How Terrifier 2 Director Damien Leone Made His Real Life Into A Horror Movie
"Terrifier 2" might have been a surprise hit in 2022, proving too brutal for even some seasoned horror fans. But you'd never have expected such success based on the original movie. Released in 2016, "Terrifier" took director Damien Leone's psychotic slasher Art the Clown, previously the star of several short films, and built a whole movie around his gory exploits. Sadly, the result was less than impressive. As /Film's Chris Evangelista put it in his "Terrifier 2" review:
"The first "Terrifier" is what I'd call 'crap' [...] While I freely admit the film is loaded with some incredibly practical gore, the movie itself is little more than a plotless, storyless, valueless excuse to showcase that gore and not much else."
Luckily, Leone stepped up his game for "Terrifier 2," as evidenced by the much improved critical response, the $15 million it made on a $250,000 budget, and the fact we'll soon be getting the highly-anticipated "Terrifier 3." With the second installment, Leone continued to showcase his "incredibly practical gore," which was most famously put to use in the now infamous Allie kill scene — a scene that also happens to be the director's favorite of the whole franchise.
But "Terrifier 2" did more than just maintain Leone's talent for creating alarmingly realistic practical gore effects. The film also demonstrated his talent for establishing and maintaining an effective tone, building the mythology of Art the Clown, and writing in a way that was apparently suppressed for the original "Terrifier." If you ask the man himself, that was intentional, and driven by a desire to inject his real-life experiences into the sequel and have the film resonate with audiences as a result.
Terrifier 2 is surprisingly autobiographical
"Terrifier 2" introduces Sienna (Lauren LaVera), who it's suggested has some sort of psychic link with Art the Clown as he once again embarks on a Halloween rampage. We're also introduced to her little brother Jonathan (Elliott Fullam) and mother Barbara (Sarah Voigt), both of whom were analogs for Damien Leone and his own mother.
In an interview with The Horror Hour, Leone explained how he wanted a"whole family dynamic" that was "very autobiographical" to his own:
"I had a single mother raising me and two older sisters. And both of my sisters, their personality is very much injected into Sienna. There's a little bit of me in Sienna with her being an artist. I mean, I am very much Jonathan growing up. Just, like, obviously obsessed with horror, fascinated by real-life serial killers and things like that."
Highlighting a specific scene in which Barbara yells at her daughter, Leone explained how something similar "literally happened" to him:
"I was doing makeup in the middle of the night. You know, everybody's sleeping, it's a school night, and I'm melting clay on the stove to make a clay head or something like that. And I didn't know at the time you're not supposed to melt sulfur-based clay, so as soon as you melt that clay, this yellow smoke emits, it just goes all over the house, I'm setting the smoke alarm off the entire house, my mother comes storming out of the bedroom, it's three o'clock in the morning and she goes nuts. And she literally says that line, she's like, 'You're going to f*****g kill us one day!'"
The effect of adding these experiences into his film was not lost on Leone, who seemed to be intent on improving on his previous script.
Leone got vulnerable for Terrifier 2
After "Terrifier" failed to do much beyond allowing Damien Leone to show off his makeup and prosthetic talents — honed over years of annoying his own mother by almost blowing up the house — the sequel allowed him to go a little further. By borrowing from his own experiences, Leone was, believe it or not, able to use his so-called "megaslasher" to get vulnerable and explore his own feelings about his past. As the 41-year-old told The Horror Hour:
"This was the most vulnerable I ever was as a screenwriter, and I wanted to put as much, as many real-life situations into the movie, and I knew that would pay off because the audience would be able to tell it was genuine, that authenticity, and they'd really be invested with these characters when I really threw them in the pits of hell and despair at the end of the movie."
Elsewhere, Leone borrowed not from his own experiences but from classic horror franchises. As the director revealed to /Film, Art the Clown was inspired by iconic horror killers, constituting a mix of "silent slasher" types like Jason, "gritty" killers like Leatherface, and of course horrific harlequins such as Pennywise. But as a self-avowed horror superfan, Leone really was borrowing from his own experiences when crafting Art. Having grown up on these classic horror movies, the director clearly soaked up everything he saw to the point the films came to define his own personal sensibilities and tastes. In that sense, even the murderous clown at the heart of the "Terrifier" franchise is a version of Leone, all of which just speaks to how being true to your own artistic sense will eventually result in something that resonates — even if your first try is complete rubbish.