Now for a look at the last of the Terrifier films, at least such as there are at the moment. This one ditches the Halloween backdrop to go for a Christmas theme. The main hope going into this is that I had heard that we get a bit more information on what Art’s actual deal is. I don’t need my horror villains to have their backstory reasons for their unkillable nature to be particularly compelling but it is nice to have some idea of what the hell is going on.

Our story picks up at Christmas time five years after the events of the second movie with Sienna just getting out of a psychiatric facility and going to live with her Aunt and Uncle and their daughter Gabbie. Jonathan is off at college and seemingly dealing with the trauma of facing Art the Clown a bit better than his sister, who is having hallucinations of her dead friends and can’t get that catchy Clown Cafe jingle out of her head. Art was reborn at the end of the previous film and has been waiting around for five years for some reason with Victoria, the final girl of the first movie who is now his demonic sidekick. Now that Sienna is up and about, it’s time for Art to go on another killing spree but this time with a healthy dose of holiday cheer.

This one begins right out the gate letting you know that it’s going to be trying to push the envelope in brand new ways. How does a franchise that is historically already graphically violent and gruesomely bloody do that? This time Art gets to murder actual children. So, you know, big warning for anyone that has that as a hard limit in horror but is otherwise fine with gory stuff. Now that I’ve gotten through all of these, I want to call out one of the best gags that has been in all three movies. Art is fully willing to just use a gun. So often with slashers and especially in the torture porn type killer movies, you will only ever see melee weapons and so his pulling a gun out of a bag and shooting a guy is honestly one of the best bits that happens in these movies. I hadn’t mentioned it yet so I had to call it out.

As far as getting more backstory, we do kind of get some sort of vague notion of what might be going on with Art. Assuming that Jonathan’s demonology lore is accurate, Art was probably just a regular human serial killer in Terrifier and then when he died, he became a host for a demon. The little clown girl in Terrifier 2 was the manifestation of that demon which then went on to use Victoria as a host but still had the body of Art walking around for some reason? And when a demon comes to Earth, heaven chooses a mortal to be a champion to stop them and that’s Sienna and her dad was a prophet of this somehow. Sure, why not. Honestly, getting any lore at all, even confusing lore that kind of sucks, still made me enjoy this somewhat more. Other than that, the movie is mostly more of the same but now it has the notoriety and budget to get some horror cameos like Tom Savini and Clint Howard.

So far the movies continue to increase in quality over time. It’s sincerely great to see Leone get better at making movies since you can tell he loves them so much.

Score: 3 out of 5