Terrifier 3 director confirms Terrifier 4, recommends ‘vomit bags’
This report comes from Fantastic Fest 2024, the annual genre film festival in Austin, Texas. We’ll have more reports from the ground up throughout the festival.
Directly before the world premiere of Terrible 3the latest phenomenally gory installment in the cinematic saga of demonic slasher Art the Clown, writer-director Damien Leone asked the audience, “Do you have your barf bags ready?”
It was a fair question: Leone openly wants to outdo his previous films in terms of graphic, gruesome, extended scenes of torture and the kind of practical-effects mayhem that turns human bodies into wet flesh. And right after the premiere of Terrible 3 At Fantastic Fest, in a Q&A with his regular cast members, Leone confirmed that he already has plans for the next sequel in the series. When an audience member asked about those plans, Leone chuckled and said, “I Love that you’re still thinking about the next one after (watching) that. So — yeah, there will be a Terrible 4.”
Leone deferred all questions about that sequel – after all, Terrible 3 hasn’t even hit theaters yet. But the new film, which expands the supernatural lore of the Art the Clown universe, certainly ends on a note designed to leave audiences wanting a fourth chapter.
Terrible 3 pits former survivor Sienna Shaw (Lauren LaVera) against Art (David Howard Thornton) and his severely disfigured former victim Vicki (Samantha Scaffidi), who has become a sort of hyperverbal Harley Quinn to Art’s silent, mime-inspired Joker. The film implies that while Sienna has spent five years in and out of psychiatric hospitals, trying to deal with the trauma of the events of Terrible 2Art has been quiet, perhaps waiting for her to resurface. When she does, and moves in with her aunt’s family, Art goes on a rampage again — this time around Christmas time.
Why Christmas? “I just thought it would be perfect for this character, all those great holiday tropes, that we could put him in those situations,” Leone said. “That’s one of my favorite subgenres of horror — Christmas horror.” Referring to the 1972 film Stories from the Crypt anthology film episode “And All Through the House” and the 1989 remake by Robert Zemeckis for the Stories from the Crypt TV shows as longtime favorites, he said, “I just love that tone. It’s the perfect combination of horror and Christmas. So that was a big inspiration.
“And then of course there is much more Black Christmas homages in this film. Just that combination of terrified and cozy at the same time — I mean, there’s nothing cozier than Christmas (…) And then (you just take advantage of that as much as you can) and add as much sacrilege to it as you can.”
The Christmas setting also allowed for a sequence (hinted at in one of the film’s more graphic posters and seen in the first trailer) in which Art the Clown takes on the role of a mall Santa, with deadly consequences. Art actor David Howard Thornton said this was his favorite scene to film, as it was actually shot in a mall, where production ended with a live audience of curious bystanders: “I had so much fun. Oh, that was so cute. All those people in the mall came to watch, so I had a real audience to perform for — it just gave me more to work with. I felt like I was back on stage.”
Polygon will share more about the concept and filming of Terrible 3 closer to the film’s October 11 release.