The Bizarre Evolution Of Terrifier's Art The Clown

Horror movie history is littered with the corpses, not just of onscreen victims, but over-contrived would-be iconic monsters that just didn't catch on. For every Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees, there's the Trickster from "Brainscan," or Horace Pinker in "Shocker." Filmmakers can try to engineer a hit horror character, but they don't always catch on.

Art the Clown, from writer/director and makeup maestro Damien Leone's  "Terrifier" films, is the latest one who has become popular with audiences, but he wasn't necessarily intended that way. Beginning as a mere supporting character in a short film that was meant to lead to an altogether different feature, he initially seized the spotlight as a supernatural being, rebooted as a more conventional slasher, then took a larger step into a much crazier and more epic universe. Along the way he somehow became a mass-marketed commodity as a result of being famous for nauseating people. As with most of Art's kills, he can never just take the direct path. It's much more entertaining for him to take a circuitous, scenic route.

From humble beginnings and portrayal by a non-actor to becoming one of the most physically expressive movie killers of all time, it's been a bizarre journey to the mainstream for Art. Here's how Art the Clown has evolved over the years.

Art the Clown first appeared, unnamed, in Leone's short, "The 9th Circle." Though he does feature a latex application on his face, it's minimal and merely serves to disguise performer Mike "Sid" Giannelli's features. He has no explicit supernatural powers in it; just the rotten, sadistic sense of humor that moves him to give a young woman a fake flower containing large insects. It's all a distraction so he can actually drug and kidnap her, but he's not acting alone. Hell — literally! — he's not even the main event.

Art's merely the servant here, bringing his victims to a subterranean lair where monsters and demons, including Satan himself (Eric Diez), perform a terrifying sexual assault ritual, and to put it euphemistically, give their female victims the Sharon Tate treatment, with a hint of "Rosemary's Baby." 

On the Blu-ray commentary for "All Hallows' Eve," Leone admits that the idea for Art and his crimes came from nightmares he had, due to his sister telling him all the details of the Manson family murders at a too-young age. With a big monster, bird monster, several witches and demons, and the Big Guy from Hell himself, Leone intended "The 9th Circle" to showcase his makeup skills as well as his ability to scare, and he planned to make it his first feature. Instead, that darn clown was what everyone remembered most, so he ran with that.

The short-film version of "Terrifier" came next, and it had all the ingredients of the feature version in a compact package. The first glimpse of Art the Clown finds him kicked out of a gas station, reportedly for messing up the restroom (which remains mercifully unseen for now). Art returns and hacks the guy to bits with a hand saw, then fixates on his solo-traveling female customer (Marie Maser), whom he spends the rest of the night hunting down, and finally mutilating in horrifically misogynistic fashion.

In this appearance, Art's makeup was refined into the now-familiar design with exaggerated pointy nose and chin, and those hollow cheeks. But Art's powers, such as they are, are within the standard slasher parameters of suspension of disbelief. Like every major slasher-killer, from Jason to Leatherface, he walks slowly, yet can somehow show up right behind his victims no matter how far they run. One could almost hypothesize that he's still just a real guy with standard horror movie rules in his favor, but for the fact that Leone himself, on the commentary track, calls it out as supernatural teleportation, and the first indication that Art is no mere mortal. Yet if you stab him, does he not bleed? Indeed, Art manages to lose an eye and suffer a knife in the back, but unlike many other modern horror monsters, he also has no qualms about using a gun, which puts the odds substantially in his favor.

When producer Jesse Baget saw "Terrifier" on YouTube, he contacted Leone, wanting to put it in a Halloween anthology film by multiple directors. Instead, Leone talked him into letting him make the entire thing himself, using "The 9th Circle," "Terrifier," and a new short featuring an alien and a wraparound segment that would tie everything back to Art the Clown.

In the alien-themed short film, Art appears only in a painting, supposedly based on a nightmare that an off-camera husband had. This plot point would go on to be re-used in 'Terrifier 2," but on the Blu-ray commentary, Leone says the significance of Art in the painting is that once the artist's wife sees it, she's doomed to die, albeit not at Art's hands. It also makes the name "Art" literal, while giving the movie a stretch of time without him to build up suspense for the finale.

In the main storyline, a babysitter (Katie Maguire) watches a mysterious VHS tape containing all three short films, but the act of watching it appears to bring Art into the house behind her, where he promptly murders the two children she's supposed to be watching. Taken as a whole, "All Hallows' Eve" suggests that Art operates like Samara from "The Ring," but he's not waiting seven days to kill. Watch his video, and he will manifest and murder that same night. This power doesn't stick around, but it unifies the shorts.

Leone's shorts, and "All Hallows' Eve," were made on shoestring budgets, with Art the Clown mostly seen in close-up or tableaux. As such, Leone persuaded his friend Mike Giannelli, who also served in multiple crew positions, to take on the role. Giannelli had no aspirations to be an actor, but had always been a willing guinea pig for Leone's makeup experiments, and he was persuaded to take the role in part by being told he wouldn't have to learn or deliver any lines. Early Art mostly just waves and grins evilly when he isn't actively killing, and it works just fine.

For a feature to center on him, however, Art needed a professional actor. Per the "Terrifier" commentary, David Howard Thornton showed up with no sides or directions, and was instructed to mime a murder. He did well, and evolved Art to the next level by adding a cartoon physicality and pantomime ability that distinguishes him from so many other horror-movie clowns out there, from the shape-shifting Pennywise to the bumbling Killer Klowns. He incorporated Giannelli's grin and wave but added much more, to the point that he can hold entire scenes purely by himself. Always unspeakably evil, Art now added a prankster's silent silliness to his mix. Thornton has since become a go-to actor for movie monsters in full-body costume, playing a version of the Grinch in 'The Mean One," and a murderous Mickey Mouse in the upcoming "Screamboat."

As a feature, "Terrifier" essentially reboots the Art the Clown saga from square one. Though nothing in it necessarily contradicts "All Hallows' Eve," there are no video or painting-based powers. For most of the movie, the only thing even vaguely supernatural is the sheer amount of human waste he craps out to trash the bathroom this time around, and yes, we actually see it this time. From the bowels of Hell! It's a consistent part of Art's character that he occasionally has to do things we don't normally see movie monsters do, like wash his clothes at a laundry (in "Terrifier 2") or take a hellacious dump.

Art is also extremely clever at hiding extra weapons inside his costume — on commentary, Leone and Thornton joke that his body is like a TARDIS, the famously "bigger on the inside" time and space vehicle from "Doctor Who." Nonetheless, even more so than his "teleporting" in the original short, it's well within the rules of most movie realities. The idea in the first film is that he combines the traits of multiple serial killers: the clown costume of John Wayne Gacy, the misogyny of Charles Manson, and the cannibalism of Jeffrey Dahmer are the most obvious. His sole surviving victim, Victoria (Samantha Scaffidi), has wound makeup inspired by Charla Nash, the woman attacked by her pet chimpanzee. That reality basis, however, comes to an end at the finale....

Surrounded by cops during the grand finale of "Terrifier," Art the Clown puts a gun to his own head and blows his brains out rather than get taken alive. It's one way to ensure that they — and we — never learn anything about his true motives or background. There's an implication that he did all the evil things in the movie because random people lightly made fun of him (or because his trashing the restroom led to his forcible ejection from a pizza place). Still, that would be considered an overreaction, to put it mildly. Most of us would just leave a mean Yelp review or yell profanity. (Art can't yell, but he can certainly make obscene gestures.)

This is where the supernatural shenanigans begin. Lights in the morgue start to flicker as the coroner examines Art, and he comes back to life, like the resurrected Jason Voorhees emerging from the lake at the end of "Friday the 13th." Was he always supernatural, with the ability to survive even death? Or was he normal (ish) human until he died, and now something more? 'Terrifier" is pointedly vague on this question, but when we learn that most of the movie has been a flashback, save for the beginning scene with Art watching his last surviving victim on TV, there's no vagueness about him being back. With death no longer an obstacle, he's more dangerous than ever. (For more on that, we took a deep dive into The "Terrifier" ending over here.)

"Terrifier 2" offers a massive retcon, reincorporating the supernatural elements of "All Hallows' Eve" and Biblically raising the stakes. It reveals that an artist predicted Art in his dreams, and he drew not just him but also an angel warrior (originally conceived for the "9th Circle" feature that never happened), who would become his nemesis before dying. His teenage daughter, Sienna (Lauren LaVera), is building a Halloween costume based on the angel warrior, but after she also has a dream about Art, she awakens to find her costume on fire.

Meanwhile, Art's resurrection has seemingly been orchestrated by the Little Pale Girl (Amelie McLain), a demon who dresses and acts like a mini-Art. Initially, only he can see her, but soon more people do. Art regenerates and becomes seemingly indestructible, and he prepares to torment and kill both Sienna and her brother. His only vulnerability is to a sword Sienna's father crafted for her, which survived the costume fire miraculously unscathed.

The implication is that Art and Sienna in some way represent champions of eternal good and evil; a demon versus an angel. We also learn that the name "Terrifier" comes from a carnival haunted house above a gateway to Hell. Sienna falls in and dies, only to be resurrected by her sword and empowered by Heavenly forces to decapitate Art. Yet Art comes back as just a head, birthed from Victoria, who's now possessed by the Pale Girl.

The evolution of Art from urban bogeyman-style slasher killer to pawn in a Biblical game of ultimate good versus ultimate evil worked wonders. "Terrifier 2," which doubled its crowdfunding goal in one day, extended its limited theatrical run due to word-of-mouth popularity, and delivered mainstream-media reported levels of gore that supposedly made some viewers physically sick. 

Howard Stern show staffer Richard Christy talked about Art on the air, declaring that Thornton should win an Oscar. Stephen King noted his interest on X/Twitter, then later praised its "old-school" gore. The low-budget sequel, which made extensive use of an existing haunted house attraction for its grand finale, wound up grossing over $15 million worldwide on a budget of around $250,000. Naturally, Leone and producer Priscilla Smith announced a third installment, set to have a bigger budget "to give the filmmakers more creative freedom, and let them be as wild as they can be."

With the success of the "second" installment — technically the third feature, as you've seen — "Terrifier" was metamorphasizing from a cult hit to a bona fide mainstream franchise. Like "The Human Centipede" before it, its now-notorious gross-outs had made it a must-see dare for brave horror aficionados... and their dates.

Unlike "The Human Centipede" and its ever-changing antagonists, Art the Clown gradually proved to be an unlikely merchandising bonanza. Obviously, his look was always going to sell to horror fans — niche horror merchandise company Trick or Treat Studios made action figures in the 12-inch and 5-inch scale, including one with color change blood splatter action! "Simply spray with ice water or place the figure in your freezer to see Art get drenched in the blood of his victims." The company has previously made collectible toys for horror properties like "Children of the Corn."

After "Terrifier 2" hit it big, however, larger companies became more interested. Mezco Toyz, which at one time or another has made collectibles based on all the major horror icons from Jason Voorhees to Regan MacNeil, produced plush and baby-doll styled Art the Clown figures. Party City made an animatronic (and expensive) Art the Clown with motion effects and a sold-separately Little Pale Girl. Cost is relative, though — Trick or Treat's 12-inch Art costs $139.99, while the four-foot tall Little Pale Girl isn't much more at $174.99.

Perhaps the ultimate sign of Art's unlikely crossover into the mainstream, however, is his appearance as a celebrity guest star on the final episode of Pete Davidson's "Bupkis." In it, Davidson hallucinates several famous faces (playing themselves) in his rehab group, including Cam'ron, Andy Milonakis, Eli Manning, Jadakiss and... Art the Clown. (Damien Leone, like Pete Davidson, is famously from Staten Island.)

This much we know for certain: "Terrifier 3" will be a Christmas holiday movie. The teaser, which riffs on Thornton's performance as a horror Grinch in "The Mean One," shows that Art the Clown is ready for the holidays, and to gleefully murder this universe's equivalent of Cindy Lou Who. Leone claims that one brutal "Terrifier 3" scene actually made Thornton sick. We know that Daniel Roebuck will join the cast as another version of Santa Claus, along with Jason Patric, and there'll be an expanded role for Victoria.

Part 3 is unlikely to be the last in the franchise, as Leone has mentioned he has at least one more installment in mind. It could be the result of part 3 getting so big it needs to be split in two, or possibly its own thing. For now, though, the writer-director does seem to have an ending in his head, though the near-certain continued success of the series may keep Art coming back indefinitely, whether or not his director does. Expect more merchandise, too. Funko Pops seem inevitable, and it's a matter of time before more toy and collectibles companies get in on the "Terrifier" action, especially since Sienna, Victoria, and the Little Pale Girl have equally distinctive and potentially iconic appearances.

In the meantime, the brutal images that made moviegoers lose their lunches can be worn proudly on a T-shirt that will probably get its wearer kicked out of the mall.