Terrifier 3 is a 2024 slasher written, directed and edited by Damien Leone, running 125 minutes and released unrated. David Howard Thornton returns as Art the Clown, with Lauren LaVera as Sienna Shaw, Elliott Fullam and Samantha Scaffidi. It premiered at Fantastic Fest in September 2024 and opened in cinemas that October.

I genuinely cannot believe I sat through the whole thing. And more than anything else, this film has been an unexpectedly revealing experience, because it has made it extremely clear that I am a different person to the one who watched the second film. Something has shifted in me, and I believe it shifted somewhere around the forty minute mark.

This was just yuck.

And I want to be precise about that, because there is a version of this genre that is funny yuck. Grim in a way you can laugh at, where the excess becomes the joke and you are grinning through your fingers. This was not that. This was simply yuck, and I spent a considerable portion of it genuinely uncomfortable rather than entertained.

I do not have a great deal more to say about the film itself, which is unusual for me, but I think that is honest.

What I will say, and say loudly, is that the practical effects work here must be exceptional. Because how else would I have had that reaction? Computer generated effects were never going to do that to me. A digital limb comes off and I feel nothing. There is no version of this where CGI has me physically gagging in my own lounge room. This was practical to the point of making me squeamish, and whatever else I think of the experience, that is a genuine technical achievement and it deserves acknowledging.

And it turns out that is not incidental. The practical effects are the entire reason this franchise exists in the first place.

Damien Leone is a practical effects artist before he is anything else. He created the character of Art the Clown back in 2008 for a short film called The 9th Circle, returned to him in another short in 2011, and when he eventually made the original Terrifier feature, he wrote it specifically as a vehicle to showcase his own effects work. Contemporary accounts note that the other characters in that first film were deliberately left underdeveloped because Leone’s focus was entirely on Art and the gore. That is not a criticism anybody needs to level at these films, because it is the stated design.

The financial story here is genuinely remarkable and worth laying out properly. The first Terrifier was made for somewhere between thirty-five and fifty-five thousand dollars and took around four hundred thousand. Terrifier 2 was made for two hundred and fifty thousand and grossed nearly sixteen million. And Terrifier 3 received a two million dollar budget, which remains tiny by any studio standard, and went on to take $90.3 million worldwide. It opened at number one with $18.5 million and is now the highest-grossing unrated film of all time, as well as the highest-grossing film its distributor has ever released.