Terrifier and Terrifier 2 were two of the most original horror films of the last five years, albeit for quite different reasons. On the one hand, Terrifier managed to restore gore after the torture franchises of Saw and Hostel seemed to have utterly exhausted it, creating a latter-day grindhouse aesthetic that often looked like a home movie. Conversely, Terrifier 2 retained the ultra-violence of the original but couched it within a lush homage to the 80s slasher. Its project was to allow contemporary audiences to feel the double pull of those formative slashers – both the suspense, which has generally aged fairly well, and the violence, which has not, as viewers become more attuned to gruesome spectacles. One of the theses of Terrifier 2 was that loving 2010s recreations of slasher suspense missed the point that the genre, in its original incarnation, was as much about ultra-violence – it’s just that the exponential escalation of what we’re prepared to take has somehow neutralised that aspect.

Terrifier 3 isn’t a radical reinvention like Terrifier 2 – more of an intensification and serialisation. For what the two original films had in common was the minting of a bona fide new horror villain – Art the Clown – who tapped into the insane jouissance that made Michael Myers, Jason Vorhees and Freddy Krueger so addictive to watch. There was an arcane kernel to these slasher figures, not simply because of their violence, but because they embodied the audience’s own voyeurism in playful and reflexive ways. They encapsulated everything amoral and potentially pathological about cinema – everything scopophilic in a word – so it makes sense that their kind of charisma has waned as Hollywood becomes more risk managed. In the remakes of Friday the 13^th and A Nightmare on Elm Street, slashers are hauntological more than genuinely playful figures, reminders the lost futures of horror their franchises once envisaged. They are exercises in mourning and melancholia, not provocation.

Art the Clown marks a return to that amoral charisma of old – and Terrifier 3 acknowledges that he has become serial potential by staring exactly where the second film left off, in sharp contrast to the aesthetic gulf that seems to separate the first two films, despite their narrative continuities. In fact, Art himself has become a cult figure within the diegetic world of the film, which is chock full of the persona proliferations that often mark a character’s graduation into a media image. Following the events of Terrifier 2, there’s a baroque mythological prologue where Art’s head regenerates (in other word, a “second” Art grows from his neck) while one of his greatest fans is the host of Craven Image, a true crime podcast. Most pointedly, just after Art regenerates, he encounters a young man dressed as him on a subway line. Not only does this young man fail to recognise the “real” Art but he congratulates him on the veracity of his costume: “Seriously, you killed it.” Leone is setting his team a challenge here, an incentive to an even more prosthetic ingenuity now that Art’s brand has become mainstream.

Interestingly, while Terrifier 3 has no shortage of gore, some of the more memorable prosthetic moments come in the comic interludes – and this is easily the funniest of the three releases. Art is like a slapstick character in an ultra-violent film, or rather transplants the sadistic anarchy that always subtends slapstick into an overt slasher register. He’s as close to Charlie Chaplin or Mr. Bean as to Freddy and Jason, performing sustained mime and physical comedy sequences between kills, or sometimes in the midst of them. Again, this captures the insane jouissance, that scopophilic impulse towards playfulness that has become considerably more muted in horror over the last two decades (just compare the ways that Ghostface and Jigsaw ask their prospective victims if they want to play a game). Speaking of Ghostface and Jigsaw, Art’s ludic power partly stems from the fact that he doesn’t have a voice, forcing all his jouissance into his body language and facial expressions. Like the first two films, Terrifier 3 exudes the potency of silent cinema, the unbearable power of images.

One of the newer ingredients this time around is an earnest normcore style that sits dissonantly against the horror elements. We see this distinction in the two houses that open the narrative. On the one hand, Art recuperates from his regeneration in a decrepit house that invokes the grindhouse vibe of the first film, rocking in a chair like a backwaters patriarch as the structure decays around him. On the other hand, the family who become his victim pool live in a planned community called “Sunny Valley” whose motto is “Welcome to Wellness.” Their family home is as full of kitschy art as Art’s homestead is bare: “It looks like a fairy tale exploded in here.” Art’s adoption of a Santa disguise completes the continuity between these two distinct visual registers, since his trademark sack has now graduated from the garbage bag of the first film, to the candy bag of the second film, to Santa’s sack of presents. No surprise the family first see Art at the mall, or that his first act of mass violence takes place at the mall;  he’s on the cusp of becoming a Middle America mall fixture himself.

These junctures between ultra-normality and ultra-violence are most vivid when it comes to Art’s encounters with children. In the final scene, for example, Art and his newfound sidekick, the sole survivor from the first film, become monstrous parents, handing out gory gifts to the main child characters while stringing decorative viscera around the Christmas tree and impaling their father’s head on top. Yet the strange normality of the film’s backdrops also make these children peculiarly competent in the face of ultra-horror too. In fact, competent isn’t quite the word – these children are resilient when confronted with extreme horror in precisely the same way as children in 80s horror films, which perhaps explains why the horror gradually lapses into fantasy and science fiction too. In the 80s, these three genres were fused, in children’s cinema, into a startlingly visceral vision of an impending prosthetic world, one riskiest to, but also most navigable, by children. Strange as it sounds, the sincerity and sentimentality that ensues may well be Terrifier 3’s most distinct advancement upon the previous two films, both couching and couched by its ultra-violence in really resonant ways.