In celebration of Terrifier 3 coming out later this year, here is a blog on the one and only Art the Clown.
What is the work?[]
The Terrifier franchise, an indie slasher series penned by Damien Leone starring a killer clown who may end up one day reaching the likes of classic slashers like Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, etc. The first film is... not good and is kind of a paper thin story with characters you care about as much as used toilet paper. Believe me, I would understand why some would hesitate to think Art counts because the film has little story, is mean-spirited, and has disposable characters.
Terrifier 2 fixes this by introducing likable characters largely the final girl Sienna Shaw, an actual story (which is still confusing), and Art gets his ass kicked there after going about 2 movies scot-free. Plus who doesn't love the Clown Cafe Song? Though it could have been shorter, but I was never bored.
Who is he?[]
The Miles County Clown himself Art the Clown. Described as being a foil to Pennywise where while It is colorful and talks, Art is more a mime who has a darker contrast in outfit and never makes a peep. Hardly anything is known about Art aside from him being some demonic entity who derives pleasure in killing his victims. And he is not gonna just stab a guy and then call it a day. Oh no. He is going to do absolutely terrible things with that knife that you would not expect.
What has he done?[]
Unsure if whether to add what he does in All Hallows Eve since I had always taken that version of Art as being a prototype for Thornton's take. In Terrifier, we follow Tara and Dawn... some rather flat protagonists who leave a Halloween party when they meet good all Art who was carrying his bag of tricks with him. And, of course, it gets worse. Art stalks the two young women to a pizza restaurant where he does his typical clown shenanigans like... writing his name on the bathroom mirror with doodie. Naturally, he gets kicked out, but obviously he ain't having that disrespect. He comes back to the restaurant, decapitates one of the employees and fashions his head into a jack-o-lantern. As for the other, he slices his fingers off then stabs him repeatedly in the face until he is a bloody, unrecognizable mess.
Afterward, Tara and Dawn stop at a warehouse so that Tara could have access to the restroom. The radio announces the double murder surprisingly quickly, but before Dawn could react, Art gets into the car and sedates her. Tara meets an insane woman who believed that a doll was her actual child, and gets confronted by the killer clown again at one point getting stabbed in the tendon. Despite her attempts to fight back, Art sedates her.
She awakens to find herself tied up. Art fakes attacking her with one of his weapons before showing off a curtain, revealing a bound and gagged Dawn suspended upside down from the ceiling. He takes a saw, and well... anyone familiar with the movie and its kills knows exactly what happened there. After killing Dawn, Tara manages to escape and fights back again... striking Art only once and then trying to flee. She gets a few good hits on the killer clown... who pulls out a gun... and shoots Tara repeatedly with it, stops to reload and take a selfie for the lulz, and then finishes her off. He pretends to be Dawn to lure Tara's sister, Vicky, to the back.
During that chaos, the crazy cat lady I alluded to earlier sees Art cradling her babeh in his arms, and, as a means to speak to the clown's humanity, the woman asks him if he ever experienced a mother's touch. And... it seems to actually work with Art sucking his thumb and being coddled by the lady.
Vicky arrives thinking that she saw her sister... except no. Art scalped the crazy cat lady and then disgustingly (and probably unintentionally transphobic on Leone's part) wears the lady's chesticles in some sick display. He mauls Vicky and eats her face as if going "finally, some good f*cking food" before being interrupted by the police. (Apparently not knowing about his supernatural prowess) Art eats his own gun and blows his brains out. The coroner looks over the bodies spotting Art's creepy smile beaming at him and then... the lights flicker...because.
Terrifier 2 starts immediately after the first film with Art doing what he does best: gruesomely murdering the coroner, ripping one of his eyes out like he thinks he's the Creeper and then bashing the guy's head in and removing his brain. Art then gathers some new material for his torture toys and... heads to a laundromat because unlike some slashers, Art cares about making himself look picture perfect before going in for the kill. While waiting, he meets the Little Pale Girl who may or may not be the 10-year-old girl he was implicated to have mutilated and murdered who transformed into a twisted ghost who resembles him, or, my take, she is a humanoid abomination who resurrected Art in the first place (will come back to that later). After playing pattycake, Art murks some random guy by slamming the wooden pole of a mop into his skull. Oh, and he also killed that employee at a Halloween store Sienna visited.
From here, we follow Sienna and Jonathan Shaw, actual characters that we can give a crap about. We get some lore nuggets with how their father had been having visions of Art the Clown and even has drawings of Art's murders. He apparently went insane and committed suicide but not before sketching his daughter wearing a Valkyrie costume.
Sienna later has a dream where she is a "kid" at the fictional restaurant The Clown Café (man that song bops). Art arrives and... well, he takes out a Tommy gun and mows the "children" down, sets the stage on fire, performer and all. Somehow, her room gets caught on fire. Art and the LPG harass Jonathan and frame him for bringing a dead opossum to school. This gets him in trouble with his mother and vice versa.
Now, Art's signature kill in the first film was the sawing of Dawn upside down. Does Art one-up this one? Yes. Yes he does. After Allie initially refuses to give him candy, only doing so to make him go away because he is a scary clown guy, Art breaks into her house and has a cup of water because all that hacking and slacking makes you parched.
Allie, poor baby, tries to escape, but Art intercepts her. In a short summarization, Art: slices her eye; scalps her with a pair of scissors; rips her arm off and tears her other hand clean down the middle. He cuts her back open and leaves the room to take a breather... and then comes back with bleach and salt and literally rubs salt into her wounds. And somehow... the poor girl is somehow *not dead*. Allie's mother arrives seeing the aftermath of the break-in and dashes for her daughter's room... only to watch Art slice into her still-living daughter's legs. She is then killed herself with Art using her head like a candy bowl.
Art then blows a huge hole into Sienna's mother's face laughing like a psychopath by pushing mashed potatoes into the hole much to Jonathan's horror. He sedates Jonathan with some mmm, mmm drugs and the LPG lures Sienna to an amusement park on the Terrifier ride. That's the name of the movie.
To sum up what he does, he interrupts a guy who was draining his snake in a scene where even if you weren't a man, you felt that. He then chases that boy's girlfriend inside. She tries to fend herself off with a wooden plank, but Art merely tosses a corrosive acid in her face that he got from the coroner's office, yanks her heart out, and goes nom.
Art finally fights with Sienna and seemingly manages to kill her and tosses her body down a pit leading to some weird resurrection/spiritual ying-yang that maybe will be explained in the third film. Meanwhile, Art tries to wake Jonathan up only to get bored and start biting into his leg because Vicky's face and a heart were not enough to satiate his rumblies.
Sienna returns and turns the tables on the mad clown using his own weapons against him and decapitating him. The LPG takes his head and... Vicky is in a mental institution after she attacked that woman from the first film and... she thinks she is in love with Art, the guy who disfigured her and killed her sister. She... is pregnant and... in a safe way of saying this, she gives birth to Art's decapitated head.
Art the Clown will return in Avengers.
Heinous standard[]
Art is the heinous standard. Mass murder, sadistic torture and prolonged suffering of his victims for his own amusement. And cannibalism, shouldn't forget that. Honestly, think the heinous is no issue when it comes to Art. The LPG is implied to have revived him, but she is otherwise just a hands-off abettor with Art getting his hands dirty of his own volition.
Mitigating factors? Freudian Excuse?[]
For starters, Art does not speak with some suggesting he may just be physically incapable of speaking. But he does have a personality. He is a psychopathic homicidal maniac who mimes laughter whenever he commits something especially terrible. He treats everything like it's some big grand act, befitting that his name is Art because it's like he's motivated to have people look at his atrocities so that he could derive pleasure from their reactions. There is the theory that the sequel posits that he could somehow be Sienna's dad, but... don't really buy it. There is virtually nothing we know about Art, but we know his motivations and get a good idea of what his character is like.
As far as his relationship with the Little Pale Ghost goes, it's not redeeming/mitigating. They work together largely because they are murder buddies who love torturing and mutilating their victims. And if the LPG is really the 10-year-old Art killed, then yeah, definitely not redeeming.