Terrifier 2's Grisly Death Scenes Involved Some Very Unlikely (And Very Gross) Ingredients [Exclusive]
A lot of filmmakers have attempted to create a new horror icon for the next generation, and most have failed rather miserably. "Terrifier" director and special effects artist Damien Leone has managed to usher in a fresh wave of blood and terror with his creation, Art the Clown. The enormously successful sequel, "Terrifier 2," was designed and crafted from the ground up with a ragtag FX team, where most of the gloriously gory set pieces were done almost exclusively by Leone and producer Phil Falcone. To achieve the amount of viscera needed to send even the most hardcore gorehounds heading for the aisle, there were some very special ingredients involved to ensure the maximum amount of gross-out potential.
Throughout horror history, there have been countless recipes for blood that have been used, including but not limited to Hershey's Chocolate Syrup flowing down the drain in Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" and FX artist Tom Savini's famous mix of Karo pancake syrup, food coloring, and Kodak Photo-Flo solution in George A. Romero's "Dawn of the Dead." For "Terrifier 2," Leone relied on his local butcher to make the blood in his absurdly over-the-top follow-up appear as disgusting as humanly possible. To call some of the ingredients incorporated into the film's gore "creative" would be an understatement.
'What we use a lot is just fat'
In an interview with /Film's Jacob Hall, Leone went into excruciating detail about everything that went into some of the most elaborate kills in "Terrifier 2." Continuing where the first "Terrifier" left off, Art the Clown is found lying on an autopsy table where an incredibly unlucky coroner is about to meet his end. Leone and his team discovered that one ingredient, in particular, could make the coroner's demise look even more disturbing on screen:
"What we use a lot is just fat. We know a butcher who would give us sausage casing and then we'd fill them all with just fat to make intestines or whatnot. We use that a lot. Or if we ever just got to dig into a body, we just sort of see all that mush."
When it came time to shoot the effects sequence, the fat would make the blood appear chunkier when they pumped it through the large tubes, adding another viscous layer to the overall look of the blood. "And you could see it a lot, especially in the scene where he's killing the coroner," Leone explained. "You just see this chunky blood, and the fat is just so soft that it actually could work its way through the tubes."
In another kill later on in "Terrifier 2," Leone was looking for a different look altogether and found a little inspiration from Romero's zombie mall classic.
'It smelled ... interesting'
Without question, the most elaborate death in Leone's drawn-out sequel is the bedroom scene involving the character Allie (Casey Hartnett) who experiences a level of torture rarely (if ever) depicted on screen. That scene is so seared into the twisted brains of brave moviegoers that it's easy to forget some of the other kills. But it's another kill from the movie that contains another oddball ingredient, and one that will make even the most hardened horror fan flinch when they try to imagine what the set must have smelled like.
When Art the Clown decapitates a clerk working at the costume shop, Leone was looking for ways to make the scene stand out a little more, leading him to add another household ingredient to make the blood look more like the blood he remembered seeing in '70s horror films like "Dawn of the Dead."
"I wanted that blood opaque and it looked like paint, almost. So I was putting powdered milk... I had to put a lot of powdered milk into the blood to sort of kill the translucency. So I was putting some other weird things in there too, maybe like strawberry syrup or things just to brighten it up and stuff. So that was maybe paints as well. That was an interesting one."
On the day, it sounds like Leone and his team tried anything and everything to try and give audiences a level of gruesomeness they'd never experienced before. Before long, Leone might be putting out a blood recipe of his own for future effects artists to play with. "It was very sticky and gross. It smelled ... interesting," Leone recalled. If the smell is pungent enough to make a homemade batch of blood stand out from the pack, you're probably on the right track.