Any horror fan will attest that the Terrifier franchise has become one of the most successful in recent memory, with its villain, Art the Clown, joining the ranks of Jason Voorhees, Micheal Myers, and Chucky. But before his first feature-length film took off, director Damien Leone was hocking blood-splattered, bootleg Funko Pop figures of Art at a convention.
He decided to gift the first one, along with a Fangoria magazine issue featuring an interview with Leone, to one of the other convention attendees — Pittsburgh-based horror makeup and special effects legend Tom Savini, Leone’s hero since childhood.
“I told him what a big inspiration he’s been and how I owe so much of this to him, and I showed him how I mentioned him in Fangoria, and I said, ‘And this is the character that’s becoming popular, and I wanted to make this for you.’ I basically just talked at him and walked away,” Leone tells Pittsburgh City Paper, laughing. “And he thanked me.”
Cut to 2024, and Terrifier 3 has unexpectedly topped the box office, in part due to special effects work by a close Savini associate. Savini also appears in a cameo role.
Terrifier 3 cost a mere two million dollars to produce but has been competitive at the box office, defeating another clown movie in the much anticipated, big-budget Joker: Folie à Deux and fellow horror works like Speak No Evil. As of Oct. 28, it became the highest-grossing unrated film of all time, earning $55.1 million worldwide.
The Terrifier franchise has become known for its alluring mixture of extremely sadistic and gory violence, with cheesy, slasher fun underscored by the stand-out performance of David Howard Thornton as Art the Clown. Fans have come to revere the franchise for its loyalty to practical effects instead of relying on CGI.
Savini, along with contemporaries like Stan Winston and Rick Baker, stands as one of the most notable figures in horror makeup and special effects work. For his Terrifier 3 cameo, Savini plays a bystander who witnesses something particularly horrific Art does at a mall. Savini appeared at the Monroeville Mall — the famed location of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, another film he worked on and starred in — to shoot his cameo, deviating from the rest of the film’s mall segment. The making of this scene happened a mere month or two before the premiere of Terrifier 3.
“I’m telling you, we pulled off a minor miracle getting this movie ready in time,” Leone says. “We really had to kill ourselves. There were four of us, including the visual effects team, that basically had to sacrifice from June to the release — and I mean, up to the release at Fantastic Fest, which was in September — to work on nothing but this movie. I’m saying maybe six days a week, like 14 hours a day. It was just nonstop.”
Savini appreciated the craftsmanship but expressed mixed feelings. He wryly tells City Paper that he found the film “appalling” and “vile.
“I said right to [Leone’s] face, ‘You’re a sick fuck,’ okay? He agreed,” Savini says with a chuckle. “But he also reminded me that there was a time when I was, too. People associate this horrendous stuff on the screen with you.”
Savini says fans often send him gruesome, gory images on social media thinking he’ll get a kick out of them, but he doesn’t. “My job was to make what the script said appear on the screen as realistic as possible, and that’s where my reputation comes from,” Savini says.
Jason Baker, a longtime assistant to Savini and now the proprietor of Pittsburgh-based Callosum Studios, worked on the special effects in Terrifier 3. He feels a sense of pride when he and his team create something that disturbs Savini, who serves as the FX supervisor and chief consultant at Callosum.
“Our running joke with Tom is that we learned it from watching you … I take great pride in that,” Baker tells CP. “If we can gross out the grandfather of gore, then we all did our job.”
Baker and his team did most of the work on a dream sequence featuring the Virgin Mary and also developed various weapons used by Art the Clown, such as the chainsaw that has become synonymous with this third entry. For the first two Terrifier films, Leone headed the special effects, but Terrifier 3 had enough of a budget that he could invest in effects artists.
He still stayed heavily involved, however.
“It is my first love, and I have such a soft spot in my heart for makeup effects. But it’s just so daunting, and this production was so overwhelming,” Leone says. “It was the most overwhelming shoot I was ever involved in because it was such a fast turnaround.”
Leone took a hands-on approach, often working alongside Baker and his team to oversee the process.
“Working with Damien reminds me a lot of working with George Romero and Tom Savini and everybody that helped start the Pittsburgh film industry, like Marty Schiff and all those guys,” Baker says. “They all have this amazing, can-do attitude, we’ll-just-do-it-ourselves-and-figure-it-out kind of gung-ho mentality.”
Baker says he loved giving Terrifier 3 a partially Pittsburgh soul.
“I’m so proud that we get to represent Pittsburgh and the film industry, and I love having Tom be a part of it because there wouldn’t be a Pittsburgh film industry if it wasn’t for Tom Savini and George Romero,” Baker says.
This article appears in Oct 23-29, 2024.
