See! It’s just a scary movie…’
As I write this on the eve of Halloween 2022, Damien Leone’s gruesome creation Art the Clown is on the verge of going mainstream. After the modest success of Terrifier in 2016, a film that eventually became a minor sleeper hit in horror circles, Terrifier 2 is currently making waves at the box office despite being a low budget, two and half hour long horror slog about a murderous clown. No mean feat. What people may not know is that other than a couple of short films, Art made his big screen debut in All Hallows’ Eve – a film that will also, no doubt, receive a residual bump from the success of Terrifier 2…
After a night of trick or treating, siblings Timmy (Cole Mathewson) and Tia (Sydney Freihofer) and their babysitter Sarah (Katie Maguire) sit down to watch a VHS tape that someone dropped in Timmy’s Halloween bag. As you do. The clips that follow are a round up of all of Leone’s short films up until that point with some grisly new material thrown in for good measure.
These stories, like Terrifier, don’t have much of a plot really. There is some stuff about a cult and a weird alien segment that goes on for too long (even in an 80 minute movie), but what All Hallows’ Eve does do is to introduce us to Art the Clown (played by Mike Giannelli here – he has been replaced by David Howard Thornton in the sequels). Unlike Jason or Freddy or Michael, Art the Clown has no backstory (yet). Unlike Pinhead or Chucky or the Candyman, he doesn’t speak either. This puts him somewhere closer to Leatherface in the horror canon. A monster that doesn’t think or rationalise. He merely exists to cause chaos and bloodshed. And there is plenty of that here. This is not a movie for the faint hearted.
Now that the Terrifier franchise is having a moment, people will return to All Hallows’ Eve looking for some kind of origin story for Art the Clown. They won’t find one, but they will find a competent and assured introduction to both Art and to director Damien Leone. You have been warned.