Jordan Peele remains the elusive showman of modern American cinema, and with Nope he pulls off his boldest hat trick yet—a genre spectacle that is as enthralling as it is unnerving, as self-consciously mythic as it is eerily ambiguous. At a time when every new alien movie tries to out-gloom its predecessors, Peele has the audacity to make the unknown not just frightening, but beautiful and indecently entertaining.
If you’d told me, in the braying wake of too many rote horror films recycled through streaming services, that a movie called Barbarian would come bearing wit, ambiguity, and a genuine chill, well, the laugh would have been yours. That laugh, sharp, startled, delighted, is precisely what Zach Cregger’s Barbarian delivers, teasing the nerves and tickling them, too, as if the genre itself were a basement door just waiting to be wrenched open.
One comes to a marathon of the “Terrifier” films much as you might approach a rickety rollercoaster at a fading state fair, skeptical, but secretly hoping to stumble out a little changed. It all begins with a shriek and a snicker: Damien Leone’s creation, Art the Clown, born of a 2011 short that was less a calling card than a threat. Yet by the third film, set amid Christmas glitter and moral queasiness, the series has grown into a twisted, almost baroque pageant of splatter and dark wit. The “Terrifier” films, watched in quick succession, form their own fevered treatise on what horror can still provoke, where it dare not go, and just how long you can keep laughing in the dark before you start to worry about yourself.
This low-budget slasher reintroduces Art the Clown, a character who has quickly risen to iconic status within the horror genre, while delivering a story that ups the ante in every conceivable way, violence, scale, and ambition. With a runtime of over two hours, Terrifier 2 pushes the boundaries of modern horror, offering a visceral experience that caters to hardcore fans while alienating some mainstream viewers.