Terrifier 3, the nastiest horror movie around, is a surprise box office hit

The most profitable film of the moment isn’t Joker: Folie a Deux but a much nastier, scrungier film whose age rating massively limits who is even allowed to see it.

Terrifier 3 has come away with $18.5 million at the box office following its opening weekend. And while that’s not a big number in blockbuster terms, it’s a sizeable hit given the film only had a production budget of $2 million. It was also the highest-grossing film of the weekend, topping The Wild Robot and Joker: Folie a Deux.

There’s a decent chance you’ve seen the villain of Terrifier 3 around even if you have never watched any of the series’s films too.

Art the Clown became something of a horror icon following the success of the first two Terrifier films, most notably 2022’s Terrifier 2, which made $15.7 million in cinemas from a production budget of just $250,000.

It’s also no small feat to create a horror character with anything like the impact of icons of the 1980s like Freddy Krueger, Pinhead and Michael Myers, something Art the Clown actually achieves.

That said, these are gore-soaked slasher movies that may be a little too much even for some horror fans.

Terrifier 3 features “excessive bloody detail,” according to the BBFC’s classification notes for the film’s 18 rating in the UK.

“There is a focus on the limbs, severed heads, flayed skin and entrails of dead and injured people.” Nice.

Despite all that, though, Terrifier 3 was a hit with the critics. It currently sits at a 76% freshness rating over at Rotten Tomatoes.

Horror specialist site JoBlo gave the film an 8/10 rating, calling it “the goriest (and best) of the series so far.”

Master horror critic Kim Newman covered the film for Empire, and gave it a 3/5 rating.

“Managing to go further over-the-top and pushing more offence buttons than you think possible, this is recommended only for the strong of stomach and hard of heart,” he wrote.

The Terrifier movies come from the mind of Damien Leone, and his character Art the Clown has haunted his work long before this series began.

2008’s horror short The 9th Circle introduced the world to Art the Clown — although few will have seen it compared to the Terrifier movies. Art returned in 2013’s All Hallow’s Eve, which is where you have seen the character if you swear you saw him long before 2022.

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