'Terrifier 3' Stakes a Claim for Extreme in the Mainstream

Depraved times call for depraved movies.

In March of 2003, the month the U.S. officially launched their second-ever invasion of Iraq, there was only one horror movie in the top 50 films at the domestic box office: Final Destination 2, which clocked in at #28. By March of 2004, however, #17 was Monster, #11 was Twisted, #8 was Taking Lives, #4 was Dawn of the Dead, and #1 was The Passion of the Christ, a film so brutal it was dubbed "a two-hour-and-six-minute snuff movie" by critics at Slate.

Similarly, in January of 1991, before Operation Desert Storm, the L.A. Riots, and the Bosnian genocide were televised, Warlock was at #29, Ghost was at #20, and Misery, a film that was psychologically battering but visually tame (save for one particular scene) clocked in at #11. Contrast that with the rest of the year, which saw extremity and fringe behavior take the form of Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (#36), Point Break & Thelma & Louise (#26 and #25, respectively), New Jack City (#23), Boyz n the Hood (#19), Cape Fear (#18), and The Silence of the Lambs (#4), and a pattern begins to emerge: when the going gets tough, the movie-going masses gravitate towards films that reflect the deepening depravity of their experience.

A disclaimer before I go any further: I am neither a statistician nor a box office analyst. I don’t know how audience trends work, though I suspect statisticians and box office analysts don’t really either. Meaning: the sheer number of factors that account for what puts the butts in the seats is so vast, predicting success at the box office with any degree of accuracy or reliability will never be a provable science, no matter how much the number crunchers at the top want you to believe their investments into AI will pay off.

What I am is a story analyst, amateur vibes researcher, and diehard advocate of extremity in art. You may think this makes me an edgelord, and it did, once. But while it was the desire to define myself by consuming what others wouldn’t watch that drew me to gateway-extremists like Harmony Korine and Gaspar Noe in my teens, no desire to keep proving it has kept me in this camp. I like Olaf Ittembach and Andreas Schnaas because of how much they’re able to do with so little. I gravitate towards Lucio Fulci and Sion Sono because art is for imagination—it’s literally what makes Japanese guro art valuable. And content aside, I’d put Lars von Trier’s mastery of the cinematic form (i.e. story arcs, directing actors, editing moving images to sound, etc.) up against that of any living filmmaker, auteur or otherwise. Call me reductive, but I believe that the best art reflects the society that produced it, like how Burgundian excess created De Sade and Nazi-governed Italy generated Salò. In short, I believe that extreme times call for extreme movies, and the snowballing success of the Terrifier franchise signals the fact that modern audiences now, on some level, do too.

I say “now” because extremity’s always inspired lasting art, be it Goya’s Disasters of War or the rise of the 70s slasher in the context of Vietnam. Did The Silence of the Lambs become the first and only horror movie to win Best Picture because it was a really good movie, or because we also all had to watch the Kuwaiti oil fields burn? I couldn’t tell you. What I can say with confidence is that pulling the advertising for Donnie Darko in October 2001 because it featured an aircraft accident did nothing to stop it from becoming a cult classic (and recouping its cost) amongst a generation of moviegoers who connected with the image of the sky falling around them. And with shameful images of dead children all but a daily status update, is it really so shocking when a clown killing Santa Claus brings all the boys to the yard?

To the box office hawks, apparently it is. “Few could have predicted that Terrifier 3 would outshine both big studio releases and films aimed at the awards circuit, but it highlights the unpredictability of moviegoing audiences.” Nope. “What’s going on here with Terrifier 3 is one of the oldest tricks in the Hollywood rulebook: noticing the popularity of IP in the home ancillaries of one sequel, and doubling down on the next installment.” Wrong. “Film analyst Stephen Follows told Business Insider that while news of walkouts and vomiting used to be a warning to viewers over movies including The Exorcist, nowadays it's a challenge to attract audiences.” Close, but still not quite. People may be challenging the strengths of each others’ stomachs to sit through a film that has warnings from both French and Australian governments, but I would venture to guess that a huge part of its appeal comes from the fact that the only theaters they have in towns across America (Regal, AMC) finally have a movie that feels as bad as they do. (The real coup de grace is that T3 FX Makeup artist Christien Tinsley’s biggest credit is, in fact, The Passion of the Christ.)

Now, I’m not saying Terrifier 3 captivates the darker part of the human psyche in the same way that does Guernica or isolates the humanity in a barbaric era like The Night Porter. The entire franchise appears to be a means to an end, and that end is simply executing the most disturbing on-screen kills possible. It’s a feat in and of itself, and stunts will always have an audience in America. But when it comes to movies that aim to capture the unrelenting chaos of Trump’s first term, the unresolved traumas of the pandemic, or the total ruination of Gaza, it’s this humble hauntologist’s contention that it’ll be a while before we find them in IMAX, if ever. Maybe in arthouses and at festivals, in the form of plucky independents like The Apprentice, The Code, or From Ground Zero, but never on 2,500 screens. Terrifier 3 is just about the only chainsaw we have to scratch that itch.