There’s an audaciousness in “Terrifier 2”—not simply the audacity to exist, but to linger, to stretch and claw at the very possibility of what a midnight slasher can become in 2022. Damien Leone, with the calm lunacy of a late-shift carnie, yanks his beloved Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton, a leering demon mime who must dream in Bosch triptychs) back out of cult infamy and puts him center stage, handing him the keys to the slasher kingdom and daring anyone in the peanut gallery to flinch.
What’s immediately apparent, or joyously appalling—depending on how many Dario Argento films you smuggled past your parents in adolescence—is Leone’s refusal to dial anything down. He takes the infernal, grinning cruelty of the first film and builds an altar to it: higher, noisier, and, God help us, bloodier. At two-and-a-quarter hours, “Terrifier 2” isn’t so much a sequel as a siege—a full-scale offensive on taste, runtime, and the slasher’s traditional efficiency, as if Leone is curing the genre’s slipshod pace with an IV drip of pure id.
And yet, there’s method in this sadism. The plot, such as it is—a frothy cauldron of haunted high schools, family trauma, Halloween pageantry, and supernatural resurrections—refuses the pitiful contours of “kill, rinse, repeat.” Leone’s ambition isn’t content with presenting a row of heads for the chopping block; he wants to lay an entire mythos at Art’s clawed feet. In Lauren LaVera’s Sienna, we’re offered not a mere “final girl” but something bruised and mythic: a young woman forced to armor herself, literally and spiritually, until the cheesy trappings of cosplay turn ceremonial. Watching her, I wondered if Leone was playing at the edge of self-parody or slipping, for a flicker, into genuine heroism. It makes you squirm—both at the carnage and at how close the movie comes to sincerity before he snatches the rug and the viscera with it.
But nobody comes to “Terrifier 2” for therapy. You come for the show—the Grand Guignol staged with such giddy malevolence that even the most hard-bitten gorehound might shift in his seat. Grapefruit-sized chunks of flesh, hapless victims reduced to red mist, a loopy daisy chain of dismemberments executed not with numb efficiency but with tap-dancing, Busby Berkeley flourish. Leone stages each massacre as if he’s answering the unspoken dare, “Surely he won’t—oh, but he does.” This isn’t violence as catharsis or social commentary, it’s violence as a schoolyard prank scrawled in arterial spray. The effects are so handmade and indulgent—so gleefully excessive—that you almost want to send a thank-you card to the unrated cut.
For all its punk bravado, the film never lets you forget that this is the work of outsiders: the supporting cast is raw, wobbly, with a familial awkwardness that only makes Art’s intrusions more obscene. The budget peeks through the seams—backgrounds stitched together from suburban Nothingvilles, parties that echo with the silence of friends-of-friends draft-dodging their lines—but it only adds to the film’s stubborn authenticity, its pride in refusing refinement.
And yet, something astonishing happens: style seeps in. The cinematography, a garish exorcism in neon jaundice and lurid pinks, twists familiar parking lots and kitchens into a fever’s playground. The music—cheap, throbbing, a synth carnival for lost children—keeps the pulse jittery. If the original “Terrifier” was grime and VHS-worn shadows, the sequel is an unholy comic book, exploding off the page in drippy chroma. Leone manipulates with gusto, but you sense he’s giggling behind the curtain, the gleeful host at a party you were not wholly invited to but couldn’t possibly miss.
And let’s talk about the time, the sheer, mulish length of this thing. This isn’t just a marathon, it’s an endurance test—a dare aimed squarely at every streaming-addled attention span. There are scenes (whole bouquet arrangements of them) one could savage in the editing suite, but then, would it really be “Terrifier 2” if it behaved? Leone’s baggy, saggy pacing is not a bug but a feature: a gauntlet to be run, not an evening’s brisk diversion.
Somewhere inside the eviscerated ribcage, the movie tries for the mythological, fashioning Art the Clown into a harlequin for the subconscious, chaos with a circus horn. Sienna, the Valkyrie-in-a-costume-shop, rises in the blood and smoke, daring to dream of archetypes in a genre allergic to ambition. This is blasphemy and devotion in one sticky, rubbery mask—a slasher trying to give gothic shape to its nightmares even as it chokes on the confetti.
And “Terrifier 2” knows itself: half-critique, half-celebration, it goads and winks. You sense Leone relishing the audience’s ping-pong between disgust and cackling, between rolling their eyes and plugging their ears. There are, I’m told, audience stories of faints and heaves, but the splatter here is closer to confection than autopsy—deliriously theatrical, impossible to confuse with the residue of the real. The overkill comes so fast and self-consciously absurd it lurches into farce: you’re not just permitted to laugh; you’re instructed.
This isn’t horror for the mothballed, A24-haunted crowd who want their terror poetic and silent. It’s for those of us who want to remember the genre as rawstone spectacle, as a test—of nerve, taste, patience—an event to be survived and, possibly, celebrated. “Terrifier 2” is a love-letter to overindulgence—the last, joyous howl of a form that owes nobody an apology. Leone scrawls an invitation in blood: you can clutch your pearls, but don’t pretend you weren’t curious.
Is it too much? Of course. That’s the point, the lawless strength: Leone doesn’t so much break boundaries as skate around the fact they ever existed. Art the Clown isn’t going back in the box. He’s claimed his cult, settled in for the long haul, and “Terrifier 2” stands as both manifesto and mausoleum for excess. If you venture in, don’t say you weren’t warned. If you stay—God help you—you might even have a hell of a time.
