2024-10-30 20:51:00
DreamWorks has something to be happy about wild robotits latest animated version. Reviews have been great and box office results since it opened in the U.S. on September 27 have been very solid: It has now grossed more than $230 million worldwide, and analysts have been surprised by the vigor with which that who had resisted his rise. third week on the bill. Those last 14 million in American theaters proved it wild robot continues to attract audiences, but also raises a suspicion: what if that extra box office was possible thanks to the young people who paid admission? they did it sneak in Terrifier 3?
Terrifier 3 It was rated R, barring anyone under 18 from entering without adults. It is also an independent production and far from the structures of Hollywood – the largest company that supported it is Bloody Disgusting, a media conglomerate specializing in horror films – which has even more merit than Terrifier 3with a budget of just 2 million, it has already raised more than 55 million worldwide. It is a small phenomenon which – driven by rumors according to which people from Australia or the United Kingdom were vomiting and fainting in the middle of the hall – could have stimulated the mischief of some teenagers who, once they had purchased the entrance ticket wild robotsneaking into a film famous for its explicit ultraviolence.
It is difficult to clarify whether this happened and involuntarily strengthened DreamWorks’ revenues, while it is much easier to oppose the triumph of Terrifier 3 —which arrives in Spain from Selecta Visión in time for Halloween— to the failure of Joker: Folie de duo. It’s not that they are direct competitors, but they both came out in a close time period and are driven by clowns. Batman’s famous enemy, protagonist of a sequel that critics and audiences rejected and It will make Warner Bros. lose millions of dollars. And in front of him, Art the Clown, a ruthless serial killer created by Damien Leone more than 15 years ago. Art is present in almost all of Leone’s works behind the camera and, as the director has already confirmed, we will see it again in Terrifying 4. or even Terrifier 5why not.
This 42-year-old New Yorker is very happy with the success of Terrifying because, among other things, it allowed him to delve deeper into his character while testing the extremes to which his commitment to the game could go. blood. This gives us the first key to the phenomenon of Terrifying: Its chief architect is an unredeemed offal enthusiast, a kind of adolescent zinger who can’t believe how lucky he is that the industry allows him to make these moves. Luckily, as long as he stays in touch with the audience, he plans to make the most of it until the end.
Meet Damien
Art debuted in a short film titled The 9th Circleonce Leone had already started working as a make-up and practical effects specialist. It was 2008, and three years later Art reappeared in another short film entitled precisely Terrifyingkeeping Mike Giannelli as an actor. They were very cheap shorts that still made noise in the right circles, so in 2013 Leone was commissioned with an episodic film entitled Halloween Eve. The idea of producer Jesse Baget was, in the style of the recently launched franchise V/H/Sthey have different directors, but Leone managed to have total control. AS Halloween Eve It consisted of his two previous short films plus an extra one and a mortar shot footage to integrate them into the film.
Such a curious scaffolding gives Halloween Eve an almost experimental quality, with the images of the short films alternating with the reverse shot of a babysitter and children watching them on television to invoke a sort of study on how we receive the cruelest terror. This intellectual vocation was completely set aside with the seminal film of Terrifier, financed with crowdfunding in 2016 thanks to the small cult generated around Art. TerrifyingIt was in fact a complete emptying of every clause of the plot to limit itself to the bloody misdeeds of his silent killer, but the proof that he had not been conscious was given by Leone himself in reacting to the critics who accused him of the same thing. , of having no arguments.
In front of Terrifier 2 Leone recovered. He read screenwriting manuals, attended meetings with established writers and made sure that no one could accuse the sequel of being a simple meat festival. The result was captivating: Terrifier 2 It lasted 138 minutes, almost an hour longer than the first, and plotted a clumsy mythology around Art that paired him with an antagonist – Leone didn’t miss the opportunity to explain that the Joker had found his Batman – of name Sienna Shaw, played by Lauren. LaVera. Sienna had been chosen to fight the evil clown according to the will of her late father, a cartoonist among whose drawings we found a winged armor that his daughter would have to wear when the time came.
This armor, of course, was an uncomfortable and hypersexualized outfit, which in the context of Halloween night Sienna would wear heroically to survive Art’s attack. This is what brings us to another central feature of the phenomenon. Terrifying: There is no self-awareness anywhere. It is possible that Leone conceived of Sienna’s father as an alter ego of himself, a demiurge who creates heroine to fight evil. But it is a little more unlikely that Leone realized the onanistic fantasy that this event does not fail to imply, limiting himself to paying homage to an iconography heavy metal typical of the 80s, such as misogyny and the obsession with female suffering, are traits of a recognizable imagery that Leone has no intention of rereading.
It’s an attitude that has found its audience. Terrifier 2Despite its absurdly long takes and unconvincing plot, it was a box office success in a way its predecessor never could have been. Terrifying (relegated to limited circuits and disappearing video stores), and its ingredients have been retained for the third installment without obscuring the central appeal. I mean, savage murders. The creative desecration of the human body according to the efforts of a makeup and VFX department, let’s face it, worthy of winning the Oscar. Terrifier 3 It is an artistic peak in this sense, which beyond Leone’s careless temperament invites us to ask ourselves why he likes it so much and what space it occupies within current horror cinema.
All the clowns of the past
The main reason is Art, of course. It’s a very happy creation, played with great ease by David Howard Thornton after Giannelli retired after Leone’s first shorts. His iconicity derives both from his appearance and from his mime gestures: Art does not speak, he only makes circus and exaggerated gestures, bathing his murders with a black humor of enormous effect. Of course he is not the first evil clown to appear in horror films, but this silence separates him from Pennywise. It when it comes to continuing to express coulrophobia (irrational fear of clowns) caused, in fact, by the insistent influx of them into pop culture.
In the DNA of TerrifyingHowever, and before the clownish shadow, the affiliation of the films to a shaker where the slasher mixes with squirt —that is, serial killers who molest teenagers in front of copious splashes of blood—, and the cocktail is served with a pronounced aroma vintageseasoned with the sentimental memory of Leone. The films of Terrifying They are anchored to the B-series cinema that emerged so much in the 70s, when it was a question of proposing barbarism without alibis and practical effects of admirable mastery. It’s a legacy that began to be quite productive in the early 2000s with Rob Zombie, whose smashing debut (The house of 1000 corpses) also had a clown as a killer: Sid Haig’s Captain Spaulding.
This return to the 70s has lost no continuity, managing to thrive into an equally satisfying event Grindhouse —double session that Tarantino and Robert Rodríguez put together in 2007—, or movements like the torture porn – which they brought Saw and Eli Roth, and what might be most valuable to understand Terrifying: Him mumblegore. left the neighbor mumblecore that gave us Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig, the mumblegore tried in the middle of this century to refresh American horror cinema from independent circles, where reflection did not have to avoid the old homage. It is precisely at that intersection that Ti West emerges, that in between The devil’s house and his trilogy X (completed this summer with MaXXXine) attempted to combine his veneration for essences with elaborate thinking – even updating – about them.
This is not what Leone did. Not even now Terrifier 3 disguises Art as Santa Claus and sets his new adventures at Christmas, connecting the film with the founding fictions of slasher style black christmas or Night of peace, night of death. Leone resembles West in his laborious recreation of the textures of the Seventies and Eighties: the grainy photography of Terrifier 3as well as the John Carpenter-style synthesizer soundtrack, are very useful for this purpose, but refuse any distance. He does not observe tradition slasher splatter with analytical eyes, but rather feverish and passionate: with a contagious joy that, without ceasing to be a mythomaniac, is seen as capable of internalizing what was the original driving force. And how could I anoint him today.
What happens with movies Terrifying It’s that they succeeded because they are honest. They don’t deceive anyone. They have the gratifying and warm aroma of a trinket, narrative claims that boil down to telling a simple story without blushing – even if this is what costs the most, even in Terrifier 3–, and a central objective reduced to the methodical display of atrocities. Leone can consider himself Sienna’s father, but it is not difficult to see him also in Art: a radiant smile that contemplates the extent to which the human body can break, playing with organs and tissues to deal with the lightness of being, discovering, in a infinite frenzy, how pleasant that lightness becomes. In its own way, it’s beautiful.
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Be the champion of this revival? By capturing both the nostalgic charm and the raw, visceral thrills of early slasher films, Leone breathes new life into the genre.
The result is a transgressive film that manages to pay homage while simultaneously pushing boundaries, inviting viewers to revel in the grotesque spectacles. The audacity of a character like Art the Clown, who embodies both comedic and horrifying elements, illustrates a playful yet fearsome return to the roots of horror. As we see Art roam through holiday-themed horrors, juxtaposing familiar festive imagery with shocking brutality, a canvas emerges that is as much about subverting expectations as it is about delivering chills.
Thus, with each installment, particularly with the release of Terrifier 3, Leone crafts a love letter to the genre, steeped in a self-aware wink, making it clear that while the blood flows and the screams echo, the ultimate goal is to entertain, provoke, and perhaps even challenge the audience’s thresholds for fear and enjoyment. The evolution of Art and the films themselves encapsulate a broader dialogue within the horror community, reflecting both a reverence for the past and an eagerness for innovation in storytelling and aesthetics.