Film / Terrifier 3

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Terrifier 3 is a 2024 Slasher Movie directed by Damien Leone, and a direct sequel to Terrifier 2, picking up five years where the last film left off.

Sienna Shaw has been recently released from a psychiatric hospital, and is living with her aunt Jess, her uncle Greg, and her cousin Gabby. Still healing from her traumatic experiences from that fateful Halloween night, her healing is cut short when Art the Clown and his demonic benefactor return for another killing spree. With Jonathan off at college and her guardians disbelieving of her, she is left to slay the malevolent pair herself.

Terrifier 3 contains examples of:

• Achilles' Heel: Art is revealed to be the champion of the demon now possessing Victoria. Sienna with her sword, as chosen by the angels, is their weakness.
• Ambiguously Evil: The figure forging Sienna's sword in her dream certainly doesn't look like one of the good guys, and the Virgin Mary statue behind it is filmed in a rather blatantly sinister light. It makes it seem rather unclear if the heavenly forces backing Sienna are any better than the demon that resurrected Art.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: In the opening of the movie, Art kills a mother and father with an axe, chops their son to pieces, then eats the cookies the parents left out for Santa's elves. He even washes the plate clean and leaves it to dry.
• Ass Shove: Art takes the chainsaw to Cole's backside first.
• Axe Before Entering: During Art's axe-swinging spree on the family in their own home in the opening scene, the mother only closes the bedroom door after running out when Art butchered her husband right next to her completely forgetting about the knob. Art smashes a hole in the door with his axe just to peep and laugh at the mom finding her children either butchered or missing, then he opens the door just by turning the knob and slaughters the mother as well.
• Bad People Abuse Animals: Art also kills rats in the movie, testing liquid nitrogen out on them as well as stomping on them at one point.
• Bad Santa: Art dressed as Santa Claus really enjoys the role as it gives him very easy access to victims, particularly children.
• Bait the Dog: A couple times:
  • At first, Art acts overjoyed to see the Santa impersonator in the bar and lets him buy him a drink. The two even appear to become friends. Then he pisses on him, kills his friends, and tortures him to death.
  • Art takes the mall Santa's place and starts handing out toys to the children all lined up. Despite his unnerving appearance, they all seem so happy. And then one of them opens a box and gets blown up, along with at least five other people.
• Batman Cold Open: The opening scene of the film involves Art attacking a random family during the Christmas season.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Mia so desperately wants to know what it was like to encounter Art the Clown. She gets the chance to experience this firsthand as Art brutally murders her with a chainsaw. He even gives her a look as she is dying that basically says, "here I am".
• Because Destiny Says So: The reason Sienna can fight Art is revealed: When a demon wishes to cross into the world, it needs a bridge with a recently deceased human. Someone utterly depraved. Art's suicide in the first film allowed the demon manifesting as The Little Pale Girl to come over and she chose Vicky as her host to stay in the material world. However, this means the forces of light, the angels, will choose a person who can fight back. As long as Sienna is alive and uncorrupted, Art and his demonic patron are vulnerable.
• Boom, Headshot!: Smokey is killed this way.
• Brick Joke: A guy on the subway train is dressed as Art, which served as a point of contention between Jonathan and Sienna in the previous movie.
• The Cameo:
  • Tom Savini makes an appearance as a bystander in the mall who saw the bombing.
  • Jason Patric plays Sienna's dad, although he has a little more bearing on the plot than just a cameo.
• Censored Child Death: Subverted - every time Art murders a kid, it's always offscreen or obscured. We do, however, see the grisly aftermaths of those kills, and they're as horrific as you'd expect.
• Cerebus Syndrome: The last act of the movie is absolutely brutal and harrowing, as Art and the possessed Vicky force Sienna to watch as they torture both her and her aunt — physically and psychologically — with next to no comic relief apart from a little bit of snark from the possessed Vicky.
• Christmas Episode: This installment takes place over the days leading up to Christmas, and as such the first of Art the Clown’s outings to not be set at Halloween.
• Cluster F-Bomb: Charles (the man dressed as Santa at the bar) screams profanity-laden insults and threats at Art after the latter pisses on his leg.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Ho, boy…
  • Burke, the asylum nurse played by Chris Jericho from the last film, gets his face and jaw torn apart by Art’s headless body and an Entity-possessed Vicky.
  • One of the demolition men who discover Art and Vicky gets his hand pinned to the floor with a huge nail, his fingers on his other hand bitten off, and then Art peels the skin from his head, top down, using a box cutter. The shock from that alone is implied to have killed him because he stops screaming immediately.
  • Art ties up a guy dressed up as Santa drinking in a bar, after shooting his companion and the bartender dead. After stealing Charlie’s Santa costume, Art freezes his arms and legs with liquid nitrogen, smashing them before freezing the guy’s face, smashing his face off, ripping off his beard to use in his own Santa disguise, and then stabbing him in the nose hole with a carrot nose from a snowman ornament.
  • Art kills Jess by jamming a glass bottle down her throat and putting rats into it, before using a blowtorch to force the rats to burrow into her throat.
• Cruel Mercy: If Art spared the little girl in the opening, it is presumably only because he knew she would suffer more than if he had killed her. From the original Terrifier short, Art will occasionally spare a victim if he judges their suffering to be more fun that way.
• Death by Cameo: Daniel Roebuck and Clint Howard show up in one scene together. Art kills them both, along with the bartender.
• Defiant to the End: Jess, after seeing her husband's mangled corpse and being tricked by Art and Victoria into thinking her daughter is dead as well, quickly realizes that there is no sense begging for mercy from people who so obviously have none. She curses them to her dying breath, and with her last words begs Sienna to avenge her family.
• Dramatic Irony: A random man in a Halloween costume of Art runs into the real Art and thinks that he's also in costume. We the audience are just waiting for the other shoe to drop.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him:
  • Sienna's uncle is Killed Offscreen by Art.
  • An even more noticeable example is Jonathan, who is revealed to be dead after the demon-possessed Victoria reveals the skull Sienna sees is not Gabby's skull, but instead Jonathan which Art confirms by putting the glasses on it.
• Evil Is Petty: Art going out of his way to Dope Slap Sienna while he and Victoria have her tied up. Twice.
• Evil Takes a Nap: After the Entity possesses Victoria and revives Art at the beginning of the film, the two return to their hideout and proceed to hibernate for five years until a pair of demolition contractors accidentally awaken them.
• Family Extermination: The movie opens with Art breaking into a house and killing a married couple and at least one of their two children, probably both.
• Final Girl: Sienna Shaw once again. Possibly even more than last time as she is the sole survivor this time, unlike the previous movie that had her brother survive with her
• Groin Attack:
  • Cole gets his penis graphically hacked up with a chainsaw.
  • While trying to fend off Art, Sienna grabs his dick and squeezes hard.
• Healing Factor: Sienna has this ability, which seems loosely tied to her sword. She's able to fight immediately after grasping the handle even though her hands were broken. In the end, she watches the deep cuts in her palms close up without leaving a scratch even though she's just lost the sword.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: Sienna is blamed by several people for the murders Art committed in the last one and is seen as unstable.
• How We Got Here: After the opening scene, the following ten minutes show us what happened to Art immediately where Terrifier 2 left off.
• I Have a Family: Santa is reduced to begging this to Art as he claims to have a wife, 2 children and 4 grandchildren.
• It's All About Me: Mia is so focused on her podcast that she can't seem to understand how insensitive it is to ask Jonathan and Sienna to be on it. She also can't seem to understand why her comments made Sienna so upset.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Jonathan's roommate Cole is described by Jonathan as not being that nice to him, but Cole is shown many times to be genuinely affable to Jonathan and several times throughout the movie tells Mia it is insensitive to ask Jonathan and Sienna to be on her true crime podcast. Most noticeably, he defends Sienna after she goes off on Mia for that reason.
• Karma Houdini: While the demon-possessed Victoria is cut down, it's ambiguous if the demon itself was destroyed. Art, however, is injured but escapes yet again with Sienna set to finish things in Terrifier 4.
• Kick the Dog: Art and the demon-possessed Victoria near the end of the movie make Sienna watch as they brutally kill her aunt in front of her and taunt her with a skull that they make her think is her cousin's Gabby head, only for it to turn out that it's Jonathan's head and that they murdered him too.
• Killed Offscreen:
  • A man in an Art costume meets the blood-soaked genuine article on a train. In the next scene, Art has the guy’s clean costume and Victoria has his air horn, leaving little doubt what happened to the Art cosplayer.
  • Greg dies offscreen, although his hideously mutilated body is seen later - decapitated, disemboweled, and crucified against the wall of his home.
  • Most prominently, Jonathan apparently dies this way too. After he’s last seen at his college, Art and Victoria show Sienna a fleshless skull that they claim is his, propping his glasses on it as proof.
• Lighter and Softer: Make no mistake, the kills in Terrifier 3 is just as sick and twisted as the other two. The kills are mainly a bit tamer compared to the first one as they are not quite as shocking and a couple are even done off screen.
• Losing Your Head: Art's decapitated body gets up and kills the cop, then walks onto the subway and goes to the hospital to be rejoined with his head.
• Lyrical Dissonance: The melody for "Terrifier Christmas" is reminiscent of a typical upbeat Christmas jingle, but the lyrics sing about Art's grisly reputation and desire to constantly outdo each previous kill in regards to how over-the-top and graphic they are.
• Mythology Gag: The woman on the bus is reading a book called The 9th Circle, which also happens to be the name of Art's debut short film.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain!: Demon-possessed Victoria letting Gabby give Sienna a gift as one cruel act of kindness backfires when it turns out Gabby knowingly gave Sienna the gift containing the sword that can be used against Art and Victoria. This leads to Sienna turning the tables on Art and Victoria and even killing Victoria.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: The Santa in the bar genuinely tries to be nice to Art when Art acts all excited to see him and even gets Art a drink. Art repays this kindness by spitting the drink on the Santa's face and pissing on his leg. The Santa also then gets a long and drawn-out brutal death from Art despite being the least hostile to Art compared to the bartender and Smokey, who get quicker deaths.
• Not Now, Kiddo: The family in the opening scene give only the most minimal of attention to their daughter Jules' pleas about an intruder she claims has broken into their house, with the dad caring more about getting 3 hours of sleep before work, the mother just thinking Jules has an overactive imagination and little Timmy being plain uninterested.
• Off with His Head!:
  • Greg is found decapitated.
  • The demon-possessed Victoria meets her end this way after Sienna finishes her off.
• Only I Can Kill Him: When a depraved human is selected as a demon's champion, the angels will empower a Good Counterpart to balance the scales. As a result, only Sienna can stop Art and his benefactor. The demon is driven to break, corrupt, and destroy Sienna's spirit because she is the one and only threat to the rampage. Whether Art knows or cares is left ambiguous since he'd want to kill and torture Sienna for the crime of existing anyway.
• Our Demons Are Different: They apparently cannot enter the mortal world except through a “bridge” created by the death of an utterly depraved and evil human being, and even then, require a host to fully interact with the world. The Little Pale Girl is one such demon, given access to Earth when Art’s suicide at the end of the first movie allowed her to cross over. After spending the second movie as a phantom only visible to Art, Sienna, and Jonathan, she is possessing Vicky throughout this one.
• Pet the Dog: Greatly subverted; there are some parts where it may seem like Art would show this, however, it just turns out to be him using it as an opportunity to be even crueler.
  • Art gives out presents to kids at the mall, only it's revealed that one of the presents has a bomb, and he was just trying to bait as many kids as possible into one location.
  • During the confrontation with Sienna, he and Vicky allow Sienna to open her Christmas present from Gabby, however he uses the opportunity to break Sienna's hands with a hammer in the process, causing her more torture.
• Poor Communication Kills: The man interviewed regarding Art bombing the Santa display at the mall gives all the details about his appearance except for the vital fact that he was wearing heavy clown facepaint, resulting in Sienna just looking crazy when she realizes it must have been Art.
• Pretender Diss: Art looks noticeably pissed when he sees a guy dressed up as him as a Halloween costume.
• "Ray of Hope" Ending: Art murders many innocent people, including children, Sienna’s aunt and uncle, and Jonathan, Vicky is fully possessed by the Entity and presumably killed for good after Sienna decapitates her, and Gabby, Sienna’s younger cousin, falls into a hellhole (like, to literal Hell), with the magic sword. Oh, and Art escapes and boards a bus out of town. However, Sienna’s hand heals, giving her hope that God, or whatever good forces exists, is still on her side and she vows to rescue Gabby.
• Red Is Violent: Our Ax-Crazy clown dons a Santa outfit in this movie, which is naturally mostly red.
• Sex Signals Death: Art kills Mia and Cole with a chainsaw during their Shower of Love.
• Shout-Out:
  • In The Teaser, Art hacks away at a door with an axe and sticks his face out. A clear homage to The Shining.
  • Art attacks Mia and Cole with a chainsaw as they shower, in reference to the other infamous chainsaw murder from the 1983 remake of Scarface. It's also likely a reference to the locker room chainsaw murder in Pieces.
  • During the climactic fight with Sienna, Art stumbles with the saw, briefly resembling Leatherface’s chainsaw dance.
  • When Art raises his hammer to attack at Christmas, it's framed in a similar manner as a famous shot from Black Christmas (1974).
  • Art being dressed in a Santa costume and carrying an axe seems to be one to Silent Night, Deadly Night.
  • The book that the woman on the bus is reading contains two. In addition to the title, "The 9th Circle," referencing Art's debut short film, its author's name is Rosemary Castevet. It seems like Rosemary really did stick around the Satanic cult after the events of Rosemary's Baby.
  • Art sitting still and covered in dust on a rocking chair in an abandoned attic reminds of Mrs. Bates' corpse in Psycho.
• Shower of Love: Cole and Mia are killed by Art while they're having sex in the shower.
• Somebody Set Up Us the Bomb: Art hands out Christmas presents to a bunch of kids. Except one present houses a bomb, which explodes when a kid opens it.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: After Art finishes butchering the family in the prologue, he cheerily enjoys the milk and cookies the mother set out while an uplifting cover of "O Come, All Ye Faithful" plays, crescendoing with him finding the daughter hiding in the cupboard.
• Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome:
  • Victoria performs a Bathtub Suicide after her escape with Art, leaving the Entity to pilot her body until she’s decapitated by Sienna.
  • Jonathan is Killed Offscreen, with his mutilated skull and glasses being shown off to torment Sienna.
• Super-Strength: Both Art and the possessed Victoria show it, with Victoria in particular easily overpowering an orderly twice her size and doesn't flinch when he tries defending himself.
• Take Me Instead: Sienna begs this to Victoria and Art as they are menacing her and Gabby in the climax.
• Tear Off Your Face: Happens twice:
  • One of the two demolition men who stumble on Art’s lair has his scalp split open with a box cutter before Art jams his fingers into the wound and pulls apart all the flesh on his skull.
  • Santa, aka Charles, has his face frozen with liquid nitrogen and then smashed with a hammer, causing most of it to fall off the flesh beneath.
• Tempting Fate: Mia tells Cole how she wants to get Sienna or Jonathan on her podcast because she wants to know what it was like for someone to be so close to Art. Art gives her more than what she wanted after he cuts her up with a chainsaw, leaving her alive long enough to look into his eyes before he finishes her.
• Time Skip: The film takes place five years after the events of the first film. Interestingly, the film came out only two years after the previous one. This helps put the actress Lauren LaVera more in line with her character's age.
• Toilet Humour: Art pisses on the costumed Santa's leg at the bar and takes a really long piss in the campus' toilets right before hacking Cole and Mia to pieces.
• Twisted Christmas: This time Art carries out his killing spree on Christmas.
• Uncertain Doom: Whether or not Art spared the little girl in the beginning is left unclear.
• Vagueness Is Coming: There's more lore given in that demons and angels explicitly exist in the Terrifier universe while confirming the Little Pale Girl and the demon possessing Victoria are the same person and that Sienna's father knew of it. However, the angel-side is still unclear, save that the demons desperately want Sienna dead as a threat and are using Art to do so for very uncertain endgames.
• Villain Opening Scene: The film opens with an entire Batman Cold Open of Art attacking a random family during the Christmas season. Then we flash back five years to the end of the second film to show how Art regenerated in the first place. Only then, 20 minutes into the film, do we see our protagonist, Sienna.
• Would Hurt a Child: Art has no problem going after children and even murders several children throughout the movie including Timmy in the opening scene, and a group of kids at the mall with a bomb.
• You Got Murder: Art uses a bomb that he wrapped up as a Christmas present box to blow up a mall full of shoppers.
• You Need to Get Laid: Jonathan's roommate, Cole, suggests that Jonathan needs to get laid so he can be less awkward around other people. While Cole means well, it's not the best advice, considering said awkwardness mostly comes from Jonathan being traumatized after almost being killed by Art the Clown.