Terrifier/Terrifier 2

And Methods Of Communication From Behind Bars

The legends were considerable. Even in prison, I was hearing about the active audience response to the “Terrifier” movies. In another reality, these expectations would have dogged my reading of the films. But as I got out of prison, I remembered just being psyched to finally see horror films. 

Let’s just put it out there, charitably. Horror is the one genre where you gotta dig for the good stuff. The mainstream horror movies are rarely superior to the films off the beaten path – I remember watching that “It” two-parter peter out maybe halfway through the second chapter. I also remember being able to sneak a peak at the DVD copy of “The Babadook” that was smuggled in to prison, a title that escaped scrutiny with the guards because it was unrated and they didn’t know what it was.

Basic cable and the DVD program also ensured we wouldn’t be getting any R-rated horror, and who among us really has the patience for PG-13 horror? PG-13 horror is like shaving with your eyes closed: you can maybe pull it off sometimes, but why try? Sure I would get excited when October would roll around and AMC would start mainlining old favorites (pulling from their Shudder vault), but the edits and commercials were a mood killer and geez, enough with “Sleepwalkers” already. You’re not gonna make “Sleepwalkers” happen.

Fortunately, the “Terrifier” movies offer that good stuff. Not that “elevated horror” subgenre which is all about trauma and, inexplicably, catnip to critics who otherwise ignore the genre overall. I’m talking gruesome, over-the-top death scenes, boogeymen with zero chill, and filmmaking that doesn’t mess around when it comes time to the hack-and-slash. Yes, you can have your “Hereditary”s but “Terrifier” is a purely primal scare – there’s a killer clown, and he’s not here to shuck and jive.

The first “Terrifier” doesn’t really have a plot as much as a set-up: two drunk girls are at a pizzeria when they attract the attention of a clown we can safely assume is homicidal. Because this isn’t a short (Art The Clown appears in the earlier anthology “All Hallow’s Eve”, actually), he doesn’t strike immediately (and he doesn’t quip, because the guy is mute). Instead, he proves his bonafides as the worst kind of horror villain – a troll. Early on, he is kicked out of the pizzeria for smearing his waste on the walls of the bathroom. Yes, he would be a good fit in prison.

There’s a lot of little filler bits like this strewn across the movie – it opens with a seemingly-unrelated vignette about a victim of Art The Clown who seems to have gone homicidal all on her own. This muddies the water in the best possible way. What does Art want? If he wanted to cause as much death and chaos as he wanted, he also doesn’t seem to be in a terrible rush about it. And it’s less like he has a modus operandi, and more that he likes to waste time. You’re going to be dismembered by Art, but he wants to guarantee your very last emotion will be one of annoyance.

“Terrifier” is a cheapie gorefest ending on a cliffhanger that’s really more of a cliffclimber if you’ve seen the film. But “Terrifier 2” is actually a sincere attempt to be a “real” movie. It’s not a surprise that Art is resurrected, in a manner that feels like a mockery of the overly-arbitrary ways horror slashers would return from the dead in the eighties. What is a surprise is that we’re allowed to see his hallucinations, in the form of a little girl who is like him – she just wants to play with corpses. We once knew Art as just a jerk. But maybe he is a father? He is clearly hallucinating his little lady clown friend. But it’s nice to know there’s someone Art doesn’t want to systematically torture and kill.

All the while, there’s a teenager out there who the movie is slowly grooming to be the Final Girl. And I do mean slowly, because this film is fifty six minutes longer than the last one. At the start, she’s having haunted dreams of this psycho clown (who, in her reveries, operated the fairly-unappetizing Clown Cafe), and the dreams are causing real life ripples suggesting a rather profound, but inarticulate bond between her and Art. This is never fully explained, of which I approve. If you were being chased by a borderline-supernatural killer clown, are you really going to understand why or how? Who exactly is going to stop and walk you through such an explanation? 

And so the movie marches along on these two tracks. We get to see Art rampaging through Halloween season, carving a path of death and destruction in his wake. And we get to see the girl, still grieving after the death of her father, and worried that, in her little brother, he’s got a budding Tommy Jarvis. The latter storyline about this girl’s coming of age is unexpectedly well-acted and observed, particularly in how she copes with the growing distance between herself and her friends. And Art, of course, remains a total jerk. Obviously, I did not see this in theaters. But if I did, surely I would have stood up after one gratuitously brutal murder and started yelling at Art inside the screen to just stop being a total jerk. Yes, I would have scolded the screen. Art is that kind of irritant. I respect this murderer. I do not like him.

I suppose here’s a good time to address coulrophobia, which supposedly burst from a period in 2016 when people were seeing clowns everywhere in public. Of course we didn’t hear about this on the inside. But shucks, it would have been helpful information! Sure, it ended up being tied to a couple of marketing campaigns, so it was not a big deal. But there’s a way you would have found this out if you were down: mail.

As I write this, I realize that this is a fluid situation. Many institutions are banning paper mail. The claim is that the officers in the mail room, who have to inspect every letter after opening it, were being exposed to narcotics that were found within the substance of the paper. Fentanyl was the big bad, and prison officials were concerned that letters were a method of getting the drug into the prisons. A story, now apocryphal, claims that officers had been exposed to fentanyl and were hospitalized with damage having been done to their hands. This story, of course untrue since this is not what fentanyl does, has since become the reasoning Washington has used to eliminate paper mail from the B.O.P. The reality, of course, is that they don’t want to pay the extra hours to have officers parse through letter after letter, when they can just quickly, lazily, xerox letters. Make no mistake, most criminal justice reform, even on the most minor level, is about cutting costs.

Beyond that, there are kiosks for computer use, though you can only access email and power your MP3 players with these devices. Supposedly you’ll get an email a couple hours after it was sent, as they need to be reviewed and examined – obviously if you say something that gets the attention of the feds in those emails, that will slow delivery. If your loved one wished to tell you about clown sightings, this would be your best bet.

And then there are, of course, phone calls. When I was in, $3.15 or so would get you a fifteen minute phone call with your loved one, and you had to wait 45 minutes in order to make a second phone call. The limit was 300 minutes per month, which is not a hard bar to reach. Securus is a company that has a monopoly on the email and phone systems, and they’re the ones jacking up prices on people – I understand the company has done even better now that they have video visits done through tablet use. There is not a lot of oversight in the actions of Securus.

During COVID, visits were eliminated. Understanding the cost many were paying for this limitation, the B.O.P. made phone calls free during lockdown, expanding our minutes to 500 per month. We were still on lockdown, officially, when I had gotten out. I understand many institutions have decided to maintain free phone calls (as the story was that the B.O.P. was losing $7 million per month from this decision). But even more have yielded to the whims of Securus, who aren’t in the business of doing anyone any financial favors. I didn’t experience any video visits via the tablet when I was in, but I understand this deeply inconvenient “privilege” has been a boon to Securus. Securus, the real boogeymen this Halloween season.

(FYI, “Terrifier 3” was released outside of the window of this substack, that being late 2014-early 2023. But us Terrifier fans (the Terrified?) have pretty predictable thoughts on that one. Have a Terrifier Christmas!)

Happy Halloween! SCARETOBERFEST concludes tomorrow!