Terrifier 2 (2022) Movie: Bringing the abominable Art the clown back to life – not that he needs any help with it; Terrifier 2 (2022) pushes the boundaries of blood-curdling gore with a mystical plot that furthers Art’s bloody secrets. The rotten, maggot-infested torture fest that has reportedly left cinemagoers not so shockingly sick is hardly just a darn good mindless slasher, unlike the first Terrifier (2016). It reflects in its domestic box that saw a massive jump of 84% in its third weekend of the release. With the sequel, Damien Leone gives the sadistic clown a more explored group of characters to brutalize, and this time Art gets to antagonize a true heroine with an angelic aura. But is that enough to take the ruthless, supernatural clown down?
A much more terrifying Pennywise; David Howard Thornton’s killing machine, Art the clown, made his first appearance in Leone’s horror anthology, All Hallow’s Eve. Being a hit with gore-lovers made his maker bring this terrifying being back to cause an unimaginable massacre on the citizens of Miles County in the first Terrifier slasher. For horror fans that don’t just tolerate gross mutilations but expect it from a perfect Halloween flesher, a killer clown simply doesn’t get more vicious than Art.
Terrifier’s ending assuring the fans that Art is, in fact, not particularly human made it certain that there will be a sequel. And this time, a lot more comes out of Art’s grisly murder bag. With a small fan-funded budget, Terrifier 2 has managed to be an even bigger hit than the first movie that has become a cult amongst the slaughter addicts. And we can definitely expect another nightmarish carnage carnival as the murder clown is far from done.
Terrifier 2 (2022): Movie Synopsis and Plot Summary
Picking right where the shocking ending of Terrifier (2016) had left off, the sequel begins its blood ride with a resurrected Art (David Howard Thornton) butchering the coroner and escaping the facility. A stop at a laundromat to wash his clown clothes introduces Art to an equally frightening little girl wearing clown makeup. The grisly clown plays pattycake with his scary new friend, who is unnamed throughout the movie and only gets referred to as The Little Pale Girl (Amelie Mclain). In the shocked eyes of the laundromat man who will soon meet his maker, Art is playing with air, and there’s no one else around.
Haunting the cryptic dreams of high schooler Sienna (Lauren LaVera), Art makes his frightening entrance to wreck the county once again – a year after the first massacre that still disturbs Sienna and her little brother Jonathan (Elliott Fullam). It doesn’t help that Jonathan finds his recently demised father’s sketchbook with the shocking portraits of Art and his victims. Sienna’s Halloween costume, being ruined by the strange fire that her dream had caused, doesn’t stop her from getting dressed as the winged Wonder-woman-ish character her father had sketched for her.
The mystical connection between the two siblings and Art, the clown, brings them both to horrifying close encounters with him, and unsurprisingly, their mother doesn’t believe them. Being accused of vandalizing the school with a maggot-filled corpse of a possum that Art and the Pale girl were toying with, Jonathan remains grounded on a frightful night. Sienna, on the other hand, gets a dizzy night of mollied partying with her friend Brooke (Kailey Hyman) and her boyfriend.
The county – neck deep in their ghoulish celebration – oblivious that some of the decorations are real – provides the perfect setting for Art to perform his characteristic butchering of the innocents. Starting with beheading a store clerk, Art moves on to blowing Sienna and Jonathan’s mother’s head off. As Sienna tries to take her mind off of her PTSD, Art scalps, skins, and slices through her friend Allie (Casey Hartnett) before offering candy from Allie’s mother’s hollowed-out skull to naive trick-or-treaters.
The added grotesque element of the ghostly clown girl comes to its full effect when she imitates Jonathan’s voice to lure Sienna to the old carnival where she was murdered. Right before getting brutally butchered, Brooke and her boyfriend’s last conversation reveals the nature of Sienna’s mysterious father’s death. After being diagnosed with a brain tumor, he had become strange and abusive and had met an excruciating, self-inflicted end. The supposedly indestructible blade that Sienna’s father gave her now remains in the horrid clown’s possession, along with her unconscious brother Jonathan.
Terrifier 2 (2022) Movie Review
Damien Leone has repeatedly proven that he doesn’t make the kind of slashers that would need a turned-off brain to be enjoyable. While the first Terrifier was, in fact, a gore-fest of bloody murders that required no particular storyline, Terrifier 2 adds more meat (pardon the pun) to the brutality. The fans needed to get what they came to watch; grisly gore porn. And the extended run time does absolute justice to the slasher with a plot that doesn’t steal attention or time away from the bloodiness.
David Howard Thornton is undoubtedly the scariest murder clown ever to have splattered the screens with his victims’ guts, and even arguably the most sinister Halloween devil to exist. As established in the first movie and proven once again in this gruesome sequel, Art the clown’s sighting is always a warning sign for blood, brain, and unattached heads.
The first Terrifier’s success was, for the most part, about the level of grossness it provided for the gore-lovers. In ways, Terrifier 2 surpasses even the prequel with its glorious vulgarities, explaining its box office success. The infamous bedroom scene with the audience getting sick and throwing up is undoubtedly one of the most disturbing levels of brutality that the slasher/splatter sub-genre has ever dared to reach. Art slicing through Allie is absolute “art” for the twisted crowd that seeks exactly this from their Halloween horrors. To take words from horror genius Stephen King’s flattering tweet, Terrifier 2 absolutely will “gross you out old-school”.
Terrifier 2 (2022) Ending, Explained
Is there a sinister connection between Sienna and Art the clown?
For the audience that really knows Art, the clown, there’s no point rooting for any character who gets in Art’s bloody path. Anyone he sets out to kill will most definitely have the worst possible death. When Sienna cannot save Brooke from Art’s demonic hands, she is still determined to at least save her brother, whom she loves dearly. Running through the threatening haze of the old carnival horror house, Sienna faces Art’s weapon-wielding laughter many times and somehow manages to get away alive every time.
Being brutalized in the hands of Art, Jonathan calls out for Sienna as he still believes that she may just possess some power that their father sensed and formed her fantasy character around. One moment of raw courage gives Sienna the strength to put a metal bar through Art’s head. To her surprise (but not ours), that doesn’t stop Art. He pushes Sienna’s dying body down the Terrifier well after stabbing her with the knife that her father had given her.
In a dream-like state that makes her feel all the pain of the real world, Sienna finds herself bleeding out and stuck in a trick-tank full of water. Her struggle to get out is stopped by her leg being restrained with something that looks like a decomposing hand. Drowning and slowly dying, Sienna sees that she’s in the exact “clown cafe” she saw in her dream–only this time, the singing and clapping patrons are all dead. Sienna cries out in agony for her brother and herself, but there’s no way out of her nightmare purgatory.
While Art tortures Jonathan, the mystic blade starts glowing, and Sienna’s stab wound glows. Sienna is magically healed, and she now has the “superpower” to swim out of the tank. As she grabs the knife, it is as though the horror clown allows her to behead him with his signature frightening smile. Sienna, relieved after what she thinks is Art’s end, is frightened when the little girl’s apparition walks out of the building with Art’s head in her arms.
Art, the clown poking his headshot wound at the movie’s beginning, had made it certain that whatever is underneath that clown mask is not human. He has been indestructible since the first movie, and the only chance of his death seemed to be the blade as soon as it was introduced. Art is perhaps Evil itself, and no mere human could take him down. The source of Sienna’s power lies in the secrets her strange father buried with.
Art himself may be Sienna’s father. The brain tumor that had brought on sudden terrifying changes in her father is perhaps the same thing that caused him to become this morbid, sadistic clown. Art didn’t even try to defend himself when Sienna was about to behead him with the blade. Such an uncharacteristic action from this unimaginably brutal clown further strengthens the theory that Sienna may be his daughter.
However, it is also possible that Sienna’s father’s brain tumor had given him a peephole into the macabre world of Evil. And that would explain the scary visions that he was known to have. The character he made for Sienna was perhaps his way of fighting the menacing evil with the power of goodness and love.
Is Art really dead?
As the mid-credit scene take us on a tour of the ominous atmosphere at the psychiatric facility where Art’s first survivor Victoria is being treated, the air screams the coming of nothing but absolute terror. Victoria is singing a spine-chilling tune and scribbling a love letter to Art with blood pouring out from between her legs. The unstable and excited Victoria is then shown to be pregnant. Shocking the orderly with the petrifying scene of the eerie Victoria cradling the head of Art, which she has just given birth to, Terrifier 2 further establishes Art the clown’s invincibility. Whether he’s a sinister supernatural being or the very embodiment of Evil itself, Art and Sienna’s battle hasn’t ended. The promise of another sequel that will hopefully throw more light on Art’s story is all that Terrifier 2 ends with.
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Terrifier 2 (2022) Official Trailer
Terrifier 2 (2022) Movie Links: IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes
Terrifier 2 (2022) Movie Cast: David Howard Thornton, Jenna Kanell, Lauren LaVera
Where to watch Terrifier 2
