Art The Clown: behind the screams with horror’s “feminist”, Mr Bean-inspired icon

Damien Leone’s Terrifier (2016) harks back to a simpler time of blood-and-guts horror cinema. Featuring eerie villain Art The Clown, a harlequin maniac wearing a Joker-style grin, the film made waves for its use of delightfully gooey special effects and extreme scenes of bodily carnage. Audiences lapped it up.

When Terrifer 2 came out in 2022, Art, who looks like a cross between Marilyn Manson and revered mime artist Marcel Marceau, was fully embraced as a new genre icon.

Art may be a psycho killer with inventively nasty tricks up his clown sleeve, but the man who plays him, David Howard Thornton, conforms to the general rule that the nicest guys play the best baddies.

Talking to NME over Zoom in the run-up to the release of Christmas-themed Terrifier 3, the friendly Thornton clearly relishes the role and is slowly getting used to being in the limelight. He enjoys the “anonymity” of performing in obscuring, heavy makeup but is getting recognised more often in “Clark Kent mode”. Achieving movie star star status is “pretty wild,” Art muses.

Thornton’s amazed Terrifier films have hit the sweet spot financially (Terrifier 2 earned $15million from a $250,000 budget) but have also become beloved cult favourites. He believes the reason for their success is obvious though. “Hollywood has become so risk-averse in the past decade or so because so many films are made for like, a hundred million dollars.”

And he firmly believes horror movies should be entertaining. Director Damien Leone is “a master at horrible, horrible things,” says Thornton. “I do think people forgot how to have fun though. With horror films, they got to do that very serious, dramatic vibe for the past decade or so, but let’s go back to the old slashers and just have fun.”

Thornton made his proper acting debut playing Art, having bagged the role via audition. Meeting the casting director, he quickly learned Art doesn’t speak, so there were no lines to read. So what did he do? “[They said] just improvise a scene where you decapitate a guy and you’re happy about doing it,” Thornton remembers. “I snuck up behind him cartoonishly, knocked him out, sawed off his head, picked it up, tasted it, didn’t like the taste, so I took out a salt shaker and seasoned it, and liked the taste, and skipped out on my merry way. I guess that’s what got me the part.”

So, playing Art is all in the choreography, and there’s little room for improv. Art is “pretty much the director’s vision and I’m just the canvas for his art,” says Thornton. Unlike other non-verbal movie monsters such as Halloween’s Michael Myers or Friday The 13th’s hockey mask-sporting Jason Voorhees though, “you don’t have any sounds coming out of him. You never hear him breathing or gasping or groaning,” Thornton explains.

The actor loves physical comedy and when playing Art, he sought inspiration from an unlikely source: “Mr Bean. Rowan [Atkinson] is one of my idols, because I think he’s a master of what he does at physical comedy. I always wanted to play a character like that, one of those mischievous, silent characters.”

Another reason Terrifier 2 took off was the various reports of audience members throwing up, calling ambulances and fainting that spread online. “That was wild,” says Thornton, dismissing rumours that the shock was staged. “We didn’t have the budget for that type of stuff. What was so amazing about it, was that it was all purely organic. It was the fans going out there, taking videos of the things they experienced and relaying it to the public. It was some of the best publicity you could get. I loved it and I have a feeling it’s going to happen again with Terrifier 3 because there’s a moment that made me almost vomit on set.”

Holy…Shit. Nothing will prepare you for the beautiful brutality that I just witnessed on screen. TERRIFIER 3 is one of the most vicious films I’ve seen in years. I already wanna see it again. pic.twitter.com/vdYIl53RJV

— Spencer Charnas (@spencerink) September 20, 2024

Terrifier movies are not without their controversies though. Like many slashers, they’ve been accused of misogyny. But is there a point where effects work is so gonzo, the only response is to laugh at their outlandishness? “Art kills a lot more men than he does women and human beings actually empathise more for female characters than they do male characters,” says Thornton. “You want to see the woman come out on top and kick this guy’s ass.”

“These films have passed the Bechdel Test (a metric for measuring female representation in movies) and are very much about female empowerment,” continued Thornton. “Damien and I were raised in families with very strong-willed women. Like, my mum wore the pants in the family. Damien came from a family of all women. His mum and his sisters. His dad was really not in the picture at all.  So, actually, the two of us are very, very feminist in a lot of ways.”

He draws attention to the inherent sense of humour that comes with the overblown horror of Terrifier films as well. “Art has a little wink and nudge at the audience after every kill. I think that’s what helps us get away with what we do,” says Thornton. “There’s always a little joke behind all the kills.”

‘Terrifier 3’ hits UK cinemas on October 11

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