Terrifier

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 ChatGPT prompt, but Art actually made his debut in a 2008… See more →

Another practical effects showreel barely disguised as a movie featuring the maniacal killer Art the Clown, a try-hard whose yearning to be a horror icon is as plain (and plainly mortifying) as our Commander in Chief’s yearning for a Nobel Prize. Despite the fact that Art, after being introduced gearing up Rambo-style in an unearned montage, indulges in some hacksaw shenanigans nasty enough to arouse the kind of guy who owns more than one Cannibal… See more →

In “Homie the Clown,” a fan-favorite Simpsons episode, Homer Simpson goes to clown college. The lessons he receives in baggy pants, balloon animals, and tiny bicycles were probably not drawn directly from the curriculum of an existing clown college, but they at least evince an awareness that such institutions actually exist.

In an adjacent hemisphere of the late 20th century entertainment world, Killer Klowns from Outer Space, a gonzo B-movie throwback, mines campy scares from… See more →

We’ve reached the “am I the asshole” stage of my reproachful trudge through this franchise, as Terrifier 3 ostensibly comes ever closer to the sort of 1980s genre trash that’s always warmed my contaminated heart. Its Silent Night, Deadly Night homage is unmistakable, its anamorphic cinematography nails the era’s unpolished 35mm aesthetic, and its uninhibited gore gleefully actualizes what all those VHS boxes on my local West Coast Video’s horror shelves always promised but rarely… See more →