“Terrifier 3 ”director reveals what's next for Art the Clown after movie's shocking finale
Damien Leone reminds viewers that his characters are "certainly not trustworthy," and even warns that "you should never trust me as the writer-director."
Damien Leone has a certified hit on his hands with Terrifier 3. The independently-produced, ultra-graphic slasher sequel carved its way to the top spot in last weekend's box office brawl with clown competitor Joker: Folie á Deux. The question now on America's lips: what's next for the franchise's horrific hero, Art the Clown?
Entertainment Weekly caught up with Leone to find out, but first, the director offered a word of caution: "Listen, these characters are unpredictable, and they're certainly not trustworthy, so I would take everything they say with a grain of salt. Also, you should never trust me as the writer-director."
Noted. But after Terrifier 2's returning final girl Sienna (Lauren LaVera) was beaten (again) to a bloody pulp, her brother Jonathan (Elliott Fullam) was apparently killed off-screen, her niece Gabbie (Antonella Rose) was sucked into a hellish, inter-dimensional portal, and Art (David Howard Thornton) escaped scot-free (again), where can the franchise's exponentially-growing fanbase expect Terrifier 4 to start?
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"Purposely, I wanted this chapter to be a very dark chapter in this franchise," Leone says. "This is the most blatant cliffhanger ending. When I wrote this, we would all kind of jokingly inside say, 'This is our Empire Strikes Back ending,' where everybody, the heroes and the villains, they're all defeated, and they're sort of left off at their lowest point."
The possible exception to that rule may be Art himself, who was decapitated at the end of Terrifier 2. Viewers learned through that film's post-credits scene (in which Art's first final girl, Victoria, gives birth to his animate head in her padded sanitarium cell) and throughout Terrifier 3 that Art is definitively not of this world, and seemingly indestructible. He escapes in one piece at the end of Terrifier 3, though he barely manages to crack his trademark smile in the final shot, suggesting his real suffering may be internal.
"Certainly, I mean, where we end off with Gabbie, again, I don't want to get into crazy spoilers, but you see that she's been sucked into this other dimension and Sienna says, 'I will find you.' So she's not giving up on Gabbie," Leone says. "That could potentially be her mission moving forward, is trying to rescue Gabbie from the underworld of what that dimension is."
As for Sienna's supposedly slain little brother, Leone "would rather not say too much about Jonathan's supposed death, because it's become so polarizing."
At the end of Terrifier 3, Art and his newly enlisted accomplice Victoria kill Sienna's new guardians, her Aunt Jess (Margaret Anne Florence) and Uncle Greg (Bryce Johnson). They then set to torturing Sienna by both walloping on her and threatening Gabbie's murder. The twist of the knife that unleashes Sienna's retributive fury is a revelation that the gruesome pair killed, beheaded, and seemingly stripped the flesh from Jonathan's skull.
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It would be quite out of the spirit of the Terrifier films to dispatch an important character off-screen and pass on the opportunity to relish in another kill sequence. Plus, moments earlier, Art and Victoria taunt Sienna with a different severed head that they claim is Gabbie's before revealing that she's actually alive and unharmed.
"It's probably the biggest— I don't even know if it's polarizing, I would call it maybe the biggest critique people have," Leone says. Fans have taken to feverish discussion of the Jonathan question online since the film's Oct. 11 release. Leone reasons that "they desperately wanted more closure. They want to know. Some are just in straight denial. They're like, 'He can't possibly dead, they wouldn't kill him off camera, or whatnot."
Leone's message to those fans: "I would wait until the next installment to get confirmation on that aspect."
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The writer-director recently told Variety that the next installment may be the last stop for Art the Clown, at least for the time being. “There is no definitive answer at this time regarding how many more films I will make before concluding the Terrifier saga. Personally, I can’t see it going further than one or two more films, but only time will tell."
Leone's history with Art the Clown stretches way back to 2008, when he made a brief appearance in the short film The Ninth Circle. Art spies a minor character reading a book titled The Ninth Circle at the end of Terrifier 3, which Leone describes as "a nice full circle moment for this character." After seven projects featuring Art the Clown spanning 17 years, it's understandable that Leone would seek a "bookend" to this twisted saga.
At the same time, scoring over $18 million on an independent production with a $2 million budget and beating out a $200 million juggernaut in only its second week of release is a feat that practically demands a follow-up.
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Leone knows, "Everybody's going to say, 'Alright, what you got? How are you going to surpass these big kill scenes? How are you going to become a better storyteller?' Also, how will I explain all this lore in a satisfying way?" Leone sees the success of the Terrifier films as deriving in large part from him "not [losing] sight of what got us here in the first place, which is a very simplistic, gritty, slasher film, and I never want to forget that element. That's the most important element of the movies. So I'm always trying to balance the lore and the supernatural elements with giving the audience a classic stalking, slashing, gritty horror movie."
But Art heads can look forward to some innovation and experimentation when Terrifier 4 does ultimately roll around. "Moving forward, there's some really interesting experimental things that I'm going to do in the next installment that I'm very excited about," he says. "I can't really spoil it, but it'll be a little more genre-bending, to a degree. We will see."
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.