The U.K. premiere of Damien Leone’s holiday slasher “Terrifier 3” was something straight out of a horror movie.
Eleven audience members walked out of the theater, nine during the opening scene, and one on-looker lost their lunch watching the latest escapades of series mascot Art the Clown, played by David Howard Thornton. While a screening like this would spell disaster for some, producer Phil Falcone celebrated the extreme reactions as testamate to the hard work of Leone and special effects lead Christien Tinsley.
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“It’s a slasher gore film with practical effects,” Falcone said. “So if you’re getting people to vomit and leave the theater, and they went there for horror, that’s a pretty good job, I’d say.”
Leone’s latest installment sees the bloodthirsty harlequin spreading Christmas cheer and fear to “Terrifier” scream queen Siena Shaw (Lauren LaVera) and the rest of the Miles County residents. Produced for $2 million ($1.7 million more than the first two films combined) “Terrifier 3” serves up the franchise’s most vicious and complex kills.
But before the blood can spill, Thornton needs an hour and a half in the makeup chair to transform into the killer clown. A makeup artist first preps his skin and then glues on a rubber face mask, which sets the base for Art’s grotesque features. Then two sets of eyebrow tattoos are added before the black eye and lip makeup are applied.
Tinsley emphasized the most difficult part of Art’s makeup was “dealing with black and white and everything,” adding that “every mistake will show if it’s not done correctly.”
As for his prosthetic teeth, Thornton wore the same pair for almost a decade before Tinsley made him fresh ones for “Terrifier 3.” “David, God bless him, has been wearing the same set of teeth for eight years. Every time they broke or cracked, they just fixed them. I said, ‘Well, let me make you some new teeth.’”
“Terrifier 3’s” opening scene shows Art making quick work of a young family dressed as old Saint Nick. In the scene’s climax, Art lops the mother’s arm off with an axe before delivering a final blow to her head. Unlike other horrors, Leone, who serves as editor and director, refuses to cut away at the point of impact, giving the audience a complete (and scarily realistic) view of the carnage.
Tinsley explained that Leone shot a fake body in profile and had Thornton swing down just before impact. He then cut and shifted the camera to a three-quarters shot and swapped the fake body with the actress wearing an arm prosthetic. Leone then captured Thornton slicing through the fake arm with the axe, and when it’s edited together, “It looks like they just saw an axe come through in one swipe and cut off an arm when actually you’re looking at it from two entirely different angles,” Tinsley said. “Our brains tie this all together and make it feel like one.”
Another standout set piece is the bar sequence, where Art ties an off-duty mall Santa (Daniel Roebuck) to a chair and freezes his limbs with liquid nitrogen before smashing them to bits. Tinsley said Leone was very particular about how he wanted the effect to look. The 42-year-old director did not “want the limbs to shatter like glass,” but instead act like a block of ice, where “parts turn into dust, but still stays solid.”
“He took it one step further, and he goes, ‘But the inside shouldn’t be frozen, because the freezing only goes so far, and the core of any living thing is still going to be warm and fresh,’” Tinsley recalled. “So not only were we building a concept of how to create something that can break, not shatter or crumble, but also still ooze goo from the center.”
With the help of special effects artist Mark Killingsworth (“Watchmen”) Tinsley was able to “reverse engineer the casting and molding process” through layering bloody inner fillings with brittle outer shells. Together they created multiple head, arm and leg elements that could be puzzled on Roebuck’s body, smashed and replaced for multiple takes.
One of the final scenes shot, and the most gruesome, was the bathroom sequence, where Art takes a chainsaw to two unsuspecting college students having an intimate moment in a communal shower. Tinsley recalled long discussions with Leone about how the scene should play out. “My whole conversation with Damien was, we have two naked individuals in an open room and a chainsaw, and it’s in a ‘Terrifier’ movie. We have to see contact,” he said. “We have to see a lot of body and flesh and skin. This was going to be really, really difficult.”
A trove of elements and prosthetics were required to pull off this impossibly complicated kill: Head elements, arm elements, chest prosthetics, fake fingers, a leg that could be ripped off, a leg that could be snapped off and two full fake bodies, one of which that could be cut completely in half. If that wasn’t difficult enough, each piece “had to do multiple things,” Tinsley explained. “We had all kinds of tubes and blood bags. We had blood coming from every direction, blood hooked up to the chainsaw, blood tubes inside the body and blood bags that were pressurized so when the chainsaw hit them, they exploded.”
Of everything he achieved in the two-hour run time of “Terrifier 3,” the shower scene was Tinsley’s favorite. Deeming it as pure “‘Terrifier’ fun,’” he hopes when the future generation of horror fans look back on their all-time favorite kills, his chainsaw magnum opus will be part of the conversation.
“I think it will have a lot of impact on the audience, which is what you’re going for in a movie like this,” Tinsley said. “When people are sitting around saying, ‘Oh yeah, the kill in this movie, or the kill in that movie,’ you hope somebody goes, ‘Oh yeah, but the shower sequence in ‘Terrifier 3.” That’s what you do this movie for, so people will remember.”
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