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Sometimes a horror icon is born right out of the box. Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson’s Ghostface had the zeitgeist by the throat pretty much from the moment Drew Barrymore picked up that phone. Other movie monsters, though, take a little time to catch on. While Craven’s own Freddy Krueger was pretty iconic in the ‘80s following A Nightmare on Elm Street, the Robert Englund baddie didn’t turn into a strange kind of folk hero in pop culture until he interrupted Zsa Zsa Gabor in the third Nightmare flick and said, “Who gives a f*ck what you think?!”
Well, Terrifier 3’s shockingly robust slicing and dicing at multiplexes this past weekend might go down as Art the Clown’s own Zsa Zsa moment, especially since he silenced another late night TV staple from the previous decade: Joaquin Phoenix’s perpetually sad clown in Joker: Folie à Deux.
Based on the estimates that came in yesterday, Terrifier 3 looks to unexpectedly over-perform this weekend by grossing a reported $18.3 million in three days—up an almost comical 90 percent over Terrifier 2’s best weekend in 2022, which saw $1.9 million in the weekend before Halloween. (Terrifier 2 was a platformed release, so it did not have a traditional opening for comparison.) That number also makes mincemeat out of Joker 2’s second weekend, which is staggering for different reasons.
Given Folie à Deux’s historically bad word-of-mouth last week for a movie that is superhero-adjacent, a steep drop always seemed likely. However, the film’s 81 percent fall week-on-week to a meager $7.05 million is unprecedented. For comparison, last year’s The Marvels dropped 78 percent (and yet seemed to generate a lot more hate-bait content on YouTube and TikTok…).
Not only did Joker 2 fall below an indie horror sold for its maximalist gore, but it also dropped to fourth place behind DreamWorks Animation’s terrific The Wild Robot and WB’s own Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, a sequel that came out a full month before Joker 2 and yet clearly left its target audience better satisfied. It’s been clear for a while audiences were prone to reject Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix’s second dance with the Clown Prince of Crime, especially since the film went out of its way to defy comic book fans’ expectations. Nonetheless, this degree of falloff is astonishing.
Conversely, there is much that needs to be said about Terrifier 3’s ascent. After all, in just one domestic weekend, the film earned more than Terrifier 2 grossed worldwide, which tapped out globally at $15.7 million. Only two years ago, Art the Clown was viewed as a niche figure intended for gorehounds who are perhaps eager to return to the visual excess of spilled viscera that many still associate with ‘80s slasher movies—and away from the so-called “elevated” era which has dominated the genre for the last 10 or so years.
Writer-director Damien Leone invented Art the Clown in 2013’s unrated All Hallows’ Eve, albeit the character didn’t really come into his own until David Howard Thornton began playing the killer in Terrifier (2016). That also unrated, direct-to-home media film was obviously not intended for a wide audience due to its preponderance of gratuitous violence and intentional gross-out spectacle. Hence why Terrifier 2 was still a niche proposition that originally opened on 10 screens two years ago ahead of a quick streaming release on Screambox.
Shockingly, however, Art’s become something we haven’t seen in decades: a new horror icon for the next generation. Despite Terrifier 3 still playing on a relatively limited amount of screens—little better than half of Joker 2’s 4100 screens—Terrifier 3 trumped Joker and a slew of more prestigious wide releases this weekend, including Sony’s SNL movie Saturday Night, Focus Features’ high-concept Pharrell quasi-doc/biopic made of LEGO, Piece by Piece, and the Briarcliff’s much-discussed but so far little watched portrait of Donald Trump’s seedy early years, The Apprentice.
This is a coup for Terrifier 3 distributor Cineverse, and yet the latest confirmation that younger audiences are eager for new characters (and new IP) to call their own. The blood-soaked feud between Art’s Devil and final girl Lauren LaVera’s angel (she literally wears an angel costume for half of Terrifier 2’s running time) has proved to be heavenly all around for a certain breed of horror fan. This is a reminder, then, that not all horror movies need to be reaching for annuanced metaphor, and that not all franchises need to rely on a brand name that’s going on half a century in age.
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