Terrifier 3 Review: Gruesome Franchise Entry Spends Way Too Much Time On The Wrong Character (2025)

Terrifier 3, the third film in director Damien Leone's ultra-gory Terrifier trilogy, once again depicts the worst possible things that could happen to its characters and refuses to blink. Set five years after Terrifier 2's ending, then only a few days, then back to five years in a series of confusing and disjointed opening sequences, Terrifier 3 finds Sienna Shaw (Lauren LaVer) being pulled out of a mental health hospital she's been in since her violent, and theoretically victorious, confrontation with Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) in the previous film.

Sienna doesn't look like she's aged a day, which is because Terrifier 2 only came out two years ago. Sienna's younger brother, Jonathan (Elliott Fullam), a college student who looks more like a high schooler, is a particular victim of these unnecessary time-jumping antics. At least it's fitting considering the set of his college, where a surprising amount of Terrifier 3 takes place, looks like it was filmed at a high school. The slowly simmering success of the franchise has not awarded the third film a significantly larger budget and the bland sets strain the imagination.

Terrifier 3 Is Disjointed Between Its Two Storylines

Sienna & Art Spend Too Much Of The Runtime Apart

The Terrifier franchise is one built primarily on the stomach-churning kills performed by its delightful and unnerving mascot, Art the Clown, and Terrifier 3 kicks off with a glut of spouting blood, torn faces, and hacked limbs. The chaos ends as the real story begins, with Sienna going to her aunt Jessica's (Margaret Anne Florence) and uncle Greg's (Bryce Johnson) to hopefully find some peace. This is where we learn that there are two movies in Terrifier 3, one starring Art the Clown, and the other about Sienna, and there's more than enough film for both in the bloated runtime.

The two movies don't combine until the final 30 minutes. By then, I was already tired of the blood and guts that made Art's story the only one of the two worth watching. Once you've seen one face mashed to a red pulp, you've kind of seen them all mashed to a red pulp. Sienna's plot finds her coming to terms with her encounter in the previous movie. Not only do people not believe her story about a murderous demonic clown, some even suspect she had a hand in the now legendary murders.

Art's scenes find him prancing from vignette to vignette, wantonly killing, sometimes creatively and sometimes with a disappointing lack of flair, which is a major sin in a franchise built around exploring every way to dismember a body. The dueling stories are constantly fighting for control of the film and too often, an exciting sequence is split in half to jump back to the other. It's frustrating and makes an already doddering film feel even slower.

What Terrifier 3 ends up feeling like is a late-night teen drama when the camera is focused on Sienna, broken up occasionally by insane and far more interesting diversions of Art doing his darndest to ruin everyone's Christmas. Right, Terrifier 3 makes a half-hearted attempt to be a Christmas horror movie, and it succeeds in some respects, particularly when Art dons a Santa Claus outfit and borrows a man's beard. I won't spoil it, but he doesn't carefully shave it off.

Art The Clown's Mayhem Is Fun But Not Enough

Terrifier 3 Is Dragged Down Whenever Art Is Off-Screen

There are more than a few perfunctory attempts at a deeper story, with a subplot about a friend of Jonathan's trying to interview him for a true-crime podcast, and a disfigured victim from the previous films who is back to possess Sienna, but none of these really add up to anything interesting. The saving grace of the film, as it has been throughout the entire Terrifier franchise, is David Howard Thornton as Art. His manic and silent performance here is probably his best work of the trilogy.

Whether he's silently laughing at Santa Claus being frozen with liquid nitrogen, miming a little girl crying, or getting annoyed with the antics of his demonic helper, anytime Art is onscreen, Terrifier 3 is noticeably more amusing. So why Leone decides to hide him in the background for the climactic battle is unclear. There's a sense of dread created by Art smirking behind his co-killer, like a devil on the shoulder delighting in all the terror being wrought, but it's at the expense of Thornton getting the full attention he deserves and the movie requires.

There's certainly not two hours worth of movie in Terrifier 3, and I hazard to say there's even one hour, even with all the Art scenes combined. The problem with constantly having the worst things happen is that we always know what will happen. Terrifier 3 has a real lack of tension that all the sawed-off limbs in the world can't Frankenstein together.

Terrifier 3 is in theaters on October 11. The film is 125 minutes long and not rated.

3/10

Terrifier 3 follows Sienna and her brother as they attempt to move past the traumatic events of Art the Clown's Halloween massacre. As they embrace the Christmas season, Art reemerges, intent on turning their holiday into a nightmare, continuing his reign of terror.