By Matt Harries
Nowadays there is a kind of movement or at least prevailing school of thought that seems to be infusing through certain echelons of horror filmmaking. A school of thought that would prefer to see the genre transcend its lowly place as a parade of predictable distractions, to instead be regarded as the perfect medium for meaningful reflection upon the dark side of human nature. If this could be said to be a reaction to the proliferation of ‘torture porn’, cheapo found footage slashers and the like, what happens when you look at the flipside to all this post-modernist interpretation?
Clowns is what happens.
As we all know, clowns are just plain horrible, creepy and sanity threatening. Pennywise, John Wayne Gacy, Ronald McDonald; clowns are, in their gleeful mockery of our collective grip on reality, in no need of any leg-up from the validation brigade. Much like the court jester of old, in their shambling, capering turns they throw our sensibilities into disarray, turn our considered proclamations into gibberish and take our childish delight to turn it into the laughter of hyenas at the kill.
While it is certainly great to see a new generation of passionate advocates for horror, who believe in the genre’s occasionally underappreciated depths, we should never forget that what drew most of us to the medium in the first place were the feelings of being disturbed, shocked and appalled by something that flips our cosy reality on its head just because it can. Something without a backstory and seemingly motiveless beyond a kind of joyful malevolence. Enter the fray one Art the Clown, protagonist of 2016 slasher Terrifier. Developed from a 2011 short of the same name from director Damien Leone via 2013’s All Hallow’s Eve, Terrifier may occupy the murky territory of the ‘cult favourite’ and therefore maintain a certain reductionist vibe, but give credit where it’s due; this is unapologetically nasty, gratuitously brutish and fortunately, at 82 minutes long, reasonably short.
Terrifier begins with an interview taken from a kind of late night TV current affairs show, which turns out to be an interview with the only survivor of the Miles County Massacre. In surviving the killing spree that night she suffered hideous facial injuries, leaving her looking much like a twin to Hannibal’s Mason Verger. Watching the programme on his own old television set is Art himself. Upon hearing of his own supposed death he destroys the TV, applies his black and white clown’s make-up and assembles a crude set of ominous looking old tools. Art the Clown is back for more – that much is clear.
After this mildly intriguing start, Terrifier continues with a solid entry into the slasher trope library – enter the obviously soon-to-be victims. Tara and Dawn are in boozy form and heading home after a night on the tiles. While they argue over who will drive, who should appear on the corner but Art, fully dressed in his baggy monochrome clown suit, black plastic sack thrown over his shoulder. He menaces the girls with his sinister stare and they retreat to the safety of a late night pizza joint. As they wait for their food, guess who flops down on to a table opposite – yes, you-know-who. In the bright light of the pizzeria we can fully appreciate the preternatural wrongness of Art; his Punch the puppet features, blood-filthy teeth and tattered gloves offset by the jauntily angled hat and perversions of friendly clown gestures. The silent rogue tolerates one of the girls sitting on his lap taking mocking selfies, but finally the pizza parlour’s custodian decides to do the girls a good turn and moves to eject the clown, who has nipped off to the men’s room, from his premises. Commotion ensues as the owner bundles Art out of the door, yelling that the mute villain has committed some form of abomination in the toilet. With his face a mask of mock surprise, he catches his bag of tools as it is thrown at him by the outraged vendor. With a menacing wave he retreats into the night…
So the scene is set for the kind of cat-and-mouse scenario that provides the framework for a series of stalkings, creepings and frenzied attacks. The female characters are from the classic school of slasher flicks; they mainly hide and scream and for some unknown reason seem to think that beseeching the killer clown who is hunting them to ‘please stop’ is going to have some kind of effect. We have a few incidental characters to add to the trio of young female victims; the pest control guy who plays the roles of both a red herring and potential hero, and the strange woman in the basement who believes her daughter – a grim faced Victorian era doll – is ‘alive.’
Of course there are a number of grisly scenes, mainly carried out with decent quality low budget effects, as wanton, gratuitous and bloody as you like. One in particular, if not always carried out with the most grittily realistic of body props, is at least certainly a damned horrible way to go. Art conducts his various stabbings, slashings and sawings with crazed determination, a contrast to his almost measured display of silent clownish gestures. At times his sense of humour is very much from the Freddy Krueger school of serial killer japery. Randomly describing pointless circles on a tiny child’s trike as one of his trembling prey watches on from the shadows, or in one of the most disturbing/ridiculous moments, conducting a preening, strutting mince while ‘dressed’ in various body parts harvested from a female victim.
Without a shadow of a doubt, Art the Clown is the main event in Terrifier. David Howard Thornton apparently has experience in mime artistry and it really shows – his poses in the early scenes in the pizza parlour are textbook. His mock surprise as he is bundled out after an extensive ‘dirty protest’ in the bathroom is almost funny. Frankly, Art is one horrible looking mutha, his intentions are so obviously malign that the idea anyone would tolerate him staring at them, yet alone try and take a selfie with him, is laughable. But of course you don’t need to start pulling apart the plot with these films; they are set up to provide an entertaining villain with as much opportunity to do his thing and end his victims’ struggles in as many revolting ways as possible.
I won’t claim to be an aficionado of the low budget slasher sub-genre, but Terrifier has grimness and gore aplenty and a well designed, well performed killer clown who is as creepy looking as they come. The thin plot and general predictability are no surprise, the lame female characters seem somewhat out of place in today’s political climate, but then again these types of film exist because they can. Because it is in their nature to act as the unrepentant, defiant counterpoint to any contemporary sense of equality, any notion of worthiness and humanity that others may utilise to broaden the spectrum of horror’s appeal. Without killer clowns and their ilk mindlessly running about causing unseemly chaos for the pure fun of it, horror would be like an army without foot-soldiers.