Art the Clown graphically hacks up and dismembers a young woman, and runs to the kitchen for salt to rub in her wounds, in Terrifier 2, an unexpectedly epic-length slasher sequel now available on VOD worldwide after premiering at London’s FrightFest. Writer-director Damien Leone adds all the story he left out of his first Terrifier movie to this one, resulting in a far more original and satisfying narrative—at least until an overblown climax that takes things to another dimension.
Terrifier 2 picks up right where the first left off, with Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) dead in a morgue. After being resurrected by some kind of mystical force, he makes his way to the laundromat to clean his blood-soaked attire. He racks up a couple kills along the way, and within the first five minutes of the movie we’re treated to scenes of violence more graphic than almost anything seen in the first Terrifier movie.
But to Leone’s credit, Terrifier 2 is not all Art, all the time. Without surviving protagonists from the first movie, he takes the story to the suburbs, a year after the events of Terrifier, where high-schooler Sienna Shaw (Lauren LaVera) is preparing for Halloween. She has Elm Street-like nightmares starring Art, but she’s able to defeat him using the Valkyrian sword from her Halloween costume—which remains undamaged after she wakes up to find her dresser in flames.
Terrifier 2 spends a lot of time with Sienna and her younger brother Jonathan (Elliott Fullam), who discovers drawings of Art in their deceased father’s notebooks and theorizes that the sword dad gave her can really kill the evil clown. Clearly, there’s some connection to the evil clown here, but mom Barbara (Sarah Voigt) wants nothing to do with the delusions that led to the death of her husband.
Like the first Halloween movie, Art stalks his school-age victims around the suburbs before a presumed Halloween night massacre. But unlike Michael Myers, he’s not creeping around behind the bushes: he shows up at Jonathan’s school to poke at a dead possum alongside Little Pale Girl (Amelie McLain), his first victim and now ghost-like sidekick, and makes no attempt to hide his presence.
In one of Terrifier 2‘s most effective scenes of actual terror, Art stalks Sienna around a costume shop, trying on oversized sunglasses and blowing party favors. While others may see him as a mischievous clown, we know the vile menace of Art and so does Sienna, who has seen him in her dreams. No attack is attempted, but it’s the mere threat of violence that makes Art scary.
Of course, these Terrifier movies are not about the threat of violence but the violence itself, and Terrifier 2 goes beyond anything attempted in the first movie, which included a memorable scene featuring a woman being sawn in half in graphic detail.
In Terrifier 2‘s showstopping sequence, Sienna’s friend Allie (Casey Hartnett) is attacked in her home, and hacked up and slashed and skinned in a sequence that goes on for over ten minutes. Allie is terrified but Art is having a blast as he breaks her bones and tears her face off and douses her with bleach and rubs salt in all the wounds.
In this almost unbearable sequence, Terrifier 2 stops becoming a gross-out horror film and turns into Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer for a dispassionate, observational-style murder scene that toes the line between repulsively realistic and cartoonishly over-the-top. Leone refuses to indulge in the victim’s terror or the killer’s glee, and instead asks the audience to look inward. How do you feel about what you are seeing on the screen?
Following the narrative template of both Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street for much of its running time, Terrifier 2 holds our interest while creating an unusually strong heroine in Sienna. LaVera is excellent in the lead, and gives us a protagonist we can genuinely care about, and root for in her quest to end Art’s bloody mayhem. Only the climax, which transplants the real-world action into a more surreal landscape, starts to lose us.
The first Terrifier had a gritty early-2000s Saw-like aesthetic, but this one goes for retro-nostalgic 70s-80s vibes and largely succeeds. Budget limitations are still felt, but not in Leone’s practical makeup effects, which rival anything in mainstream horror films.
Given the extreme graphic violence, Terrifier 2 can still only be recommended to devoted horror fans, but this one delivers a lot more than senseless gore. It won’t be the last in the series, and the growth that Leone shows here, as a filmmaker but more importantly a storyteller, raises expectations for the future of the franchise.
