If it is your experience that society has devolved into a considerably more selfish place compared to, oh, let’s say 5 years ago, then good news: You’re not alone. Science shows us, dating back to summer 2020, that people have grown increasingly insolent in recent memory, and although that same science can’t quite agree on why, research and the power of observation demonstrate that “me first, gimme gimme” is indeed the ethos driving scads of folks in 2024. Call it a marker of life in a post-COVID world, or a post-truth world, or a consequence of tolerating social media saturation; whatever the reasons, the outcomes are self-explanatory.
Of all the areas where this rise in cultural self-interest can be traced, horror cinema is perhaps a lower rung compared to, for instance, presidential politics. But horror reflects the collective consciousness, and thus is primed to communicate the fears and anxieties burrowed in our psychoses. The implicit corollary of this effect, that horror shows us what we’re afraid of, is that horror also ultimately gives us the monsters we deserve. And we deserve Art the Clown.
The venial sins of selfishness–refusing to hold the door for strangers, tipping waiters stingily, cutting cars off in bumper-to-bumper traffic, being a dick to strangers as you livestream–are a far cry from the protracted atrocities Art subjects hapless victims to in Damien Leone’s Terrifier films, including, but not limited to, sagittal bisection, flogging, flaying, acid attacks, amateur knifepoint penectomies, cannibalism, and bludgeoning, all conducted using homemade weapons or rusty hardware. (For a lucky few, Art resorts to guns.) But what Leone makes clear across each of these movies, and what David Howard Thornton, the man behind the harlequin makeup, expresses through his performance, is how much delight Art takes in killing. Going by the KonMari method, savage violence is absolutely what sparks joy.
Art isn’t the first of slasher cinema’s masked villains to derive if not joy, then at least a hearty belly laugh, from painfully shuffling people off of their mortal coils. Charles Lee “Chucky” Ray and Freddy Krueger are ur-texts for Art’s background; both of them like murdering people, and both of them go deep in the tank to devise new, creative ways to take life. (Krueger has a noticeable edge in this contest, but you gotta respect Chucky’s industriousness.) Think of either character; the first thing that comes to mind is likely to be their appearances, but the second thing is equally as likely to be their echoing cackles, which are as core to their personas as the accouterments we associate with their names. Contrasted with genre-defining silent lumbering beefcakes, like Leatherface, Michael Myers, and Jason Voorhees, Chucky and Freddy’s sadistic delight is a pleasant anomaly.
What separates these classic 1980s figures from Art, though, is the way he merges their conflicting sides into a single profile. Art doesn’t make noise. He doesn’t talk. He doesn’t whistle. He doesn’t gasp with excitement or scream in anguish. He’s a silent killer, like a gas leak. At the same time, he’s ferociously loud in gesture; Thornton contorts his mouth into donut-sized “O’s” to articulate surprise, he grins like the Cheshire Cat to prime the audience for incoming carnage, he mock-cries at his victims’ suffering, he shuffles, he struts, he glides. Even at just a hair over 6’ in height, Thornton reads as diminutive next to those ’80s-era big boys, but his commitment to the role gives him the effect of feeling larger than life. He takes up the screen whenever he’s on it: A black and white jester who speaks volumes with his face and his body.
Is it any wonder that audiences have seized on him with an enthusiasm afforded to no other modern day horror baddie? Victor Crowley, the malformed behemoth of Adam Green’s Hatchet series, comes close; an argument might also be made for John “Jigsaw” Kramer, too. But Art the Clown has his own novelty popcorn bucket. Ice Nine Kills wrote a song about him. He has a cameo in Pete Davidson’s FX series, Bupkis. Go to your local horror convention and the odds are astronomically high that you will see people–young people, old people, middle aged people, big people, small people, and maybe a toddler or two–wearing Art the Clown paraphernalia: Daisy glasses, t-shirts, or, for truly hardcore fans, full-on cosplay. You will not see Crowley. You will not see Kramer. Grant that Saw lost luster over the decades, in part because the overwhelming majority of that franchise comprises junk entries, and in part because horror trends have deprioritized the “stuff” of these movies; this, too, may explain why Green hasn’t made a new Hatchet movie in 7 years, though that whole pesky COVID affair probably didn’t help, either.
The Terrifier films draw on the same grisly blueprints and tropes as Hatchet and Saw, of course. If torturous ultra-violence is out of vogue, then logically, Terrifier shouldn’t be a “thing” to the degree that it is. But numbers don’t lie and there’s no such thing as bad press; reports of people retching at Terrifier 3 screenings, or otherwise walking out, only stir up excitement among Leone’s core demographic, and Terrifier 2’s $15 million box office take on a $250,000 budget is nothing to sneeze at, either. There’s something about Art, many somethings, actually: His look, his behavior, his over-the-top brutality. There’s a reason why Thornton is Terrifier’s star, even as the series’ protagonist, Lauren LaVera, assembles an impressive following of her own. He’s just that compelling as Art, a psychopath compelled by the pursuit of his own pleasures at the expense of whichever poor bastards cross his path.
But it’s exactly Art’s nature as a volatile and homicidal pleasure seeker that’s allowed him to embed himself in a pocket of pop cultural consciousness. He’s the monster we fear the most today because we see shades of his cruel self-interest in a critical mass of workaday behaviors, whether simple rudeness or explosive acts of narcissistic rancor, the kind passerby capture on camera in hopes of having their viral moment, instead of, y’know, intervening. This, of course, adds yet another layer of the “me before everyone else” thought pattern; people would rather get their 15 minutes of fame than help their fellow man. Art would get a kick out of that combination of appalling greed and indirect harm. And then he’d slaughter the bystanding videographer, along with their subject.
Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers the movies, beer, music, and being a dad for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours. He has contributed to Paste since 2013. You can find his collected work at his personal blog. He’s composed of roughly 65% craft beer.
