***/****
starring David Howard Thornton, Lauren Lavera, Elliott Fullam, Samantha Scaffidi
written and directed by Damien Leone
by Walter Chaw Damien Leone’s Terrifier films are empathy tests for a culture, for a creature, that has amused itself to death. No longer able to discern the line between reality and the media we consume, we are presented with these Voight-Kampff tests designed to replicate the social conditions of our steady dehumanization. You see, I’m sick. I’m afraid it’s mortal but I don’t know–I mean, every second is a second I will never see again, so isn’t everything mortal? I have, for over a year now, watched Israel gleefully, defiantly wage genocide on the Palestinian people and consumed images of the human body in various states of dismemberment, violation, and humiliation that before this I had only glimpsed with horror in grainy photographs smuggled out of Nanking during WWII–that I had only imagined while reading war stories written by men destroyed largely by just the act of bearing witness. This is the shape of my astonishing privilege. If I didn’t want to see it, I didn’t have to. Something changed.
And I have noticed, from the first day to the 370th, that I can look at decapitated children now, held in the arms of parents maddened by grief and the tacit complicity of the United States and most of Europe, without looking away. I am a shell. I don’t sleep well anymore. I am hollowed-out and empty. I understand T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men, his warning about the apocalypse, for the very first time. “Our dried voices, when/We whisper together/Are quiet and meaningless/As wind in dry grass/Or rats’ feet over broken glass/In our dry cellar” and “Paralysed force, gesture without motion,” and “Remember us–if at all–not as lost/Violent souls, but only/As the hollow men/The stuffed men.” I understand who the “eyes I dare not meet in dreams” belong to now; I know where the “twilight kingdom” is, where the dead land “[u]nder the twinkle of a fading star” is, because I live there now. We live there together. The noise of us together sounds like the noise you make when you try not to make a noise. The dry rustle you hear is all our voices mouthing prayers to broken stones.
I understand Charlie Chaplin’s The Tramp character, with his too-small hat and too-large shoes, the immigrant and eternal outsider who good-naturedly demonstrated the inhumanity of others through his interest in the weak and championing of the powerless. I understand why The Tramp appeared in the space between the mechanized mass slaughter and dismemberment of WWI and the rise of fascism and murder camps of WWII and fast became the most famous personality on the planet. Chaplin would play little tricks on despots and middle-managers, sly kicks and sleights-of-hand, and smile and wave if caught in the act. “You got me,” his grin says, which maybe has a dash of Bugs Bunny’s “Ain’t I a stinker?” as well. And I know why, at the end of his film The Great Dictator, Chaplin breaks character and the fourth wall, addressing the audience directly to plead with them to care again about the suffering of others. He spoke of a world rapidly tilting into totalitarianism: the best filled with despair and the worst locating that seam in the sheer rockface of our sense of righteous morality that allows them to find purchase, take root, spore. He begged us to remember who we were when we could still weep, when we had to look away.
How long has it been for you? How far has it progressed? I know. I’m sorry.
The star of Terrifier 3 is Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton), the punchline to a joke about what’s black and white and red all over with his too-small hat and too-large shoes: the eternal outsider who good-naturedly demonstrates his sanguine inhumanity to the desensitized and the privileged. Set during Christmastime, the film begins in a stock home with a stock family: A little girl hears reindeer on the roof while her brother and her parents are in various stages of disturbed sleep. Then Art, who is not entirely of this world, comes down the chimney with a bag carrying a long-handled axe and a good attitude. You know this family is going to be slaughtered in the same way you know that once you get on a rollercoaster, the slow click-clack is merely prelude to the sickening drop. What I noticed, however, was how the dad expressed his irritation with his wife and daughter, saying his rest was more important than theirs. We fill in the rest, right? How men believe their families want them to work more when really what they want is to be heard. I looked at the warmth of the holiday production design, thought about movies like the Silent Night, Deadly Night franchise, and appreciated how Art demonstrates the tenuousness of our sense of security and the capriciousness of a universe that not only doesn’t care what happens to you–it doesn’t even know you exist. Scream all you want.
When Art chops, cuts, grinds, peels–when he gores, disembowels, flays, stabs–he looks for an audience. He mocks the horrified reaction, he questions your empathy. He’s hilarious. He’ll hack and gauge the reaction, he’ll piss on someone–a trick he likes because it violates a social contract in a particularly disrespectful way–and mock his urinal. I don’t laugh that much anymore, but I did laugh when he vivisected a man sleeping next to his wife and then made fun of the man’s wife for reacting poorly. It’s funny because it’s extreme, and a lot of how humour works involves transgression and surprise. But it’s also funny because it’s absurd–because an extravagant reaction to the excessive, gleeful butchering of your spouse as he lies next to you in the marital bed is respected in our culture, and decorum is not to be japed. I laughed, too, when a bunch of rotten kids, who lose all sense of self-control as “Santa” starts handing out presents, breaking free from their distracted parents to cluster around an open bag like piranha around a cow carcass, are suddenly evaporated. It’s like that scene in Blazing Saddles where all the idiots get dynamited to Heaven. It reminded me of the “Chuckles Bites the Dust” episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”, where Mary can’t stop laughing at the funeral of a clown who was dressed as a peanut and got trampled to death by a confused elephant.
I think it’s funny, too, because you realize as you’re watching it that you haven’t turned away and may in fact be, at that moment, surrounded by an audience full of people laughing like lunatics. Laughing a bit too hard and too long and checking on each other to make sure it’s still funny. And you, too, are laughing and checking. And Art gets it. Even though your stomach hurts, Art gets how you’re dead inside, and seeing him do the same stuff for fake you’ve been wallowing in for real is cathartic, because at least up there it’s a joke, and we still know the difference between a joke and a joke, don’t we? Don’t we? It’s important not to wonder who the straight man is to Terrifier 3′s humour, the perpetual punchline, and the picture’s funny so long as you don’t, because when the wife gets an axe to the head, her eyes keep blinking for a few seconds. That’s hilarious, don’t you get it? Make the noise an axe makes when you pull it out of a wet piece of wood you failed to chop all the way through. That was a person. Get it? How ’bout now? Remember when you used to care? When I read something like that in Stephen King’s Misery, I was 14 years old and threw the book across my room in squeamish revulsion. Remember feeling horror? How long ago was it, and what put out that fire in you?
Art has a sidekick, Victoria (Samantha Scaffidi), the Harley Quinn to Art’s Joker, who functions as his literal mother, possible lover, surrogate voice, sidekick, and occasional Greek Chorus. In the middle of the last film’s closing credits, Victoria birthed Art’s decapitated head in the mental institution where she’s been ensconced since having been run over by a car and getting her face eaten off by, well, Art. We see part of that delivery scene again in Terrifier 3, the head attached to a Cronenbergian umbilicus while the proud mother watches her “son” root about in the entrails of a felled orderly. Later, Victoria masturbates with a piece of broken glass as she watches her kid make good on his potential. The original concept was to have Art birthed fully formed from Victoria’s head, though it’s better this way. Had he come out of her head, we’d have to deal with the Athena creation story and wonder how Art fits into that archetype. Instead, Leone is drawing his own mythology using the most gruesome bits of the world’s most familiar archetypes. He’s an Edith Hamilton of Hell–a new Dante, in his way, dreaming the creation myths as nothing so obvious as good and evil, but as the mystery of empathy when evolution and biological imperative are inherently selfish.
Sienna (Lauren LaVera), a survivor from the second film, is given supernatural visions and a sword she hallucinated/received a holy vision about, with which she might slay dragons. She ends Terrifier 3 in a crown of thorns, her palms bisected with stigmata, having answered a Joseph Campbell-ian call to action. A Hellmouth has opened and closed over the course of the film–a literal one. Art has laid waste to every traditional institution, destroying the concept of love, impugning the act of spectatorship, trammelling the notion of catharsis. I felt a release of tension, a rush of relief, watching Terrifier 3, because here finally is an explanation for how we keep going in the face of all the extraordinary ugliness, all the unbearable loss and irreplaceable people and places, all the time that’s gone for good. We keep going because when we go long enough without seeing evidence that the world ever reverts to a moral mean, we lose our ability to care. “We are the hollow men/We are the stuffed men/Leaning together/Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!”
The odd thing about this film, though, this overlong, sloppy love note to making you laugh, is that, at the end of it all, it’s hopeful. Maybe that’s actually the most terrible thing about Terrifier 3. I mean, there was hope in Pandora’s Box, too. Despair is like William Carlos Williams’s red wheelbarrow: hope is what makes despair legible. Art has entered the popular consciousness, joining the horror pantheon after three features and some short films. Explanation for Art’s effectiveness, like that of his fellow icons in this small community, can be distilled to an atavistic pastiche in a Passion Play. He is an angel to some, a demon to others, yes? A seasoned artificer of nightmare-scapes, a deathless and inexorable avatar of the violent male sexual response. But he’s also Charlie Chaplin and Harpo Marx and Bugs Bunny, inducted into another pantheon of trickster gods and monsters, and what he really wants to do, in his voiceless way, is remind you of what you have lost and will never get back. I recently screened Richard Donner’s Superman to 100 or so college freshmen and sophomores. Most of them laughed at Supes saying, “We’re all part of the same team!” when a prison warden thanks him for bringing criminals to justice. We’ve lost something precious. I’m sick about it. I’m hollow. And I don’t want to hope anymore, but I can’t seem to stop. I think when people say we’re in Hell now, that’s what they mean.
