. Now we’re into the meat of something else.

And it’s hard not to want to make sense of it. Those of us who love and write about horror love to think of each period as a reflection of the anxieties of our time. Night of the living dead it encapsulates the upheavals of the late 1960s; The Texas Chainsaw Massacre—and what a perfect day for this movie to turn 50! happy 50, TCM!—is Vietnam and the American uncertainty of the 1970s. J-Horror and its emphasis on cyber-anxiety marked the turn of Y2K. There’s a new documentary playing at festivals right now generation of terror which delves into the so-called “torture porn” era and how it was the perfect encapsulation of our post-9/11 warmongering.

The general sense I got when we recently moved away from the cool, slow austerity of something like The Witch towards the theater of the meat-munching monkeys of the terrorizing movies was just that people wanted their horror movies to be “fun” again. No more post-Obama rants about “trauma”, thank you very much David Gordon Green. Of course, it’s hard not to tie this sea change to our immersion and subsequent exhaustion with Trumpism; it seems telling that gleeful cruelty is the representation of the darkest identification of our time. I mean, when even Mike Leigh is making movies about meanness, there’s something in the air!

It’s weird being a film critic because, more than your average moviegoer, you’ll often see several seemingly incongruous films in a short period of time, especially when there are film festivals. And that’s how I ended up attending the premiere of Terrorist 3 12 hours after watching Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili’s slow-motion abortion drama April at the New York Film Festival last week. They’re not movies I can imagine anyone else on Earth doing double duty, and yet Art—that is, Art the creative process, not Art the mass-murdering clown—always finds a way of making connections where logically there is no connection.

April it’s steely, cold, and hard (also probably a masterpiece), with a long abortion scene (which I’m not convinced wasn’t real) punctuated at the beginning and end by two real birth scenes (one vaginal, one c -section) in all its gruesome glory. And they reminded me of another film I saw at NYFF just two years ago called From Humani Corporis Fabricawhich used microscopic cameras to turn surgeries, including another birth scene, into fragmented, hallucinogenic spectacles of light and sound and fast.

I mean, if we’re not safe from art-house gore-fests, if Demi Moore could be nominated for an Oscar for having a disembodied breast come out of her sternum, then of course , Terrorist 3go spray your red stuff all over the big box office. To paraphrase an Oscar winning movie that is about to release its own sequel in a few weeks, aren’t we entertained???

Straddling the October and December holidays like no film since The Nightmare Before Christmasfrom Leone Terrorist 3 it plays out like a Christmas movie from its opening moments, where a sweet little girl with a plate of cookies mistakes Art, the sand-clawed clown, excuse me Santa, until it starts with the whole forties thing blows And there’s no “Bones Festes” spreading festive wealth in plain sight here, full of Christian imagery straight out of The Passion of the Christ (a.k.a. Mel Gibson’s 2004 contribution to the Torture Porn genre) featuring crucifixion, a crown of thorns, and a terrifying vision of the Mother Mary that foreshadows some allegorical motifs in Art’s season of gleeful dismemberment, this is a Christmas movie with a capital C. (For butchery! For cannibalism! For castration, oh!)

Finally, after some deliciously wonky art antics showing us how he’s come back after all that “beheading by magic sword” last round, and major props where major props are needed, as the actor David Howard Thornton has done the work to do it. Art the horror icon it deserves to be; her performance is once again sadistic mimetic bliss: we find ourselves reunited with Sienna (Lauren LaVera), the latest girl introduced to Terrorist 2. Finally out of the mental hospital where she’s spent the last five years trying to regain her sanity after Art left a bunch of guts to just about everyone she loved, she’s doing… okay. Thanks to many pills. And “okay thanks to lots of pills” is probably the best any of us could hope for in his situation.

Sienna moves in with her Aunt Jess (Margaret Anne Florence, a strange Wendie Malick bell), Uncle Greg (Bryce Johnson) and adorable pre-teen cousin Gabbie (Antonella Rose), while brother of Sienna, Jonathan (Elliot Fullam), who himself barely. he survived being a snack for Art as much as Lunchable: he’s out at the local college. Also featured, since Leone has a two million dollar budget in this one that buys a lot of animal gut to play with, are Jonathan’s roommate Cole (Mason Mecartea) and the podcast girlfriend of true crimes by Cole, Mia (Alexa Blair Robertson). —A couple who might as well have “Murder Us While We Have Sex” emblazoned across their foreheads. (Oh, if only they’d gotten away with just a print on the forehead.)

From here on Terrorist 3 it shows us between Art’s escalating murders and some truly absurd scenes of Sienna and her family doing their best to be normal, boring people: it’s a strange pace, a domesticity punctuated by scalping and masturbation with mirror fragments, like an episode of 7th Heaven with Silent night Deadly night spliced ​​in where the commercial breaks should be.

But Leone’s diabolical glee at getting away with his luck—that all of this has somehow succeeded—is legitimately contagious; this is easily the most accomplished film in the series, and it’s not just the biggest budget. There are curious and confronting imperatives at work; real ideas fighting behind mutilations. (Christian allegorical stuff is legitimately interesting to me; ask me!) I love the moments when Art’s berserker grin fades and he seems to momentarily sink into depression; I don’t want to push the “Clown is Trump” button too angrily (we might be so lucky to have a non-talking Trump), but Art (a demon that has now officially sunk parasitically into modern Christianity) clearly. he wants all eyes on him at all times, and he’s willing to shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue (or say, a crowded bar) to make sure that’s what’s happening.

But then that’s me perhaps trying to make too much sense of everything here, as horror critics tend to do regardless of the carcass that’s been dragged before us. These films, without giving them a larger meaning, are basically critic-proof through and through: audiences willing to drink this parade of meat will be perfectly satisfied. Terrorist 3.

When I first became a horror fan, I tried to be very high and mighty about it, praising atmosphere and psychology above this Guignol theater. But I have come to an appreciation of gore at its most practical level: I can now watch these scenes fascinated and captivated by the real skill required of their technicians to pull them off. And to see these scenes of stupid, frivolous disfigurement unfold in the same 24-hour period that I did the emotionally brutal, very real violence of an art film like April really put Terrorist 3 in the right context. Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe, and sometimes a pipe is a penis being cut up with chainsaws in excruciating close-up.

Because well, when all else fails Terrorist 3 flattens the charges of misogyny that have long been leveled at the franchise for its depictions of female-centric violence, this time giving a man’s private trash the same rigorous and explicit attention to mutilating detail as before they had been reserved strictly for women’s business. And that, my friends, is real equal opportunity progress that we can see and measure!