I’m a huge horror movie fan and always look forward to Halloween as it’s the one time a year the (somewhat) divisive genre gets the spotlight all to itself. But this spooky season there’s only one horror series that people want to talk about …“Terrifier."
Welcome! This article is part of Trick or Stream, a seasonal series in which members of the Tom's Guide staff share what they're planning to watch for Halloween 2024 and their takes on the horror genre, with the goal of helping you find great movies that you might want to stream during spooky season.
This slasher franchise kicked off in 2016 with “Terrifier," an ultra-low-budget slasher that revels in extreme gore, and the series has only risen in popularity with its two subsequent sequels, “Terrifier 2” in 2022 and “Terrifier 3,” which is currently playing in movie theaters nationwide after topping the global box office in its opening frame. Quite an achievement for an unrated indie movie.
The horror community is awash with “Terrifier” fans celebrating the series cracking the mainstream and rising above "cult" status and yet I can’t help but be concerned that its success is going to teach horror filmmakers the wrong lesson. Here’s why “Terrifier” has me terrified for the future of the genre.
Warning: This article contains descriptions of graphic violence.
My problem with ‘Terrifier’
‘Terrifier’ hangs its hat on being violent. We’re talking disturbing levels of violence. This is the franchise that begins with a female character being hung upside down and sawn in half and culminates in “Terrifier 3” with a central character being force-fed live rats only for them to become lodged in her throat. The blood, guts and gore levels are practically off the charts across all three movies.
To “Terrifiers” small (but rapidly growing) fanbase, this is the core appeal of the franchise. In the leads up to “Terrifier 3's" release earlier this month the online fan speculation was largely unrelated to the fate of franchise lead Sienna Shaw (played by Lauren LaVera), but instead, viewers were locked in a guessing game trying to figure out how the series’s slasher villain Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) was going to brutalize and butcher his new crop of victims. Would he use a hammer? Perhaps he might opt for a pair of garden shears? Maybe a chainsaw?
I don’t necessarily find the high level of violence in any of the “Terrifier” movies distasteful (as a horror fan, I’ve developed a strong stomach for this stuff), but rather it’s the overall unpleasant tone that has me pausing for thought. There’s something almost mean-spirited about the way series creator, writer and director Damien Leone presents Art’s blood-drenched rampages.
Sequences of intense violence are presented as something the audience should find almost comical, we’re expected to gleefully smile as barely fleshed-out side characters are maimed, dismembered and tortured. Art (and assistant Victoria Heyes) performs all this killing with a sinister grin, and that reaction was mirrored in the faces of many of the people in the audience of my “Terrifier 3” screening.
Usually in a horror movie when a character succumbs to a grisly fate it’s presented as a shocking moment, within the “Terrifier” franchise, we’re expected to bay for the blood of our protagonists, and keep our fingers crossed that each new kill is more extreme than the last. Granted, the slasher genre has always banked on viewers rooting for the antagonist (be that Freddy, Jason or Michael), but in "Terrifier," things are taken to an extreme I find borderline uncomfortable.
An example of this would be the “fan-favorite” sequence in “Terrifier 2” where Art breaks into the home of a teenage girl named Allie (Casey Hartnett) and subjects her to seemingly hours of unimaginable torture. She is scalped, dismembered and sliced open in a horrifying scene that lasts several minutes. The character screams in pain throughout and is kept alive far beyond the pain threshold that any human could withstand so we can watch her suffer some more. Only finally granted death when her mother walks in to find her eviscerated. It's grim stuff.
“Terrifier” lacks substance
I expect some passionate “Terrifier” fans are already writing their venom-laced response to this opinion article right now declaring that I’m just “too squeamish” to handle Art’s campaign of chaos, but I can assure you that’s not the case.
For example, one of my favorite horror movies of 2024, heck one of my favorite movies of the year, period, is “The Substance”. This high-concept horror culminates in a sequence that probably contains more fake blood than all three “Terrifier” movies combined, and I sat in my cinema seat on opening weekend absolutely transfixed by what I was watching, loving every single second.
But, crucially, the movie’s deliriously bloody finale was not my favorite part of the flick. The most memorable scene for me wasn’t one of the movie’s many other skin-crawling body horror moments either. It was the part where the lead character Elisabeth Sparkle (played by a phenomenal Demi Moore) is getting ready for a date and looks at herself in the mirror, her eyes swimming with self-loathing, before violently removing her makeup with unrepressed rage.
This simple scene had such a profound effect on me because it was all about the character. And that’s something that “Terrifier” has never understood. While the series does technically have a protagonist, Sienna, and there is a rudimentary plot stitching together its numerous sequences of ultra-violence, it all feels perfunctory. The story is just a vehicle to showcase Art’s sadistic methods of murder. The characters are walking bags of flesh to be ripped open for the audience’s amusement. “Terrifier” encapsulates the worst traits of the slasher genre. You feel nothing for the victims because none make an impression.
Furthermore, it's very hard to argue that “Terrifier” places any real value on storytelling when a key character, Jonathan (Elliott Fullam), the younger brother of the series’ Final Girl, is murdered off-screen in the most recent installment. Granted, there are fan theories that his “death” is actually a fake-out, but as it stands in the franchise’s wafter thin cannon he’s now deceased.
To be honest, I suspect that if “Terrifier 4” (and there will be a “Terrifier 4”) opted to ditch any attempt at a threadbare narrative and was merely Art carving up unnamed characters for two hours with no context whatsoever, the fanbase would gobble it up with great gusto, and not miss Sienna Shaw for a moment.
‘Terrifier’ could impact the future of horror
Now I’m not here to rain on anybody's parade. For the reasons outlined above the “Terrifier” franchise clearly isn’t for me, but that’s okay. Just because I’m a horror fan doesn’t mean I have to like every horror movie or franchise. “Terrifier” has its fanbase, and I’m perfectly content with it carving out its own niche within the genre. My concern is that as each new installment yields bigger and bigger financial returns the future of horror will become cheap “Terrifier” clones that prioritize being as violent as possible over compelling stories and characters.
In Hollywood, imitating a proven formula is all the rage, and we’ve seen similarly successful horror franchises start new waves of intimators in the past. Take 2007’s “Paranormal Activity”, which made almost $200 million on a budget roughly 1,000 times smaller. What followed (aside from far too many garbage “Paranormal Activity” sequels) was a glut of low-budget found-footage movies hoping to make similar bank. While “Terrifier 3” isn’t making quite the same waves, it has grossed almost $45 million (to date), a healthy profit on a $2 million budget.
I’m keeping my fingers firmly crossed that the next class of horror directors isn’t watching the success of “Terrifier” and trying to imagine ways of replicating its success. I can’t think of many things scarier than the next few years of new horror releases being dominated by movies that take the same shock-first approach to violence and gore as “Terrifier." I genuinely wish the franchise (and its fanbase) well, but I don’t want its influence to infect my favorite genre.
Watch "Terrifier" and "Terffier 2" on Amazon Prime Video now
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