Art the Clown is Back in the Sickest Entry Yet

If they gave out an Academy Award for best performance by a silent harlequin in a white clown suit who can mime a giggle fit while slicing people’s faces off (don’t try this at home — the slicing or the silent laughing), the award would be a lock for Art the Clown, the mascot of beyond-anything-you’ve-ever-seen slasher mayhem who’s the depraved mascot/killer of “Terrifier 3.”

Art the Clown is to Freddy and Jason and Michael Myers what the Sex Pistols were to the Who and the Stones: their punk end point, their scandalous culmination. In the good old days, slasher movies were about masked hulks chopping people’s limbs off or skewering them with butcher knives. (How quaint.) “Saw” and its sequels upped the ante, with the characters subjected to intricate machine-tooled torture that involved every conceivable form of dismemberment (with the added joke of: each victim deserved it!). You might well ask: How could the “Terrifier” films top that?

The answer has to do with something that Art the Clown has in common with Kamala Harris: the joy factor. It’s implicit in every slasher movie — going back to the granddaddy of them all, “Psycho” — that the men wielding kitchen knives and chainsaws get off on what they’re doing. That’s part of what’s scary — they like their work, so you’re not going to convince them to stop.

But Art the Clown takes the concept of enjoying homicidal sadism to new levels of sick-puppy insanity. The character is played, in all three “Terrifier” movies, by David Howard Thornton, an actor who disappears into his costume: white make-up and hook nose and bald clown head cover, black-lipsticked mouth, dirty rotten licorice teeth that look like they were borrowed from the Nun, all capped off by his tiny top hat, which is cocked just so. From inside that getup, Thornton gives a hell of a performance, like Marcel Marceau inhabited by the fiendish spirit of Charles Manson, with a touch of Divine. In his silent-clown way, he imitates ordinary human emotion — the grins and wide-eyed surprise, the innocent moués, the cartoon-sad frowns — with a stylized frivolity. He’s going to mock and mirror what you’re feeling right back at you, just before he saws your legs off or disembowels you like a stuck pig.

The “Terrifier” movies, so sordid in their ultraviolence, began as an underground phenomenon, but they’re now a mall-theater franchise with a complicated backstory, like the “Scream” films. At the New York premiere of “Terrifier 3” I attended earlier this week, the audience was a swirl of cult celebrity and goth party chic, signifying that these movies had arrived as a brand. (So did the novelty dolls on hand of Art the Clown.)

In “Terrifier 3,” Sienna (Lauren LaVera), who has emerged as the series’ heroine/final girl, gets released from a psychiatric hospital (she’s been in and out of them) and goes to stay with her Aunt Jessica (Margaret Anne Florence), Jessica’s husband, Greg (Bruce Johnson), and their kid, Gabbie (Antonella Rose). There’s a lot of kitchen-table discussion, maybe too much of it, of all that went on before.

Damien Leone, the series’ garishly inventive writer-director, knows how to stage a splatter opera of an opening fanfare in which a family gets chopped to pieces. But he’s not exactly a wizard of expository dialogue. He makes these movies on the cheap, and they have an outside-the-system quality; they’re basically collections of set pieces. And the flashbacks in which Art the Clown, who was decapitated at the end of the last film, gets weirdly reconstituted by Victoria (Samantha Scaffidi), who becomes his one-eyed rotting-and-walking-corpse assistant, play like a highlight reel of scenes from “Re-Animator” shown out of order. “Terrifier 2,” all two hours and 18 minutes of it, was a more seamless piece of filmmaking.

But “Terrifier 3” puts the “E” in Extreme, and it has an ace gimmick, one that simultaneously winks at and fulfills franchise expectations, when it sets up Art the Clown as a fake Santa Claus who unleashes his mayhem at Christmastime. He steals his costume from an off-duty store Santa after freezing his limbs with nitrous oxide, which makes them crumble to dust at the smash of a hammer. The film’s prosthetics and makeup effects were created by Christien Tinsley, who works with a depraved practical magic that reminds me of early Rob Bottin (“The Thing”).

A little later, as we’re recoiling, and maybe marveling a bit, at Art the Clown’s slaughterhouse ingenuity, he pulls out an instrument of death that’s so classic — a chainsaw — that we wonder what he’s going to do with it that’s new. Well, here’s the thing. In every chainsaw murder you’ve ever seen onscreen, you only see…so much. (“The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” in its poetic nightmare greatness, is famous for being understated in its gore.) But Damien Leone, and Art the Clown, are going to show you what no “Chain Saw” sequel, no scene-that-helped-to-get- “Scarface”-an-X-rating, ever did. We begin with two nude college students fornicating in a shower, at which point Art, as Santa, saws through the shower door, then starts sawing off hands and limbs, then places that chainsaw right between the dude’s buttocks, at which point the party is just getting started.

The movie’s climax features squiggly rats, a big glass tube shoved down someone’s throat, and a head that’s been carved down to a brain so that we go, “Who was that?” (The detail that reveals the identity is, in an awful way, witty.) “Terrifier 3” is two hours long, and you might wonder why a porn-of-violence exploitation movie, the kind of thing that’s usually on the short side, would be such a protracted smorgasbord of gruesomeness. But that’s part of what “Terrifier” fans crave: a complete immersion in depravity. The horror is onscreen, but in another sense it’s in the audience. It’s in the very fact that a sizable slice of mainstream viewers now regard this as entertainment. I don’t mean to sound so judgmental; I’m one of them. Going back to the days of “Friday the 13th Part III” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street 4,” I always found slasher sequels tedious. Yet the prospect of another “Terrifier” movie doesn’t dispirit me in the same way. It leaves me in a kind of suspense: What, in hell’s name, will Art the Clown do next?