US Edition
Somebody needs to check that Natasha Kaplinsky is OK. The former TV newsreader and Strictly Come Dancing champion has spent the past two years as the chief censor, as president of the BBFC. Any time you go to the cinema, you will see her signature, along with the age rating, just before the titles.
And so when, before a Monday lunchtime screening of the 18-rated Terrifier 3, Kaplinsky’s imprimatur next to the warning that the film contains “strong gory violence [and] injury detail” was vaguely reassuring. It sounded like a proper slasher, but one that a fairweather horror watcher could bear. Natasha says so!
The BBFC notice could not have understated things more. In the first scene alone, a family of four sleeping before Christmas is hacked to death by an axe-wielding demonic clown dressed as Santa Claus. While the children are killed off-screen, you want to scream with their mother when she finds the dismembered corpse of her son in bed.
The first official screening of Terrifier 3 in the UK saw a clutch of people – including one who was physically unwell – leave after that scene. Damien Leone, the director, has said that major Hollywood studios were interested in funding Terrifier 3, after the surprise success of the first two instalments in the franchise, but “knew they weren’t going to let me make this movie based on the first five pages”. So he funded it himself.
Nothing in that first scene has anything to do with Damien Leone’s story. Instead, it only serves to demonstrate how brutal Art the Clown can be. “That’s not even the big kill scene,” Leone said. “So that’s why I was like, I need to just make this movie on my own, because it’s too insane.”
Insane is one word for it. The mute Art, and his undead accomplice Victoria, goes on a trail of destruction using bombs concealed as Christmas presents for children, liquid nitrogen, claw hammers, a chainsaw, live rats and, when all else fails, their teeth. Look out for the particularly gruesome fate that meets Burke, a security guard played by Chris Jericho, the legendary wrestler and six-time WWE World Heavyweight Champion.
Yet Terrifier 3 has proved a hit and shows that video nasties have entered the mainstream. It took a stonking $21 million (£16 million) at the American box office over its opening weekend, compared with $7 million for the Joker sequel in its second week of release. On this side of the Atlantic, Terrifier 3 brought in £1 million, putting it just behind Joker and Transformers One in the charts.
There is a real danger that Joker fails to make back its reported $200 million budget, making it a monumental flop after Joaquin Phoenix’s first turn as Arthur Fleck grossed more than $1 billion. Terrifier 3, by contrast, cost just $2 million to make – most of which appears to have been spent on prosthetics and fake blood.
Perhaps I ought to confess that horror films have never really been my bag, though this year I have watched and enjoyed The Substance, the Demi Moore allegory of what happens when famous women grow old, and Immaculate, which stars Sydney Sweeney as a pregnant nun in a creepy convent. But I would never have chosen to see Terrifier 3 were it not the wish of my editors at a particularly sadistic moment.
Never before have I seen a film (or, more accurately, watched one through my fingers) that delights in showing what might happen if a human’s insides were on the outside. At one point you get a weapon’s-eye view as Art sodomises a university student with a chainsaw; I’m pretty sure you see it burst one of his testicles. And it is going to be hard to shake the image of Victoria doing something unspeakable to herself with a shard of mirror glass as Art strips the skin off a man’s skull with his bare hands.
In case I haven’t made it clear how gruesome this film is, the French film censor banned all under-18s from seeing it, the first time it had given such a classification since the release Saw III was released in 2006. It’s too much for the French!
That Monday lunchtime screening, at the Vue multiplex on Leicester Square, was surprisingly well-attended, with 16 others joining me for the gore-fest. Nobody walked out in disgust, and they all looked like relatively well-adjusted members of society – even if they were all unironically watching a horror film in the middle of the working day, and one of the ladies in attendance had bright blue hair.
Even before Terrifier 3 was released last week, to commercial and (some) critical acclaim, Leone had already confirmed that a fourth instalment is in the works, and this film ends on a literal cliffhanger to tee it up. I’ll give it a miss.
Terrifier 3 is in cinemas now
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