Terrifier

The picture opens on a man at a workbench, shot from behind, painting his own face white and black. Horror fans will recognize the composition from A Nightmare on Elm Street. Wes Craven gave us the glove before he gave us Freddy. Damien Leone, who wrote the film, directed it, and built the gore effects, is announcing his sources in the first thirty seconds, and he isn’t apologizing for them.

Cut to two young women out too late on Halloween. They stop for pizza and draw the attention of Art the Clown, who wears a filthy black-and-white costume and a tiny hat, carries his implements in a garbage bag, and never speaks a word. He grins at everyone. This is the entire plot, and the film wants no more, because it isn’t interested in plot. It is interested in what Art does to people with the contents of the bag.

What he does is worse than what Jason or Michael got away with in the 80s, and I suspect that is the point. The centerpiece, which fans have been describing to each other for years now, involves a woman hung upside down and a hacksaw, and Leone does not cut away from it. He holds. It is grotesque and it goes on and it is also, in some hard-to-defend way, a little exhilarating, in the manner of a magic trick performed by someone who really did saw the lady in half.

Leone is threading a needle here. He doesn’t want the nudge-in-the-ribs comedy the Elm Street sequels sank into, and he doesn’t want the sour documentary ugliness of the August Underground tapes, which are less movies than evidence. He gets his tone. Art is springy and playful like Freddy and implacable like Michael, and when he turns up later in a woman’s clothing you can hear Leatherface knocking.

The budget shows. The digital photography looks like digital photography, several scenes are obviously looped in a sound booth, and the camera keeps declining to pull back and show us everybody in the room at once. Leone has admitted on the commentary track that some sequences were stitched together from footage shot weeks apart in different buildings, the murder here, the screaming witness there. Most people won’t catch it. I caught it, and it itched.

The real trouble is the victims. We learn almost nothing about them, which is forgivable, and they behave like lemmings, which is not. One of them stabs Art in the back and drops him at her feet, while she is standing beside a heap of tools that would finish the job, and she runs. Later she flattens him with a two-by-four and, rather than swinging it a second time, stands over him shrieking at him to get up. He obliges. This is the Idiot Plot at full throttle. A monster who can only catch people who volunteer isn’t much of a monster. When a later victim finally escapes the building and then walks back into it, I audibly groaned.

And yet. In the middle of one of these rounds, wounded again, watching her sprint off without finishing him, Art grimaces and raises his middle finger at her back. She doesn’t see it. We do. David Howard Thornton improvised the gesture and Leone kept it, and it is the best moment in the picture, a silent clown conceding that he is stuck in a loop and will have to keep bleeding through it.

The film means it. There is no irony here, no film student winking at the camera, no character explaining the rules of horror movies to the other characters. Leone loves this stuff and knows how to build a severed head, and that sincerity carries farther than the writing does. If you loved the mean little slashers of the early 80s and have been waiting for someone to make another one with a straight face, Leone has made it for you, with a bigger effects budget than conscience. Bring a strong stomach and low expectations for the victims.