At DreamWorks they have reasons to be satisfied with wild robothis latest animated release. The reviews have been great and the box office performance since it was released in the US on September 27 has been very solid: it has currently grossed more than $230 million worldwide and analysts were surprised by the vigor with which the one that had been enduring its third week on the billboard. Those last 14 million in US theaters proved that wild robot continues to attract audiences, but they also raised a suspicion: what if that extra box office was possible thanks to the fact that the young people who paid their entrance did so to sneak into Terrifier 3?
Terrifier 3 It has been rated with an R, which prevents minors under 18 from entering without adults. It is also an independent production and far from the structures of Hollywood – the largest company that has supported it is Bloody Disgusting, a media conglomerate specialized in horror films – which has even more merit than Terrifier 3with a budget of just 2 million, has already raised more than 55 million worldwide. It is a small phenomenon that – driven by rumors that people from Australia or the United Kingdom vomited and fainted in the middle of the room – could have stimulated the mischief of some teenagers to, once they acquired their ticket of wild robotsneak into a film famous for its explicit ultraviolence.
It is difficult to clarify whether this has occurred and has unintentionally reinforced DreamWorks’ income, while it is much easier to oppose the triumph of Terrifier 3 —which arrives in Spain from Selecta Visión in time for Halloween— to the failure of Joker: Folie à deux. It’s not that they are direct competitors, but both were released in a close time frame and are headed by clowns. The famous enemy of Batman, starring in a sequel that critics and audiences have rejected and will make Warner Bros. lose millions of dollars. And in front of him, Art the Clown, a ruthless serial killer that Damien Leone created more than 15 years ago. Art has appeared in almost all of Leone’s works behind the cameras, and as the director has already confirmed, we will see him again in Terrifier 4. or even Terrifier 5why not.
This 42-year-old New Yorker is very happy with the success of Terrifier because, among other things, it has allowed him to delve deeper into his character while he tested the extremes to which his commitment to the game could go. gore. What gives us the first key to the phenomenon of Terrifier: Its main architect is an unredeemed offal enthusiast, a type of adolescent impetus who can’t believe how lucky he is that the industry allows him to make these moves. Luckily, as long as he connects with the public, he plans to make the most of it until the end.
Meet Damien
Art debuted in a short film titled The 9th Circleonce Leone had already started working as a makeup and practical effects specialist. It was 2008, and three years later Art reappeared in another short titled precisely Terrifierkeeping Mike Giannelli as an actor. They were very cheap short films that still made noise in the right circles, so in 2013 Leone was put in charge of an episodic film titled Halloween Eve. Producer Jesse Baget’s idea was, in the style of the recently launched franchise V/H/Shave several directors, but Leone managed to have total control. So Halloween Eve It was made up of his two previous shorts plus an extra one, and a footage shot as mortar to integrate them into the film.
Such curious scaffolding gives Halloween Eve an almost experimental quality, with the images of the shorts alternating with the reverse shot of a babysitter and the children who watch them on television to invoke a kind of study on how we receive the cruelest terror. This intellectual vocation was completely set aside with the defining film of Terrifier, financed with crowdfunding in 2016 thanks to the small cult generated around Art. TerrifierIn fact, it was a complete emptying of any plot clause to limit itself to the bloody misdeeds of its silent killer, but the proof that it had not been conscious was shown by Leone himself when reacting to the critics who accused him of the same thing, of having no argument.
Facing Terrifier 2 Leone got his act together. He read scriptwriting manuals, attended meetings with established writers, and made sure that no one could accuse the sequel of being a mere meat-fest. The result was endearing: Terrifier 2 It lasted 138 minutes, almost an hour longer than the first, and traced a clumsy mythology around Art that paired him with an antagonist—Leone did not miss the opportunity to explain that the Joker had found his Batman—named Sienna Shaw, played by Lauren LaVera. Sienna had been chosen to fight the evil clown according to the will of her dead father, a cartoonist among whose designs we found a winged armor that his daughter should wear when the time came.
This armor, of course, was an uncomfortable and hypersexualized outfit, which in the context of Halloween night Sienna would wear heroically to survive Art’s attack. This is what leads us to another central feature of the phenomenon. Terrifier: there is no self-awareness anywhere. It is possible that Leone conceived Sienna’s father as an alter ego of himself, a demiurge who creates the heroine to combat evil. But it is somewhat more unlikely that Leone has realized the onanistic fantasy that this occurrence does not fail to imply, limiting himself to paying homage to an iconography heavy metal typical of the 80s. As with misogyny and the fixation on female suffering, they are features of a recognizable imaginary that Leone has no intention of rereading.
It’s an attitude that has found its audience. Terrifier 2despite the absurdly long footage and its unconvincing plot, was a box office success like the previous one could never have been. Terrifier (relegated to limited circuits and dying video stores), and its ingredients have been maintained for the third installment without overshadowing the central appeal. That is, savage murders. The creative desecration of the human body according to the efforts of a makeup and VFX department, let’s say it already, worthy of winning the Oscar. Terrifier 3 It is an artistic peak in this regard, which beyond Leone’s scatterbrained temperament invites us to ask ourselves why people like it so much, and what space it occupies within current horror cinema.
All the clowns of the past
The main reason is Art, of course. It is a very happy creation, played with great aplomb by David Howard Thornton after Giannelli retired after Leone’s first shorts. His iconicity comes both from his appearance and from his mime gestures: Art does not speak, he only makes circus-like and exaggerated gestures, bathing his murders in enormously effective black humor. Of course he is not the first diabolical clown to appear in horror movies, but this silence separates him from Pennywise. Item when it comes to continuing to express a coulrophobia (irrational fear of clowns) caused, precisely, by the insistent influx of these in pop culture.
Within the DNA of TerrifierHowever, and before the clownish shadow, the affiliation of the films to a cocktail shaker where the slasher mixes with splatter —that is, serial killers who harass teenagers in front of the copious splashes of blood—, and the cocktail is served with a pronounced aroma vintageseasoned by Leone’s sentimental memory. The movies of Terrifier They are anchored in the B-series cinema that emerged so much in the 70s, when it came to offering barbarism without an alibi and practical effects of admirable craftsmanship. It’s a legacy that began to be quite productive in the early 2000s with Rob Zombie, whose formidable debut (The house of 1000 corpses) also had a clown as a killer: Sid Haig’s Captain Spaulding.
This retreat to the 70s has not lost continuity, managing to prosper in an event as satisfying as Grindhouse —double session that Tarantino and Robert Rodríguez put together in 2007—, or movements like the torture porn —that they brought Saw and Eli Roth—and the one that could be most valuable in understanding Terrifier: he mumblegore. left the nearby mumblecore that gave us Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig, the mumblegore tried in the middle of this century to refresh American horror cinema from independent circles, where reflection did not have to avoid the old homage. It is right at that intersection where Ti West emerges, which between The devil’s house and his trilogy x (completed this summer with MaXXXine) has attempted to combine his reverence for essences with elaborate thinking—an updating, even—about them.
This is not what Leone has done. Not even now that Terrifier 3 disguises Art as Santa Claus and sets his new adventures at Christmas, linking the film with founding fictions of the slasher style black christmas either Night of peace, night of death. Leone resembles West in the effortful recreation of seventies and eighties textures—the grainy photography of Terrifier 3as well as the John Carpenter-esque synthesizer soundtrack, are very useful for this—but it rejects any distance. Does not observe tradition slasher splatter with analytical eyes, but rather feverish and passionate: with a contagious joy that, without ceasing to be mythomaniac, does see itself capable of internalizing what the original driving force was. And how I could grease it today.
What happens with movies Terrifier It’s that they have succeeded because they are honest. They don’t fool anyone. They have the gratifying and warm aroma of a trinket, narrative pretensions that are reduced to telling a simple story without raising blushes – although this is what costs the most, also in Terrifier 3—, and a central objective reduced to the methodical exhibition of atrocities. Leone may think of himself as Sienna’s father, but it’s not hard to see him in Art as well: a radiant smile contemplating the extent to which the human body can break, playing with organs and tissues to confront the lightness of being while discovering, in a frenzy endless, how pleasant that lightness becomes. In its own way, it is beautiful.
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