Sensationally Gory, Violently Misogynistic, Kinda Fun: A Review of Damien Leone’s Terrifier
After a disappointingly brief night out, my friends and I changed into comfortable clothes and made our way to Smitty-B, hoping a movie night could salvage the few hours that were left of our Saturday. It was mid-October, not yet Halloweekend but certainly close enough that we desperately yearned for its unique atmosphere of faux-spooky fun. One person suggested Damien Leone’s Terrifier, a low-budget cult classic slasher that the rest of us–apparently novice horror movie enthusiasts–had never heard of.
Though I am embarrassingly susceptible to flinching at jumpscares, I’d like to think I have a perfectly average tolerance for gore and the horror genre as a whole. The original Terrifier is not scary–and in fairness I never got the impression that Leone was trying to create genuine scares in the first place–but it is certainly the goriest movie I’ve ever seen. Terrifier is disgustingly, absurdly, and mind-numbingly gory. The scene where one of the female main characters is suspended nude upside-down and sawed in half (hotdog, not hamburger style) is viscerally and spectacularly disgusting. Though Terrifier 2 had scenes that were grosser and more drawn out, with more flesh and blood and exposed bone, for me, nothing in that movie could top the moment I realized that a whole production team would actually commit to depicting a woman sawed in half vertically in such graphic detail. In order to imagine how I felt watching the sawing scene, picture a 1980s suburban housewife accidentally reading the infamous orgy scene at the end of Stephen King’s IT. Still, King’s readers had easy explanations for the offensiveness of the orgy scene. Readers could blame it on his self-admitted routine of consuming a cocktail of drugs before writing his novels, and his detractors could blame the devil. Without the influence of the Satanic Panic guiding me to moralize or spiritualize Leone’s directorial choices, I was left dumbfounded at the psychological phenomena that allowed a scene so horrifying to be imagined, produced, and then readily enjoyed by a large audience.
I don’t say that to clutch my pearls at the brutality of Leone’s torture porn, only to emphasize my shock. My friends and I laughed repeatedly throughout the movie at the absurdity and sheer audacity of the violence. Plus, the movie’s villain, Art the Clown, is portrayed fantastically, and David Howard Thornton’s performance single-handedly elevates the franchise to its cult classic status. Without saying a word, Art is incredibly charismatic and delightfully, idiosyncratically mean; he goes further than you could possibly expect, just for the gag. Thornton’s physical performance is so animated and so unpredictable that it forces you to keep watching, even when your eyes are being assaulted by blood and guts.
Despite Thornton’s performance, though, Terrifier’s cheaply misogynistic overtones are impossible to ignore. The movie’s main female characters are two college students (whose names I could not tell you even five minutes after watching the movie) and whose entire on-screen existences can be only described as “dumb, drunk, and bitchy” and “dumber, drunker, and bitchier.” Neither character has any depth or redeeming qualities; they are the splitting image of a misogynist’s description of an insufferable shallow woman–which incidentally is also just a misogynist’s description of a woman in general. Both main characters are dumber than you can conceptualize a real person being. This is clear early in the movie, when the dumber, drunker, and bitchier girl flirts with a visibly disturbed Art the Clown in an empty restaurant after midnight and then tries to convince her friend that he’s harmless. It’s an act so incomprehensibly stupid that it made my friends and I want to root for the clown.
At some points it is genuinely upsetting how much the movie hates its main female characters, not because we as the audience do not also hate the main female characters, but because the movie never gave us a chance to like a female character. The movie’s final girl is not one of the two main characters presented at the beginning, but the slightly less dumb, drunk, and bitchy one’s sister. She is never particularly sympathetic or interesting, which could have been more forgivable if she is not eventually revealed to be the unhinged disfigured woman from the opening scene, who violently attacks a (dumb and bitchy) female news anchor for cruelly mocking her appearance. In the end, the only female character that the movie even half heartedly wants you to root for ends up being insane, setting up a storyline for the later movies where she becomes romantically obsessed with Art the Clown.
It's easy to see why Terrifier is a cult classic slasher film. The pure, audacious gore that Leone has created combined with Thornton’s masterful physical performance as Art the Clown makes it the perfect kind of film to watch near Halloween with a group of friends and laugh, flinch, and scream together. However, the overt misogyny, poor character writing, and terrible acting from everyone but Thornton is so glaringly obvious that it cheapens the whole product to a maddening degree.
Ultimately, despite the laughs and inadvertent physical reactions it provided my friends and I, I still find it difficult to argue that Terrifier has more artistic value than any of the other shock horror products created by weird, edgy misogynists. Terrifier doesn’t care that it's another product that exclusively tortures young, attractive, scantily-clad women because it doesn’t really have anything to say at all. It's kinda fun, but only if you can momentarily turn your brain off and ignore the mental image of a male audience deriving voyeuristic pleasure from the main characters’ suffering.