Stephen King once said that there are three levels of horror: “The Gross-Out,” “Horror,” and “Terror.” Another, perhaps more accessible way to frame these would be to describe them as body horror, traditional horror, and existential horror. However, all of these types of horror rely upon a common theme, one articulated best by the person who I believe crafts the best horror prose in the history of English literature: Thomas Ligotti.
Ligotti, like many theoreticians and academicians of horror, notes that the specific violation horror relies on is the revealed existence of that which, by its intrinsic or acquired nature, should and must not be. This is most frequently accomplished by inventing or emphasizing a paradox. Our orderly minds, which believe that we inhabit an orderly world, flee from paradox and contradiction, whether that contradiction is a living corpse, a self-propelled puppet, or the invasion of a creature from another realm inimical to our own.
The Tragicomedy of Stephen King
Stephen King, in
marked contrast to Ligotti, never tires of offering opinions on horror (and
politics, and culture, and television, and…). As with anything produced en
masse, his opinions are occasionally defective. One of the tropes Stephen King
is most famous for advancing – one might even say originating or significantly
reinventing – is the scary clown.
It is therefore odd that one of the things King is most consistently wrong
about is scary clowns. Now, King isn’t wrong about scary clowns in a literary
sense. Pennywise, the titular monster of his 1986 bestseller It, is
without a doubt the archetypical evil clown, and remains one of the greatest
horror villains of all time. What King is wrong about, specifically, is the cinema
of scary clowns.
I’ll cite two examples. The first are the television and
film adaptations of It. King – and legions of his fans – went bonkers
for Bill Skarsgård’s Pennywise, and
not without reason. Skarsgård did one hell of a job being manic and creepy. The
problem lay in Pennywise’s character design in It: Chapter One and Chapter
Two versus the character design in the 1990 miniseries
adaptation, in which Pennywise was played to brilliant, unequaled perfection by Tim
Curry. King has been as effusive in his praise of the new It movies as
he was in his
condemnation of Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant adaptation of The Shining,
and that strikes me as odd. Bear with me.
King criticized Kubrick for directing Jack Nicholson to play
Jack Torrance as more or less unbalanced from the get-go (Kubrick focused on
the oppressive and disturbing atmosphere
of the Overlook Hotel), and insisted that it was Torrance’s slide from sanity
to madness that presented the story’s true horror. In other words, King didn’t
simply want to display that-which-should-not-be, but to juxtapose normality or that which is normally
acceptable with that-which-should-not-be. While I love Kubrick’s film, I think
it’s a fair point.
This is why Pennywise’s character
design in It: Chapters One and Chapter Two is, in my opinion,
not great. From moment one, Pennywise looks like a murderous thing from under a
bridge (which, in fairness, he is). This presents a problem. In King’s text, the
entire reason that the titular galactic horror sometimes dons the persona of
Pennywise the Dancing Clown is to disarm children and lure them to their doom. Tim Curry plays this up brilliantly. His
costume would not look out of place at an old-timey circus or on a 1950s television show. Curry’s
Pennywise cracks jokes. He mugs exactly the way a clown does. Then,
turning on a dime, he's a terrifyingly toothy, monstrous entity wearing the
same skin. It’s the contrast that makes the scary clown scary. Clowns, while
always figures of mixed motives and often destructive designs, have not always
been the Halloween
horror masks they have become.
This brings me to Stephen King’s second, less forgivable,
and more recent sin: heaping praise on Damien Leone for Terrifier 2, about which King tweeted:
“TERRIFIER
2: Grossin’ you out old school.” Now, that might not sound like high
praise, but remember the tripartite horror categorization that King elaborated
and I quoted in the opening paragraph of this post. Coming from King, “old school
gross out” is, indeed, praise worthy of going on the movie poster (according to Leone). In my
most forgiving appraisal, this is just an attempt by an aging master of the
horror genre to stay relevant and (again, in my forgiving fantasy) he definitely
hasn’t seen Leone’s other, somewhat less excusable work. That’s my exculpatory
fantasy, because the Terrifier franchise’s Art the Clown is, put
simply, a bad, lazy character in an inexplicably successful, bad, and lazy string
of literally and figuratively shitty movies.
Art the Clown Fucking Sucks
In case I haven’t made my feelings clear (and
I have, in
detail), Art the Clown fucking sucks. Terrifier 2 fucking sucked. All
Hallows Eve fucking sucked, and Terrifier fucking sucked,
too. In fact, the first Terrifier more than fucking sucked: I consider it
little better than a slightly higher-budget version of the simulated snuff
films that now-defunct, Tampa-based Internet porn company Electric Chair Productions
used to crank out in the 90s and 00s for would-be serial rapists or murderers
to masturbate to (true story; Pepperidge Farm remembers the
unarchived portions of the “wild west” Internet, and so do I).
Terrifier is in the rare category of material that I
consider legitimately antisocial. This is a category which, in my taxonomy, is limited
to “art” like albums from white pride outfits or pornography that simulates
rape, abuse, and incest. Some of that shit is illegal, and some of it is just
hard to find anywhere but the dark web. Art the fucking Clown, on the other
hand, is a runaway success. So much so that, of late, I hear the following question:
“Hey Charles! You like scary clowns, right? Why does Art bug you so much?”
First of all, a minor correction: I like clowns, period. The
non-scary ones make me laugh,
the violent anarchistic kind fill my
heart with a song of purest joy, and the scary ones ain’t bad, either (especially in the
hands of aforementioned horror auteur Thomas Ligotti in his “The
Last Feast of Harlequin”). With that cleared up, allow me to present a list
of my major complaints with the oeuvre of Damien Leone.
One Sorta-Scary Image Does Not a Franchise Make
Who is Art? What drives his murderous lifestyle? Is he alive? If not, is he some
sort of demon? A science experiment run amuck? Is he a serial killer in the
sense of Michael Myers (quasi-mortal), or Jason Voorhees (immortal)? Some of
these questions were answered (clumsily) in Terrifier 2, but dig this:
from Art’s first appearance in a short film in 2008 up until Terrifier 2
– fourteen fucking years – Leone had no cogent answer to any of those
questions, nor did he seem particularly interested in pursuing them.
Some stories can be told in media res (indeed, should be),
and some horror doesn’t need a plot. But there is just no meat on the
unappetizing bone that is Art. Is he mysterious? Sort of, I guess. He kills, he
laughs, he loves. No, actually, he just kills and sort of mimes laughter, and…
that’s it. King’s Pennywise had a very simple motive (it eats fear and likes
the fear of children best), and that fueled an epic, intense, and intensely
well-written book that
weighed as much as a prize cheese. All Leone has is an image of a monster;
not even a steady collaborator (Art has been played by at least two actors so far).
There’s no “why,” and no particular variation in setting or scenario. We’re
always trapped in a dank, crumbling location, usually (literally) painted in
Art’s shit, and Art has some sort of unsanitary-looking torture device. Then Art
just tortures, kills, poorly mimes laughter, and on he goes. Oh, and he's
gross. I suppose that’s a leitmotif, too. Which leads me to…
A Matter of Taste
Look, I acknowledge that this second point is highly subjective. Different
people have different “yuck” and “yum” factors, especially when it comes to
horror. But man, oh man, does Art the Clown like to play with his own shit. He
paints a pizzeria in his shit in Terrifier, in Terrifier 2 his
little clown-girl friend shits for no evident reason whatsoever on a laundromat
floor and, later, he crafts a whole haunted house room dedicated to shit: you
get the picture.
I have been labeled coprophobic before, but after mulling it
over, I don’t think that’s accurate. In fact, reading just one of the
short stories I have published in magazines or anthologies (specifically, my
story “stuffed” from American Cult) will
put the lie to that. However, when I invoke shit, I do it for a reason; one
might even say that I only put it in my work when nature calls. It seems like
Art’s coprophilia is just another random piece of junk plucked from the “yuck”
pile and thrown into the disordered messes that are writer/director Damien Leone’s
attempts to make horror films. And I say “attempt” because…
Haven’t I Seen This Before?
Four. I just want to remind you of that fact. Four times, Leone has
taken a bite at this same rotten apple. Of the three preceding films
that featured Art (short film “The 9th Circle,” All Hallows Eve,
and Terrifier) none of them advanced the character or pushed toward any
sort of plot in any sense I can recognize.
Other than a few minor variations in manner and degree of
torture-murder, it’s all just plot-free gore porn with a bichrome demon-jester taking
his turn at hell’s bellows this time. If you are intrigued by Terrifier
franchise and haven’t seen any of the preceding films, honest to Satan, please feel
free to skip straight to Terrifier 2. Better yet, skip all of them! Now,
on the subject of Terrifier 2 itself…
Terrifier 2 *is* Slightly Better. Slightly.
Put that on your fucking poster, Leone!
Terrifier 2 marks an innovation in the franchise in a few
important ways. First: Art made me laugh! Twice! (Spoilers ahoy) When, at the
beginning of Terrifier 2, Art unzips his clown suit for the first time,
I literally said to myself out loud: “If Art is naked under that thing, I’ve
got to give this movie at least a little love.” Well, damn me if Art
wasn’t starkers beneath his clown suit (which, really, is the only way to properly
wear a clown suit). Big props to Leone for that, and I don’t mean that as faint
praise. It was incredibly funny. Also, and in the same scene, when Art picks up
a newspaper and does his mime-laugh at the headline FAMILY OF FOUR KILLED IN
HEAD-ON COLLISION, I laughed out loud at that, too. That was downright
Jokeresque.
Second, the film’s “Clown Café” dream sequence is a gem. Funny,
scary, and bless me if the commercial jingle wasn’t clever and catchy. I may
hate Art, but I can’t hate the very decent, very short film buried inside of
the larger failure that is Terrifier 2, and the atrocity that is the
franchise as a whole. If you can excise and watch just this part of just this Terrifier
movie, I would recommend that this be the sum total of your whole experience
with the films.
Third, before filming on Terrifier 2 commenced,
Damien Leone discovered the existence of a strange species of Hollywood
wildlife called “a protagonist.” Don’t misunderstand me; I don’t mean a hero.
A monster or villain can be and has been the protagonist of many a fiction.
What I mean by “protagonist” is a character upon whom the action is centered
but who also advances a plot. In many horror films, you even have a
protagonist, an antagonist, and a foil – in fact, Terrifier 2 has all three!
Terrifier 2 is the first Art the Clown movie that hasn’t simply killed
one introduce-and-dispose character after another with no attempt to
differentiate between different shrieking meat-playthings. While this previous
structure does avoid final
girl syndrome, it does so in arguably the worst way possible.
While the female protagonist of Terrifier 2 is a
pretty wretched example of the species, it’s a step. I can’t say it’s a step in
the right direction, as the character seems cobbled together from little more
than daddy issues, chillwave, LARP props, and creepy ephebophilic fan service.
In fact, while we’re on that subject, let’s just get right to it.
There Never Should Have Been a Terrifier 2
The first Terrifier film sort of pissed me off. That’s not something I
can say of very many films. Terrifier did not piss me off with its
transgressive content, nearly all of which was too retrograde to really be
transgressive so. It pissed me off because it had the single most jaw-droppingly
misogynistic, hypersexualized, grand-guignol-level-gore, Toybox-Killer-esque sexual
assault and murder scene that I’ve seen in a “mainstream” horror film. The
scene itself didn’t shock me: not only am I regrettably a student of real-life
atrocity and a product of the 90s/00s Internet, I’ve also trawled the depths of
ryona and 60’s- and 70s-era
grindhouse hits like Blood Feast
and Blood Sucking Freaks
(often at Mondo’s
house, for my longtime readers). It did, however, make me feel the way the
revivification of certain “debates” recently has: really? Still? This
shit?
Without getting too deeply into the weeds of abnormal
psychology, the scene in which Art bisects Tara in Terrifier is beyond mere
grotesque misogyny, which remains regrettably common in horror, the genre I
love and to which I have devoted my life. The Art-Tara scene sails straight past
misogyny and into the toxic, lifeless waters of pornographic sexual sadism. Not
only that, it does so without even a fig leaf of character psychology (as is
the case in everything from Henry
Portrait of a Serial Killer to The
Collector to Exquisite
Corpse). I don’t mind strong stuff when it has a purpose or provides a
glimpse of utter darkness in human form (Halloween,
The Devil’s Rejects). However,
when a scene is, as far as I can tell, only meant to excite a specific brand of
defective human psyche,
I feel well within my rights to say that while I get what Damien Leone is
“getting at,” I think it – much like Art’s sole non-murderous pastime – amounts
to shit smeared on a bathroom wall.
So! Taking all of the above arguments into account and
reflecting on Art’s lack of depth, maybe you can see why, in my opinion…
No Contrast, No Color, No Point: Art the Clown Fucking
Sucks
When Tim Curry flips from charming clown to toothy monster, we are presented
with that-which-should-not-exist: a contradiction in the form of humor and
horror. In both “The Last Feast of Harlequin” and Ramsey Campbell’s The
Grin of the Dark, clowns are treated as like-but-unlike human forms;
grublike or vaguely balloon-like and immaterial, respectively. In my own
contribution to the scary clown subgenre, a short story called “auguste” that
appeared in British anthology Deadman
Humour: 13 Fears of a Clown, the tale’s murderous clown is contrasted
with his former scruffy-but-loving self in a manner not dissimilar to the way a
character might transform from an ally to a zombie adversary in a living dead
tale.
Art the Clown has no true “before,” not even in the slapdash
backstory that’s half-articulated in a mangled fashion in Terrifier 2.
There’s no contrast, no color: literally or figuratively. Art’s physiognomy is
demoniacal due to prosthetics we see him apply in Terrifier, and there’s
no variation. His face is always grotesque, his teeth black, his eyes
bulging. Art the Clown has one gear and one gear only and that is, frankly,
boring. Gross, misogynistic, dumb, and boring.
I am a longtime fan of all things clown-related, including disturbing and scary clowns. I remain firmly in the camp that
is not jumping aboard Art the coprophiliac Clown’s circus-car bandwagon.
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