Film Review: Terrifier (2018)
(This review contains mild spoilers.)
I initially passed on Terrifier when it hit general release in 2018, as a friend whose horror taste I trust–and who is a proper gorehound–kind of shrugged it off when I asked for her opinion. With so many great horror films coming out around that time, that was enough for me to direct my attention elsewhere, and Terrifier became one of those things I might or might not get to in the future. With the success of Terrifier 2, I ultimately decided that this movie was clearly important enough to the zeitgeist that I had to see it, so I passed on reviewing something from my long list of to-dos and sat down with the original Terrifier.
Still Having a Moment
I think it’s important to talk about the villain, Art the Clown, in the context of the wider world. Clowns have have received a lot of attention in the last decade between the revitalization of Stephen King’s IT and a series of bizarre viral appearances a few years back. Every dog has a day, and while clowns to provoke strong emotions in me, I do understand why so many have visceral reactions to them.
Clowns are inherently discordant but they also command attention, forcing us into the rare situation where we are drawn to focus on something we probably don’t enjoy looking at. We understand clowns on an instinctual level, constantly needing to remind ourselves that our reaction—be it fear or reluctant amusement—is a façade and the thing before us is actually just another mundane human being.
Though purportedly conceived as something to bring joy, their costumes don’t hide the state of the person underneath, and thus a clown is naturally something of a human embellishment of both features and emotions. The garish makeup and ill-fitting clothes set our brains on edge in the same way that a stranger on the street who talks to themselves does. No one trusts a clown, even if we don’t have a clear reason to fear them.
And this is where we come to Art. If Pennywise is a bad dream, Art is the actual murderer showing up in your house. His construction as an agent of fear is impeccable: he uses only black and white to create this starkness in his visage, but the pristine veneer of his newspage ensemble is counterbalanced by soiled fingernails and red, red teeth. He looks very much like a madman who papered over the animal beneath with depthless blacks and bleached whites in order to hide himself. Art is nasty, sadistic, and unpredictable. As likely to sit and smile through a scene as break out his carving knife. His very presence is, in itself, scary.
From a cinema perspective, Art is cruel in a way that makes us uncomfortable, because his brand of evil hasn’t been widely seen since the grittier horror films of the 70s and 80s. Even me, a damned horror writer who has mainlined the culture since I was a kid, was a bit taken aback by the maliciousness that played out on screen before me over the course of Terrifier. It wasn’t the nastiest stuff I’ve ever seen—I was online in the early 2000s—but it was something that had become unfamiliar in our modern era of CGI and comic book-esque, stylized violence.
Did that make this good? It made it effective, we’ll stick with that for now.
The Plot, Such as It Is
Terrifier opens with a wonderful little vignette of a talk show host interviewing a victim who was maimed by Art the Clown in an earlier massacre (presumably, All Hallows Eve, where the character was originally featured). After a brief recap of the victim’s experience, we cut to the host in her dressing room, on the phone and speaking poorly about the maimed guest. Justice for people like this comes swift in horror films, and the survivor, who has been listening to this conversation offscreen, emerges from the host’s bountiful clothing racks to gouge out the eyes of the TV host while laughing maniacally.
And this is where Terrifier shows its strongest note: when the survivor’s thumbs penetrate the talk show host’s orbitals, we see these elaborate, violent, satisfying practical effects as the front of her skull collapses. Her remaining eye rests amid the bloody mess, mirroring that of Art’s victim.
It’s cornball, it’s fun, it’s wonderfully gory and surprisingly elegant for those who appreciate the creativity that goes into making practical effects. As a son of Pittsburgh and sycophant for Tom Savini’s work, I have to love this aspect. Throughout the film we’ll see a wide array of bloody kills rendered without CGI, and this alone may be a reason to watch if it’s really your thing.
From there Terrifier hits the restart button, and we cut to a pair of sexy Halloween girls on the street arguing over whether or not they need to sober up before heading home. Art the Clown approaches, and like people destined for ghastly ends, the girls start up some silly flirting with the greasepaint ghoul. I’m pretty sure this never actually happens in real life.
The women proceed to a nearby pizza parlor and their clown acquaintance follows, electing to occupy a booth across from them. Here he smiles and stares at one of the women whenever her friend looks away. It’s an incredibly unnerving scene, but it belies everything that is to follow in Terrifier. The girl who isn’t being leered at eventually takes a few pictures with the clown, who subsequently gets thrown out of the restaurant after shitting all over the bathroom.
Did that read okay? Yes, the clown gets kicked out of the pizza parlor for shitting all over the bathroom. And people say this script lacks creativity.
Right now the tone is a weird blend of wickedly threatening and slightly silly, like baiting a vicious dog in a costume. We know what the clown ultimately does because of the scene with the victim and the talk show host, but we don’t yet know what his escalations look like. This is good tension-building.
Unfortunately, the film is about to take a nosedive, and for me, it’s never going to find something to recover the goodwill it engendered up to this point.
The girls leave, and Art subsequently returns to butcher the pizza shop guys who tossed him out (and right after one of them cleaned the bathroom–the outrage!). These kills are fun and quick, but in this, the seeds of something that troubled me about the film take root. I’ll get back to that in a minute.
The women find that the tire on one of their cars has been destroyed and call a sister for help. Desperately needing a bathroom late at night while they wait, one asks a bug bomb guy working on an old building if she can sneak in an use the toilet while the other woman waits in the car.
And Here. We. Go.
I’m going to stop summarizing here for two reasons. First, you might want to experience the real meat of the film firsthand without me recounting every scene in it, and second, this script is as thin as toilet paper and there isn’t a whole lot to describe plot-wise. Art the Clown systematically isolates and murders the Halloween girls, the exterminator, the exterminator’s co-worker, a mentally ill homeless woman, and probably a few others I forgot about.
The kills are elaborate, reasonably creative, and rendered in top-tier practical effects. Art himself is appreciably unpredictable, capable of feigning ignorance or being playful before abruptly shifting to some of the nastiest cruelty we’ve seen in mainstream film.
(here’s where it gets grisly, if you’re concerned)
Most of his facial features are oversized, and watching him butcher these people feels closer to reality than a lot of what we see in horror movies. He exploits his victims, at one point drugging one of the Halloween girls and tying her to a chair so he can make her watch as he saws her friend in half, starting between her legs.
And here’s a problem I have with the kills in Terrifier: they are deeply and unavoidably misogynistic in a way that feels exploitative. I am not someone to run around the internet crying misogyny about everything; there are people who are better at it and more interested than I am (For the record, I think a significant number of those people are bad actors getting high on their own indignation for the sake of provoking engagement). But I struggled to see Terrifier through another lens, as much as I tried.
When Art kills a male, he does it in either a silly or vicious, brute-force way. When it’s a woman he’s going after, there’s a strong element of cruelty in his behavior, drawing out the torment and maximizing the suffering that his victims experience. He often mutilates the woman’s breasts and/or vagina. This weird way in which the creator chose to have him destroy women’s bodies while simply killing men feels like juvenile exploitation for its own sake.
(Let’s reiterate: I’m not an individual who goes around looking for this stuff, primed to soapbox about it. There’s very little I would say is off-limits in a horror film, but the execution here made it impossible for me to see the film in a different light.)
I’m all for this if you want to be creative, but cut up some men in elaborate ways too? Perhaps Art could have dick fingers to go with his breastvest? Then, I could just enjoy what the film does well instead of feeling like I’m watching some frustrated teenager’s violent fantasy play out.
About a third of the way through, I realized that there wasn’t much to appreciate in the remaining film beyond schlocky, gory fun. For me, it’s not enough to hold up a film on its own, especially when that film revels in cruelty and torture. The point of this movie is to trot out over-the-top absurd kills and watch the clown cut up body props. It’s a fine piece in the horror toolbox, but feels deeply pointless and juvenile when reduced to being the only commendable aspect of a film.
Terrifier is a semi-joyless feast of gore, having nothing fun or interesting to say. It feels too malicious to be good, and there’s absolutely nothing clever about the way it all plays out. Its indulgent, sadistic elements aren’t tempered or balanced out by anything to cheer for, and the whole film carries an air of late-90s edgelord nihilism. It’s all too trite to be shocking for someone who lived through that. It’s a solid proof-of-concept, but not really a complete film.
Despite all of these criticisms, I wish I could say I felt some sense of disgust or outrage. Instead, I feel is a blasé tiredness that films like this still find an audience. I was bored. The kills sacrifice style in the name of brutality, and the scriptwriting is a joke. Art has no motivation, no backstory, no depth, he’s just cruelty and violence with a creepy veneer. Is that enough? Viewers will have to decide. This is horror at its trashiest, for better or worse.
Verdict: 3/10
Strengths:
Art the Clown is genuinely scary, if hollow
Practical effects are the best we’ve seen in decades
Decent cinematography
Weaknesses
Crap script
Too sadistic to be fun
Carries a weirdo misogynistic note
UPDATE: Since writing this review, I’ve watched Terrifier 2 and think that it is a much better film, pretty much resolving most of the issues I had with this first one. See, I’m not just a hater.
You can watch Terrifier for free on Tubi.
You may also like: Jeepers Creepers, having women avoid you
