Terrifier 2

Terrifier 2 is the most extreme film in our index, it is a hundred and thirty-eight minutes long, and the strangest thing about it is that it is also a sincere film about a bereaved family.

Leone made the first Terrifier as a nasty, efficient, eighty-minute exercise. This one is something else: a self-funded sequel, partly crowdfunded, that opens out into mythology, gives its final girl a dead father, a costume he designed, a sword, and a prophetic dream life, and runs longer than The Shining. It should not work. Half of it does, and the half that works is Lauren LaVera's Sienna Shaw, who is a genuinely good lead — physical, grieving, angry, and allowed to be competent.

David Howard Thornton's Art is the other reason. Art does not speak, and Thornton plays him as a silent-film comedian: the mugging, the little dances, the delight, the pratfalls. He is funny. That is what makes him unbearable, because the film cuts from a clown doing a bit to several uninterrupted minutes of mutilation without changing its tone.

The bedroom scene

It has to be addressed directly, because it is the reason the film is notorious. Roughly halfway through, Art kills a teenage girl called Allie in her bedroom, and the sequence runs for several minutes of sustained, inventive, close-up mutilation of a living person. There were widely reported walkouts, faintings and vomitings at screenings. It is the single most explicit sequence in anything we have scored, it is practical rather than digital, and it is not staged as suspense — it is staged as endurance. Whether it is defensible is a real argument, and the honest position is that it is the film showing you precisely what it is and daring you to stay.

Where it is genuinely bad

The runtime is indefensible. There is a forty-minute stretch in the middle — the Clown Cafe dream sequence, the costume shop, the carnival — that would improve enormously with an hour cut out of the film around it. Several performances outside the leads are amateur. The mythology arrives in dumps and contradicts itself. And the film's sincerity about Sienna sits very awkwardly against its enthusiasm for Allie's death.

For the same practical-gore maximalism with a sense of humour, Evil Dead and Re-Animator; for the same sustained cruelty with a philosophy attached, Martyrs and Audition; for the slasher this is descended from, Halloween.

The short answer: Art, aided by the Little Pale Girl, kills Sienna's mother Barbara and takes her brother Jonathan. Sienna, badly injured, puts on the winged warrior costume her late father designed for her and goes after them, and the film's supernatural logic finally declares itself: the sword from the costume is a real weapon and it heals her. In the confrontation she decapitates Art. She then dies of her injuries — and is revived, in the film's most openly mythological beat, by the crown from her father's drawings, returning as the figure he had been sketching all along. Jonathan survives. The Little Pale Girl takes Art's severed head away and keeps it, and the closing scene is that head, alive, in a jar — which is where the third film starts.

What is Art the Clown?

The first film left him as a silent killer who is somehow not dead. This one commits: Art is resurrected by the Little Pale Girl in the opening sequence, he cannot be permanently killed by ordinary means, and he is attended by an entity that is clearly not a child. The film declines to give him an origin, a motive or a word of dialogue, and his supernatural status is demonstrated rather than explained. What he is is a thing that enjoys this.

Who is the Little Pale Girl?

A silent girl in clown makeup who accompanies Art, is visible only to him and to Sienna, resurrects him in the first scene, and keeps his head at the end. The film offers no explanation of what she is or what the relationship is. The most defensible reading is that she is the thing operating Art rather than a victim of his, and she is considerably more frightening than he is.

What is Sienna's sword and costume?

Her father, who died of a brain tumour, spent his last months drawing a winged warrior in Sienna's likeness and sketching the costume in a notebook, and Sienna made it for Halloween. The film reveals that the drawings were not a hobby: the sword is a real weapon that works on Art, it heals the wounds of whoever holds it, and the crown in the sketches brings Sienna back from death. Her father was seeing something.

Does Sienna die at the end of Terrifier 2?

Yes, and then no. She is mortally wounded in the final fight, decapitates Art, and dies — and is restored by the crown from her father's designs, which the film stages as a resurrection into the figure he had been drawing. She is alive in the final scene and alive in the sequel.

Why is the bedroom scene in Terrifier 2 so notorious?

Because it is several uninterrupted minutes of a living teenager being mutilated in close-up with practical effects, with no cutaway and no suspense structure, and because it arrives after a sequence in which Art is being funny. Reports of audience members leaving, fainting and being sick at screenings were widespread and were used in the marketing. It is the most explicit sequence in our whole index and the film's reputation rests on it.

Do I need to watch the first Terrifier?

It helps but is not required. Terrifier 2 re-establishes Art, brings back Victoria Heyes from the first film's ending, and otherwise starts clean with a new family. The first film is eighty minutes and much simpler; the mythology that matters all begins here. There is also a short, The 9th Circle, where Art first appeared.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

Viscera 098 is the ceiling of our scale — 104 of 105 works score lower. Prolonged mutilation of living people in close-up, practical throughout, with the bedroom sequence running several minutes without a cut away.

The threat at 088 leans hard towards the human — 93 works score lower, which is a judgement call: Art is supernatural in his persistence and entirely physical in his method. He is a man with tools.

Era bias 084 reads modern — 81 works score lower. Digital capture on a micro-budget, a contemporary grade, and a crowdfunded production model that could not have existed before it.

Pace 070 is fast — 91 works are slower, though the film's length means there is a very slack hour inside it.

Tone 044 is close to the midpoint — 93 works score lower, which is high for this content: Art is comic, the film is frequently enjoying itself, and the protagonist wins.

Reality anchor 032 is grounded — 19 works score lower. One town, one night, ordinary geography, and a dream sequence that is clearly marked.

On jump scares: few. The film does not need them and knows it.