Horror

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The board may be slightly-dead but Horror Cinema is very much alive ~

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hehehe

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Adam Nayman taking Osgood Perkins (and Damien Leone) to task

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These days, it seems that everybody making horror movies wants to be Romero or Peele—except maybe Damien Leone, the creator of the popular and ultraviolent Terrifier series, who recently ignited controversy on social media by insisting that his trilogy was "not, in any way, shape, or form, a political franchise."

The catalyst for Leone's comments was a series of posts by Terrifier stars David Howard Thornton and Lauren LaVera criticizing the cruelty unleashed online under the second Trump administration. "If you're going to come on to my page, claiming you're a fan, and then insult the LGTBQ community, then you can f@ck all the way off," wrote Thornton, whose portrayal of the dead-eyed, rictus-grinning serial killer Art the Clown has turned the character into a 21st-century horror icon. Without referring specifically to Thornton's post—or the comments that led up to it—Leone tried to play peacemaker. He was also, possibly, playing dumb. "I'm all for freedom of speech and expression," explained Leone, even as it was clear he didn't exactly appreciate his collaborators speaking their minds. "I did not get into filmmaking to become a politician, or promote any political agendas or ideologies, especially through a killer clown movie," he added. "I fell in love with horror movies as a form of pure entertainment and those are the films I like to make."

Whether Leone was being clueless or careerist is hard to say. Either way, it's unfortunate that a filmmaker with a certain talent for going too far seems determined to stake out the rhetorical middle ground.  There's no such thing as pure entertainment, of course, and the Terrifier movies don't have to be partisan to touch a nerve. Somewhere, there's a paper on the relationship between sadism and authoritarianism being written with Art the Clown's name in it. What makes the movies potent—and fascinating to analyze—is the way they lay bare Leone's agenda, which is basically extremity itself. There's no need to separate Art from the artist since they're operating in the same register; Leone's bogeyman is endearing because he's so eager to please. The giddy delight that Howard's carnivalesque antihero takes in his brutal craft works best as an extension of his creator's exuberance in turning multiplexes into grindhouses.

Leone is within his rights to believe that his own movies aren't worth thinking about too deeply. He's also not alone. Last summer, Osgood Perkins—riding high before the surprise box office success of his occult thriller Longlegs—singled out the Terrifier series for dismissal, telling The Hollywood Reporter that Leone's movies were "the opposite of what I want to be putting into my brain." Perkins's choice of words is interesting insofar as Longlegs is a movie about what happens when people's headspaces are penetrated by malign influences, which is what makes it enjoyable as a supernatural thriller and bogus as social commentary (in this version of Middle America, men who commit acts of domestic violence can literally claim that the devil made them do it). Meanwhile, a case can be made that the Terrifier films and The Monkey are effectively kindred spirits as exercises in jaw-dropping gore-ography.

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