The Only Recap You Need Before Terrifier 3

How much do you really need to know about a slasher series before jumping in? After all, in the typical “Friday the 13th” or ‘Halloween” sequel, it’s pretty easy to get acclimated. The killer is back, there are a whole new bunch of potential victims, yadda yadda yadda. That may be true of many horror franchises, especially the longer they get, but it is definitely not true of the relatively short-running “Terrifier” franchise. 

There aren’t just two movies to recap, but two movies with radically different plot dynamics, two short films, and an anthology feature that incorporates the shorts while adding new material. As the story progresses, murderous mime Art the Clown goes from lowly henchman to full-on antichrist status, and can it possibly be true that he’ll face off against the real Santa Claus next time around?

Strap yourself in for a look back at the movie series specifically named to sound like a roller-coaster ride, and take in the only recap you need before “Terrifier 3” arrives in theaters.

Art the Clown, initially played by Mike Gianelli, made his debut in Damien Leone’s short film, “The 9th Circle.” In it, he first appears at a train station on Halloween. From the getgo, he’s silent, only making noise via his deliberately annoying bicycle horn, and he smiles and waves in menacing fashion at Casey (Kayla Lian), a young woman on her way home. As in subsequent adventures, he gives his intended victim a gift at first — in this case, it’s a magician’s trick flower, with a large cockroach hidden inside. When Casey reacts in fright, Art grabs her and injects her with a sedative. Before she passes out, she sees his eyes glowing, which could simply be altered perspective from the drugs, but it foreshadows the way The Little Pale Girl will appear in “Terrifier 2.”

It seems Art was working for a coven of subterranean demons, as Casey awakens in an underground building with two other captives. (In the original cut of the film, she’s alone, as Leone had edited out the other two, but he added their scenes back in when the short became part of the feature “All Hallow’s Eve.”) As they try to escape, they encounter mutants, monsters, and deadly fates via dismemberment, Manson family-style fetal removal. To make things worse, it concludes with a captive Casey getting sexually assaulted by a figure who may be Satan himself. As memories of the evening flash before Casey’s eyes, we get one more quick glimpse of Art.

The short film version of “Terrifier” plays like a condensed version of the feature, as we see the beginnings of ideas that will be expanded later. This time, Art gets kicked out of a rural gas station for messing up the bathroom, and on the way out, fixates on a random, unnamed costume designer (Marie Maser) who’s fueling her car. First, he hacks up the station attendant, then spends the rest of the evening pursuing her. Along the way, another one of Art’s victims features an early version of the mutilated face make-up that the character Victoria will later sport in the features.

On the commentary, Leone notes that he definitely considers Art to have supernatural abilities in this one, notably teleportation, so no matter how fast the costume designer drives away from Art, he always catches up immediately. How it works isn’t entirely clear, as he still has to break into the shed that his quarry hides in, or maybe he’s just taking his time for fun. In a short film, a lot can be left to the imagination. 

Art wins, of course, and he also debuts one of his signature weapons: a flail made from the braided hair of his victims, with weapons attached. For a brief moment, Art seems to sustain a deadly stab wound, but he comes back with another signature move: the surprise pulling of a gun.

The costume designer is left a living, screaming, dismembered torso, with more pain in store.

“All Hallow’s Eve” was originally planned to be an anthology horror film featuring the short films of various directors, but when Leone was offered the chance to submit “Terrifier,” he instead pitched that he should direct the whole thing himself, and every segment would feature Art the Clown in some way. That’s exactly what happened. 

The film revolves around an unmarked videotape found in a kid’s trick-or-treat bag; the footage on the tape includes an unfinished trailer for a feature version of “The 9th Circle,” followed by the re-edited original short, as well as a new short involving an alien, and finally, the original “Terrifier.”

The alien short is the most bizarre, out-of-place piece of the Art story, taking it into the realm of science fiction. The one notion it does add to the larger mythology is that of an artist creating an image of Art without ever having met him. In this case, it’s an unseen painter named John, and according to Leone on commentary, seeing the image of Art’s face on canvas seals the fate of his wife Caroline (Catherine Callahan), albeit to alien abduction, for some reason.

In the finale of the wraparound segment, the kids’ babysitter takes a call from the costume designer in “Terrifier.” As the call drops, Art-on-tape walks toward the TV screen and materializes inside the house, where he decapitates the kids, leaving his name written in blood on the wall.

While nothing in “All Hallow’s Eve” specifically contradicts the “Terrifier” movies, they don’t appear to be part of that storyline, playing more like first drafts of ideas that would get reused in the main franchise. “All Hallow’s Eve” is, however, canon to its own anthology sequels, which feature many other monsters, including the alien from the middle segment. Imagining those all being in the main “Terrifier” universe would dilute the premise considerably. Thus, only the “Terrifier” features are considered canon to the ongoing “Terrifier” storyline. It’s all part of the bizarre evolution of Art the Clown.

Some fans have theorized that David Howard Thornton’s Art is a copycat killer of the original Mike Gianelli version of the slasher, but that wouldn’t really explain why Hell would choose the copycat as their champion over the real and more supernatural deal.

The first “Terrifier” is told in nonlinear fashion, with most of it being a year-old flashback. Taken chronologically, though, Art first appears in an alley on Halloween, as party girls Tara (Jenna Kannell) and Dawn (Catherine Corcoran) mildly make fun of his costume. Later, at a pizzeria, Art comes in and sits across from them. Tara takes selfies with him as he looks displeased. Later, he gives Dawn a vending-machine ring that, unbeknownst to her, marks her as his prey for the night. After Art is kicked out by the pizzeria owner for covering the bathroom in his own excrement, the girls go to their car and find the tires slashed. Tara calls her sister Vicky to pick them up, and then she tries to use the restroom in a nearby building. For the rest of the evening, she and everyone else in the building become the targets of the demented, silent clown.

One of the residents of the building is known only as the Cat Lady (Pooya Mohseni), a squatter who cradles a baby doll like it’s her real child. In an uncharacteristic moment of what could almost pass for decency, Art actually lets her touch his face. Remarkably, he then adopts a fetal position, letting her hold him while he sucks his own thumb.

On the Blu-ray commentary track, Leone calls this out as foreshadowing, though it doesn’t seem to have paid off yet, at least not by the end of “Terrifier 2.” Thornton believes that Art is at least partly mocking the Cat Lady, but perhaps he also has legit mommy issues. Later, Art kills the Cat Lady and wears her skin, much like serial killer Ed Gein, on whom both Norman Bates of “Psycho” and Leatherface in “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” were based. All had serious parental issues, so there’s probably something dark in Art’s past, but will we ever get to see it? Should we? Sometimes maintaining an air of mystery around a monster is important, but given the way the lore expands in “Terrifier 2,” there’s a good chance much more will be revealed in the future.

After Art kills Tara and Dawn, Vicky (Samantha Scaffidi) arrives, but she’s no match for Art. With the help of two pest control guys, she briefly escapes, but Art kills both men, then starts to eat Vicky’s face when the police arrive. Seeing himself surrounded, Art pulls out his gun and shoots himself in the head. He’s taken to the morgue, where strange power surges ensue, and suddenly, the coroner finds himself face to face with a reanimated killer clown.

A year later, although shown at the beginning of the film, a terribly mutilated Vicky, now going by Victoria, is interviewed on TV, where she insists Art the Clown is dead, because she saw him die. Afterwards, she overhears the TV interviewer in the dressing room making insulting comments about her appearance, and Vicky beats her to death. Offscreen, as we will later learn, she’s captured and taken to an insane asylum.

Art, watching the Victoria interview on TV, suits up and arms himself with new weapons, ready for more killing. As “Terrifier 2” later reveals, The Little Pale Girl (Amelie McLain) is watching with him, and this scene takes place during the course of the events of the sequel. For a more in-depth look at the movie, be sure to check out our ending explainer for the first “Terrifier” movie.

“Terrifier 2” begins by going back to Art’s resurrection. After he kills the coroner, he takes his blood-soaked clothes to a laundromat, where he’s greeted by The Little Pale Girl, a macabre apparition who looks like an evil child cosplaying as Art. Winning him over by defecating black bile and playing patty-cake, she heals his injured eye and brain. Though nobody else can see her (yet), she’s the manifestation of whatever evil force brought Art back from the dead, and now that he is resurrected, he has supernatural regenerative abilities, like a bizarre antichrist. What he doesn’t know, and The Little Pale Girl does, is that the forces of good are preparing a champion of their own.

A year later, shortly before Victoria’s TV interview in the first film, we meet Sienna (Lauren LaVera), the creative daughter of a dead artist. She’s preparing a Valkyrie-like costume for Halloween, as her serial killer-obsessed brother Jonathan (Elliott Fullam) wants to go as Art the Clown. The forces of good test Sienna with a dream featuring Art the Clown. When she willingly endures multiple tests of pain to stare him down and draws a sword her father had made for her to block the fire from a flamethrower Art wields, she unknowingly becomes their champion, baptizing the sword by fire that manifests both in the dream and the real world.

Later, Jonathan sees Art and The Little Pale Girl at school.

Both good and evil forces now have their avatars, but neither Art nor Sienna knows what to do at first. Art continues on his merry way of killing people, not fully realizing he’s being guided by The Little Pale Girl to specifically murder friends and family of Sienna in order to break her down. Sienna must understand that Art is real, and she needs to confront him. When she discovers that her father drew images of Art, as well as her Valkyrie costume, she begins to see it. Her father, we gradually learn, was a vessel for both the forces of good and evil, which allowed him the foresight to make the sword and draw Art. However, the evil force made him turn abusive, and the conflict created a brain tumor. He killed himself before he could get any worse.

Art kills several of Sienna’s friends and her mother, kidnaps Jonathan, and takes Sienna’s sword, not knowing it’s actually the one weapon that can kill him. The Little Pale Girl, mimicking Jonathan’s voice, calls Sienna and lures her to a nearby carnival. Her friends Brooke and Jeff drive her there, only to be dispatched with by Art. Sienna continues to a haunted-house attraction called the Terrifier, built over a portal to Hell, where the showdown must take place, as it’s the only location where either Sienna or Art can kill the other.

Throughout the Terrifier attraction, Sienna and Art battle each other, with Art recovering from every wound inflicted upon him. Finally, he stabs her with her own sword and throws her into the open grave in the Hell portal, leading her into her own personal Hell of eternal drowning. In a Houdini-like water chamber, she appears to die, but the wound from the sword heals, as she cannot be permanently killed by her own baptized-in-fire weapon. Now, like Art at the beginning of the film, she too is resurrected with new power. As Art tries to eat Jonathan, as he did Vicky a year prior, Sienna engages him one last time and cuts his head off with the sword. This time, his death looks legit, but The Little Pale Girl comes and takes his severed head away, cradling it like it’s her baby.

This is a sort of ironic foreshadowing, because soon, in a way, he will be…

“Terrifier 2” has a lengthy mid-credits scene that only creates more questions. In her cell at the asylum, Victoria has been puking, bleeding, and writing things like “Vicky + Art” on the walls in her own blood. She has apparently gone full Stockholm Syndrome, but she has also gone into labor. As she gruesomely gives birth, what emerges is not a child, but the living head of Art the Clown.

How is this possible? The glow in Victoria’s eye, as the last thing we see, is the giveaway that her body has now been possessed by the evil force that was in The Little Pale Girl. The apparition’s bodily appearance was that of 10-year-old Emily Crane, the murdered daughter of two circus performers. The force that was using Emily’s image has taken hold of Vicky’s body somehow and once again resurrected Art. Unlike the Emily form, which existed in a parallel dimension and was only ever seen by Art, Sienna, and Jonathan, Victoria has a physical body fully in this reality. The Little Pale Girl does not appear in the trailers for “Terrifier 3” as of this writing, nor has McLain been officially announced as returning. Presumably, this means the evil force is going all-in on Victoria for victory.

Art the Clown is ready for the holidays in the first “Terrifier 3” teaser, but it doesn’t give us much to go on, since it’s mostly a parody of Cindy Lou Who’s first encounter with the Grinch (whom David Howard Thornton also played in “The Mean One”) in “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” This time, however, it looks like Santa Art’s heart doesn’t grow whatsoever, and the implication is that he hacks her up with an ax.

The full trailer tells us a little more. It takes place five years after the events of “Terrifier 2,” with Art appearing as the worst mall Santa ever and following Sienna to college. Art appears to be working both with Victoria as his new partner in crime and a mysterious Orc-like figure, and it looks like Chris Jericho’s asylum orderly is going to get permanently choked out. Art also has a chainsaw now!

Meanwhile, Daniel Roebuck (“The Munsters”) has been cast as Santa Claus, though it’s unclear whether that just means he’s a mall Santa whom Art replaces, or, given the progressively more cosmic/spiritual nature of the storyline, the actual Santa Claus. The climactic battle, once again, seems like it will have to take place at the Terrifier attraction.

Also, one brutal “Terrifier 3” scene even made David Howard Thornton sick, so there should be plenty for fans to sink their teeth into when the sequel arrives this spooky season. We can’t wait to see how this one expands the killer’s mythology.