All Hallows’ Eve

It seems as though Terrifier is the slasher franchise of the moment, with 2024’s third installment reportedly becoming the highest grossing unrated film of all time, so it’s time once again for me to hold my nose and commune with the zeitgeist.

You’d be forgiven for assuming Terrifier’s stabby antihero, Art the Clown, was the product of an 11-year-old Fangoria subscriber’s very first Chat GPT prompt, but Art actually made his debut in a 2008 short film called The 9th Circle, followed by the 2011 short Terrifier, both of which director Damien Leone bundled into his 2013 anthology All Hallows’ Eve. I suppose it’s to Art’s credit that Something in the Dark, the only short Leone made specifically for the anthology and the only one to omit Art, is easily the worst of the bunch. But just because my dog’s third time barfing this week made the biggest mess, it doesn’t mean I’ll have any fond memories of the first two.

As far as I can tell, Leone is a VFX/makeup guy who likes scaring people with fake mutilated body parts and generic monster masks but isn’t especially interested in telling anything like a story while he does it. That’s fine if you want to work on a haunted hayride or whatever, but there’s a reason the haunted hayride industry isn’t predicated on streaming rights or DVD sales.

So here’s hoping Leone learned a thing or two in the three years between this bottom-of-the-barrel anthology and the proper beginning of his Terrifier franchise, because we are not off to a good start.