Terrifier 2 (2022)

My, how time flies. I pre-ordered this film, and watched it a week or so after its late December release, and I’m just now getting around to covering it. It’s been so long since I covered the first two titles in the venerable Terrifier franchise that I can just about guarantee that no one who might stumble across this page will either remember them or be able to dig through my posts and find them. Furthermore, the fervor that surrounded this film upon its release during the ’22 Halloween season has now officially died down, and so I feel the time is right to take it to task: is Terrifier 2 the return to vintage horror glory that it's being touted as, or is this yet another case of “You had to be there?”

Generally, I start with a synopsis, but in the case of Terrifier 2, there honestly isn’t much to summarize. Our story picks up the very instant the previous film ended, with Art the Clown freshly resurrected by a mysterious supernatural entity and the poor coroner on the scene being torn apart in grisly fashion. From there, it sort of starts over and we’re introduced to Sienna Shaw and her family, one year later, preparing for Halloween festivities in the shadow of Art’s killing spree. In fact, Sienna’s brother Jonathan wants to go to a party dressed as the homicidal clown, which she immediately protests. Needless to say, things don’t go well, and before long, we’re back in familiar territory where Sienna’s family and friends are picked off one by one by Art while she attempts to figure out a way to stop him. 

The clown prince of grime

If that doesn’t sound too awfully exciting, understand that it's all just a framework to deliver one twisted splatter setpiece after another, all of which go above and beyond anything seen in the first film. It’s kind of wild that the first film was able to leave you with a sinking feeling in your belly simply by having Art gun down a young woman slowly, cruelly, and dispassionately mid-way through, yet in this film, I found myself chuckling as a young woman was torn apart violently in her bedroom and then presented in grotesque fashion to her mother. Yes, if you, like me, were afraid the kills in this film would get a little too creative and that it would become miserable and hard to watch: don’t be. The kills here remind me of that old Celebrity Deathmatch show that scarred me as a child: they’re so far removed from reality that it becomes impossible to take them seriously. Hell, Happy Tree Friends scarred me only a handful of years ago when I first discovered that, and it was a cartoon! Here, the old-school prosthetics and gore, even when augmented with CG, look great and particularly icky, but not at all real, and all I can see is the craft that went into staging it all.

But don’t get me wrong: it’s not the technical aspects of these setpieces that make them so wonderful, no sir; it’s the creativity with which they’re conceived and staged. Damien Leone is a gorehound who actually enjoys looking at photos of real injures and wounds (fuck that) and trying to recreate them in his films, yet isn’t so far removed from it all that he’s become desensitized to it. This means he rides the line between disturbing and darkly humorous fairly well.

The opening is incredible, wordlessly catching everyone up who hasn’t seen the first film, while also quickly establishing the sort of bloodbath that we’re in for when Art crushes a man’s skull with a small hammer and pulls out his brain to play with it. It also quickly establishes that we’re firmly in the land of the fantastical, as a mysterious little girl that no one but Art can see is introduced as the force that probably resurrected Art at the end of the first film. This is crucial to maintaining a fun vibe even when things get sadistic: just keep repeating “It’s only a movie.”

I also love the "Clown Cafe" dream sequence. It’s been described as obvious padding, but its the kind of padding I like to see: it provided the film with one of its weirder and wilder scenes of violence, and one of its bolder ones as well: it takes a lot of balls to show crowds of people being mowed down with a machine gun in 2023, and Terrifier 2 pulls it off gleefully. There’s also some nice subtlety surreal horror here and unbearable tension, as the minute the scene starts, you already know something bad is about to happen. It’s sort of like the first film’s diner scene, at least in terms of atmosphere and tension. But then they go ahead and blatantly recreate that scene a little later in the film’s now-famous scene of Art stalking Sienna Shaw through a costume store, trying on silly sunglasses, and harassing the poor girl with his horn until he’s kicked out by one of the store’s employees.

Obviously, a big part of the reason it all works so well is because of Art himself. He’s an antagonist who’s compelling to watch and who can draw humor out of the darkest situations. His insistence on being a dick when torturing and murdering his victims doesn’t sound particularly funny, but somehow, the team behind the film pulls it off and our antagonist becomes the spitting image of bile fascination. And I find it charming how he acts so awkwardly and uncomfortably around the pale little girl who resurrects him. It makes one wonder what might have been had Damien Leone been able to write a protagonist that was as charming, but we’re not quite there yet. Oh, and on a side note: the music sounds more like a film score now, and less like the generic dubstep-adjacent cues purchased from Fiverr that acted as the “score” for the first film, so that’s nice.

"The food's a little funny at the Clown Cliché."

But lest you think I have nothing but positive things to say about Terrifier 2, rest assured I just haven’t gotten to the negatives yet. Yes, the film lives up to its viral hype in terms of violence and vintage grindhouse fun, but in many ways, this might even be a step backward for the franchise in terms of filmmaking and storytelling, which is bizarre considering all the praise heaped onto the film at the time of release, usually centered around how much the filmmaking had “improved.” 

Yes, while I think the decision to attempt to tell a more interesting story with actual characters was noble, I don’t think that's what they achieved here at all. The film takes a very pedestrian approach to “improving” things. To make Sienna likable and “human,” Leone gave her a hobby that overlaps with his own (she’s crafty and likes to make her own costumes,) a family that she’s constantly falling out with, and exactly one “panic attack” early in the story so that one can technically argue that her fighting back against Art constitutes “character development” when really it just constitutes bad writing that’s a means to an end more than anything. 

Sienna is a Mary Sue, plain and simple, and not a particularly likable protagonist. Everything that makes up her character is simply told to us, not really shown, and even then, she’s just not all that interesting. Furthermore, the reason she’s able to rise up and fight Art is because of a prophecy (yes, I’m serious) that the film pulls out of its ass during its miserably boring final half-hour rather than anything she actually achieves on her own. All around her, her friends are slaughtered with ease, yet when Art makes it to Sienna, he’s always holding back or running away when he should be finishing her off in a way that makes it far too obvious that the character is draped in plot armor, not helped by the fact that she’s dressed in a stupid Halloween costume for the whole film that screams “Girl power!” in the same shallow way that something like Wonder Woman's marketing did.

What makes all of this a hundred times worse is that the acting across the whole film is uneven as fuck. Sienna’s actress is hardly an exception, especially once she becomes injured and exhausted near the end of the film. Combined with the cliche writing, things threaten to become laughable at multiple points: usually any time Sienna’s mother is being psychologically abusive and hateful in a way that feels like John Waters meets Christian TV movie of the week. Then there are the celebrity cameos from desperate horror icons that scream “Pandering!” 

But then there’s... well, everything else. The direction feels totally rote and uninteresting whenever Art isn’t eviscerating someone, the pacing is all over the place and generally makes you feel every minute that passes, and the reliance on the terminally overused teen slasher structure feels uninspired, especially given the film’s length. Speaking of which, this is not the kind of story that you stretch into a two-hour-plus film. Imagine if the original Halloween was two-and-a-half hours, and you begin to see the issue here. A rewatch would likely be miserable every time things switch over to “Let’s see what Jonathan is doing at school…” or “Let’s see what the Shaw family is arguing about at the dinner table tonight…”

If the film had gone all out with its comic book plot, where Sienna is this avenging angel who travels to Hell and fights Art on a hill of corpses next to a river of lava or something, I could see more of this stuff working. The problem is that this film doesn’t know what it wants to be: one minute, it’s a microbudget grindhouse movie, another, it’s a teen slasher, and then it suddenly morphs into something that could have almost been written by a child where their super-cool OC becomes the chosen one and fights off the root of all evil with rubber swords. It’s the latter that I find most charming, most interesting, and most unique, even if it does get really, really stupid at points, but the rest of it feels like a big step backward from the original Terrifier, itself not a great film by any means. And by the end, once the whole film goes on autopilot with a half-hour still left to go, most of the potential the larger-than-life superhero story possessed has been squandered and used more as sequel bait than anything. And I’ll be honest, I don’t know that I’m excited for Terrifier 3, considering how this one was so obviously shaped by the audience of the first film. It’s nearly as bad as the Five Nights at Freddy’s series in this regard, and so who knows what the next film would entail.

And that’s all I have to say about a film that it seems just about everyone besides me loved unconditionally from beginning to end. As I stated at the beginning of this piece, I loved all the gory setpieces, and the anticipation of them did at least provide some solid tension throughout the film, but all the things the film is being most praised for by people on social media just show how little the average filmgoer knows or cares about the art of storytelling. You don’t make a character that will stand the test of time by writing yourself as an avenging angel that can never do any wrong, and you don’t make your horror film more affecting by pretending to be something it’s not.