Now we know America still loves clowns, just not the one portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix .. Art the clown took center stage at the box office this weekend and trounced Joker 2.
And with the news of this small budget box office bonanza, something bigger seems to be happening.. something cultural seems to have shifted.
The Terrifier movie franchise centers on Art the Clown, a silent but sadistic killer who brutally murders his victims in increasingly horrific ways.
The first film, Terrifier follows Art as he torments two women on Halloween night, marking his debut as one of modern horror’s most terrifying villains. Terrifier 2 expanded on the lore, exploring more of Art’s supernatural abilities while maintaining the intense gore that became the series’ hallmark.
Both films are known for their graphic violence, practical effects, and unrelenting brutality, drawing comparisons to classic slasher films while pushing the envelope in terms of shock value.
The franchise was created by writer and director Damien Leone, who is also known for his work in makeup and special effects. Leone first introduced Art the Clown in a short film titled The 9th Circle eay back in 2008 and later included him in the anthology film All Hallows’ Eve in 2013.
As a filmmaker with a deep passion for practical effects, Leone’s work on Terrifier showcases his skills in creating disturbing, realistic gore, which has become a defining feature of the series.
Leone has expressed that he draws inspiration from horror classics like Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street while wanting to push horror into new, more extreme territory.
Terrifier 3 seemingly took the gore aspect to a much higher level. Just search up the rat scene or chainsaw scene. Choose if you wanted to watch it, but at least read about it. Chances are many of you already saw it at the either’s anyway.
Joker 2 dropped 82% at the box office Terrifier 3 for being a movie that costs little to nothing to make. It scored almost $20 million.
Timing is key.
Perhaps the fact the movie came out October. The weather’s colder and those Halloween decorations are abundant. Or perhaps just maybe something else is going on. It seems to be that there’s a craving out there for gore. Suddenly, it seems that society itself relishes in the macabre. And the dastardly.
It feels a lot like when the Saw movie franchise started back in the early 2000s. Then, society was overrun with torture and war footage on television. Reality was grosser than fiction, so fiction had to try to outdo it, and it tapped into a pop culture moment in which we as a people shifted into the acceptance of gore due to the acceptance of torture and a war stands in response to terrorism.
Art the clown then signifies something.. maybe Terrifier 3 is just a blip on the horror radar, or perhaps this movie coming out right before a really painfully divisive election showcases how painfully divided we all are ..
Art the clown is the instigator .. he’s the killer with no conscience, murdering children at a Christmas decorated mall without mercy. The darkest of crime and inhumanity.
Is it possible that Art the clown, while maybe not signifying how we all feel WE ACT, certainly signifies how society itself feels.. no remorse, no mercy and just relentless over the top violence to the point of absurdity.
Or maybe not.
Terrifier, 3 again could just be that blip .. the moment when moviegoers just said no to the supernatural scares, and they would rather have a blood-soaked and vomit laden theater to slip and fall in..
Time will tell, but either way Terrifier 3 has certainly made bloody waves.
No, really.. We’ve been seeing this for quite some time now. Terrifier 3 is coming out in theaters, and with the run up to the film, a lot of reviews have been talking about how revolting the movie is they’ve been talking about the amount of gore and for native bonus.
Now, websites and Facebook pages are discussing actively. How many people vomit during the film?
It’s really difficult to prove a negative, so it’s tough to say unless we’re there, whether people really have walked out in disgust, it’s also very difficult to say what the puke count is unless we’re literally in the audience watching people regurgitate while the movie’s playing.
But it certainly brilliant marketing.
A lot of movies have done this before Netflix films with headlines of people saying it’s the scariest film they’ve ever seen or other headlines saying people were so disturbed.
They walked out of theaters. Now, we’re able to find out that people are actively vomiting during the film, perhaps from a flu, the stomach virus, or from the blood and gore in the terrifier..
Tough to say, I guess unless you vomit from the film, you may never know.
You can’t make it up.. bit all joking aside is this a wee bit too..strange.. for confort?
The indie horror film “Late Night With the Devil” opened this weekend across 1,034 venues where it made $2.8 million and ended up in sixth place.
However our eyebrows are rising now that final numbers are being analyzed .. it has been revealed that the film’s estimated Palm Sunday one-day haul is coming in at $666,666 according to trade paper Variety..
No joke..
From Variety:
On the independent scene, “Late Night With the Devil” took sixth place and summoned $2.8 million from 1,034 venues, including (and you can’t make this up) $666,666 on Sunday. This marks the biggest opening weekend for its distributor IFC Films, overtaking 2022’s “Watcher” with $826,775. The low-budget thriller stars David Dastmalchian as a late-night talk show host who keeps the cameras rolling during a live Satanic incident.
“This weekend’s release of ‘Late Night With the Devil’ set fire to our old opening record,” says Scott Shooman, head of AMC Networks Films, which encompasses IFC. “[It] continues to showcase that there is still potential for highly reviewed, intelligent auteur films in movie theaters across all genres.”
666 for the devil on one of the holiest days of the year.
Slurping eggnog spiked with rum and eating until you’re unable to move? That’s the American pasttime around the holiday season–and then the New Years guilt and resolutions to lose your new found weight is an annual tradition.
Kira Cochrane of the UK GUARDIAN wrote this to describe humanity’s long love of telling ghost stories around this time of year:
Christmas has long been associated with ghosts, says Roger Clarke, author of A Natural History of Ghosts: 500 Years of Hunting for Proof. Just before Christmas 1642, for instance, shepherds were said to have seen ghostly civil war soldiers battling in the skies. This connection continued in the Victorian era through Dickens’s story, and through the ghost stories he later published at Christmas in his periodical All the Year Round, with contributors including Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell. It would also continue in the tradition started by MR James, the provost of King’s College, Cambridge, who would invite a select few students and friends to his rooms each year on Christmas Eve, where he’d read one of the ghost stories he had written, which are still popular today. They include Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book (1895), in which an ancient holy book brings forth a demonic presence, first announced by a hand covered in “coarse black hairs, longer than ever grew on a human hand; nails rising from the ends of the fingers and curving sharply down and forward, grey, horny and wrinkled”.The popularity of ghost stories was strongly related to economic changes. The industrial revolution had led people to migrate from rural villages into towns and cities, and created a new middle class. They moved into houses that often had servants, says Clarke, many taken on around October or November, when the nights were drawing in early – and new staff found themselves “in a completely foreign house, seeing things everywhere, jumping at every creak”. Robbins says servants were “expected to be seen and not heard – actually, probably not even seen, to be honest. If you go to a stately home like Harewood House, you see the concealed doorways and servant’s corridors. You would actually have people popping in and out without you really knowing they were there, which could be quite a freaky experience. You’ve got these ghostly figures who actually inhabit the house.”
We have lost so much with the disappearance of this tradition! I call for a renaissance!
Telling ghost stories around this time of year appears to be a lost tradition. These days, we trample each other at malls and break glass doors for expensive Air Jordans that we cannot afford. But that aside, it would be sacrilegious in modern times to tell such haunting tales around the Christmas dinner table.. 50% of us celebrate the birth of Christ (though it probably would not have even happened this time of year) and the other 50% celebrate the modern rituals of present buying and giving. Ghost stories aren’t found within that celebration.. No time for the paranormal with those numbers.
We did borrow the Christmas tree and SO MUCH MORE from the pagans.. but for some reason, we ended the tales of horror in our newer centuries..
There are books and websites describing jut how popular ghostly tales were this time of year..
But that was then.
MAY ALL YOUR GIFTS COME ALIVE ON CHRISTMAS MORNING!
Now it’s all about fun, joy, peace, and harmony. Little thrown in of scary or weird….paranormal or other-worldly. And it seems we miss out on so much with the absence of the paranormal..
While I do not contend my theories or ‘feelings’ are ever correct or a representation of anything but bizarre mental manifestations, I have long felt that two times of year were always filled with mystery: One being Halloween, and the other being Christmas. I recall nights when I was a child, especially Christmas Eve night, where I felt something mysterious in the air..something strange around me. Something like a presence–not necessarily a negative entity, but just another ‘element’ that I could not understand with my five senses. Did the pagans and others get it right.. does the veil thing? Those old ghost stories are not without purpose, they were just a way for people to express their fears of the darkness without shining light. You could argue that such ghost stories in the Victorian Age being popular was because they simply lived in scary times–gas lamps that lit the way for some with prestige and money, but darkness at night for the rest of the troubled lot.
Joy and love and peace could not be found on radio stations, and often so many younger children died from pestilence and disease, Santa Claus was not as busy as he is now.
But I still say there is something else to the story. I think there is a deeper and more profound reason that so many tall tales were expressed this time of year in centuries past. And maybe it’s because we, as humans, have a connection to a sixth sense.. maybe we have a deep affinity for the unexplained because we as humans are a PART of that unexplained. Why are we here? Ghost tales make sense of our existence in some way, because it gives credence to an afterlife. Yes, maybe spirits get trapped here, but at least we ‘go somewhere.’
Though we have an absence of the fireside chats during Victorian times, there are a few paranormal tales that withstood the test of time.
Charles Dickens’ classic A CHRISTMAS CAROL is one of them, with a series of ghosts coming back to haunt a living man to scare him into being nice.. Some of the past film adaptations of CHRISTMAS CAROL were downright scary, and even the black and white versions of the story haunted me as a child, such as SCROOGE from 1935.
Some other stories from my lifetime that still keep the ‘creepy’ in Christmas: The GREMLINS was able to successfully utilize horror and holiday music, grounding up gremlins while DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR played .. that scene shaped my childhood dreams.. There were also some other badly made seasonal horror flicks, like SILENT NIGHT DEADLY NIGHT, and CHRISTMAS EVIL.
Even IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE has a paranormal theme. An angel coming to save a suicidal man before he ends it all..
Even the GRINCH THAT STOLE CHRISTMAS was scary.. and the idea that an ever-knowing Santa watches children when they sleep doesn’t really give me a deep down calm feeling either.
And who could forget, we still do have Krampus at Christmas..
And finally, there could be something else scary about this time of year. Besides the ‘veil thinning’ and the pagan acknowledgement of death during winter, it’s just a scary time altogether! .. New years is coming–one calender year over, of course calenders are man made but that doesn’t make them any less foreboding. Aging is scary.. not knowing what the next year will bring is also scary. We become victims to our paranoia and fear…and maybe that is why the Victorian Age was filled with so much of it..
There is, after all, lots to be actually scared of. Yes, then it was sickness and darkness, but what really has changed? The news media informs us almost daily that a big accident may soon happen to our entire grid, leaving parts of the United States dark for ‘years.’ We are equally warned about diseases that are not being killed off anymore by antibiotics. While we don’t dress with Victorian attire, we can attest that our fears are often the same as they were during our past. That’s the common bond in the human race. We surely don’t all get happy about the same things but that’s not true about fear. Deep down, we all fear the same things.. and ghosts represent the mystery and high strangeness that humans cannot explain.
So I say we bring back ghost stories! Let’s get the fire warm, open some gifts..drink up some spirits, and tell some tales about weird creatures and sounds bumping in the night.
Keep the Christ in Christmas. And keep the creepy, too.
If not, Santa may not stop by this year, but instead give us the ghost of CHRISTMAS FUTURE–and if you recall that was the scariest spirit of them all..
Miramax’s Head of Global TV Marc Helwig will be overseeing the franchise creatively in close collaboration with producer and CEO of Trancas Malek Akkad, who has worked on Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers,Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later, Halloween: Resurrection, Halloween (2007) and Halloween II (2009).
According to Deadline, “The new Halloween series is envisioned to potentially launch a cinematic universe spanning film and television. Miramax’s Head of Global TV Marc Helwig will be overseeing the franchise creatively in close collaboration with Akkad”as well as reminding that “Jointly controlling both the film and TV rights would allow Miramax and Trancas to map out an integrated film-TV universe.”
It will hit theaters on Sunday, October 1 at 4pm and 7pm local time, and Wednesday, October 4 at 7pm local time.
The limited engagement puts the spotlight on William Friedkin’sExtended Director’s Cut, sourced from the Original 1973 Cut Camera Negative with newly restored and remastered picture and sound in stunning 4k—removing dirt, scratches, and other defects, while maintaining the film’s original creative integrity…
The rumors of a 3 hour FNAF movie are not true.. more like an hour and 50 minutes of fun.
Despite people’s objections the concept was perfect for a film adaptation and we hope it’s as fun as the original game was years ago when it was released..
There has been a lot of pre-release hostility for this movie, even before people see it. Will it be OSCAR worthy or even CHAINSAW AWARD worthy? No! But it does not have to be. If it provides jump scares, tacky humor, a few creepy parts, and something that could be teenage friendly, that is all we need.
The game was a phenom.. the movie won’t be.. But if it captures the right audience, a lot of 12-14 year old kids who played the game as a child will flock to theaters. Of course they need to go with an adult as it is rated R..
A friend of mine reminded me tonight about this great movie from the 1980s.. he said he was catching a viewing of it this Friday night. FRIGHT NIGHT was a special kind of horror–and his message reminded me of the spectacular VHS cover that always caught my eye in my local video store back in the day..
Were these times simpler as we all think they were? Or were we just blinded..
Those who read this post and say “the old man is talking about VHS movies again” just will not comprehend the time.. the idea of not scrolling through on a screen but checking to see if the little yellow card was still rubber banded to the back of the movie in the store…
Sure, modern times are great. Easy.. Any movie you want at your fingertips.
But that quest.. that hunt.. that time when a movie was not there.. when you had to wait until it was returned.. they were kind of.. simpler?
BLOODY DISGUSTING first reported this news today followed by the Hollywood Reporter..
Spyglass “has tapped Christopher Landon, a scary movie stalwart whose credits include the Happy Death Day movies as well as body-switching horror-comedy Freaky, to direct the seventh installment of the long-running franchise.” Scream and Scream VI directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (Radio Silence) will remain on board as executive producers, as will Chad Villella.
At this point it is assumed but there is no official word yet on who will be writing Scream 7, but THR reports that Melissa Barrera and Mason Gooding are expected to return.
Of course this is all this contingent on Hollywood actually coming back soon from a writers strike..
Epically bad numbers for the horror flick LAST VOYAGE OF DEMETER but Barbenheimer continues it’s odd summer rampage on the box office.
While did the movie do so bad? Some have opinions.. we think people are bored with vampires, the marketing was bad, and this is not the magic week of summer for horror. Closer to September always works better..
But from Deadline, they say this:
Unfortunately, the tanking of Amblin/Universal’s $45M-costing The Last Voyage of the Demeter stands out like a wart, since we haven’t had many misfires this summer. Granted, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One‘s profitability might be in question next to their exorbitant Covid costs. But these pics have put up tentpole grosses in the nine digits, and have been mass draws (just not as massive as they were hoped to be). Note the filmmakers aimed to keep this period horror pic as cheap as they could: Exteriors were shot in Malta, while interior were shot in Germany, both those countries respectively having tax credits of 50% and 30%.
— Read on deadline.com/2023/08/box-office-barbie-last-voyage-of-the-demeter-1235460243/
