The Terrifier franchise is misogynist
Foreword:
There are numerous spoilers below. I write about graphic misogynist violence that occurs in the film. I’ve also given as much effort to structuring this blog post as Damien Leone gave to plotting films one and two of the Terrifier series so if you are bored at any point that’s fine.
My short takeaway if you’re interested is that it’s an extremely misogynist series. It wears its influences in terms of hybridising True Crime fandom, fetishism for grisly visuals and pornographic storytelling on its sleeve. And I would really like for horror reviewers including those in the relatively mainstream media to be less credulous when Leone makes bullshit pseudofeminist defences of how blatantly misogynist it is. Reading uncited accusations of misogyny leveled at this guy in the press with him coming up with pseudofeminist defences in response just helps turn misogyny into a branding vehicle for this virally successful series - the accusations are severed in reviews of the film franchise from the women voicing them so they are never followed up on while his voice carries as the one that answers the question of whether the work is misogynist or not. Also while the following blog is going to be interpreted as a denunciation of some kind by horror bros, potentially, it’s really not. If it walks, talks, and quacks like a duck, I’m calling it a duck. This film franchise is deeply misogynist. It’s an observation I am making and I think one any reasonable person might if they’re honest with themselves watching this film series.
I first heard of the Terrifier series through buzz around cult horror fans online and particularly women in online extreme metal and horror fandoms. I was curious about what that buzz was about and tonight I decided to watch the first 2 films.
It's clear from the start of the first film the creator is fluent in the cinematic language of the Classic Slasher and that playing with its tropes is basically what this franchise is about.
What I went into these films curious about, is the buzz. I’m not entirely convinced about how much of it is organic. Horror has a long track record of viral word of mouth marketing, as a playground for stirring up rumours about people vomiting or fainting or having heart attacks at screenings and numerous other experimental marketing techniques. Critical reaction can itself get easily wrapped into marketable “controversy”.
As I start to write this piece I'm half way through watching Terrifier 2, having finished Terrifier earlier on. I'm a little bored of the plot. I gather the first movie was a tech demo for the writer director's special effects talents. The plot attests to that origin: a series of gratuitous set ups for exploding heads, stabbings and one scene where a woman is hung upside down by the legs and sawn laboriously in half. Its relationship to a plot bears much more from the tradition of porn story telling than anything else (as does the cinematography from that scene with the focus on her bobbing breasts as she's hung upside down to be bisected). That is to say every scene has an almost incidental moment of dialogue and acting, that is clearly just a set up to the impending deaths, torture and mutilation that fans are presumably here for.
The filmmaker has denied accusations of misogyny widely in interviews and in the second film of the series he focuses heavily on the Final Girl Sienna. Who is... despite the creators' protests, set up as a kind of soft pornographic Virgin Girl Next Door, who gets drugged by her very handsy female best friend at the club. It’s just transparently bullshit. I can’t call it anything else. There are gruesome torture sequences where the the true protagonist, slasher monster Art the Clown, delights in ripping women’s bodies apart screaming piece by piece. I started the first movie thinking this was a broadly nihilistic gore fest that is admittedly misogynist by default through its reliance on slasher tropes. But going into the second film, I’ll be honest the effects just are not that impressive on a technical level, and it is clear that the graphic misogyny is the point.
This franchise feels like the aesthetic bastard child of extreme metal's porn and goregrind subcultures. And in terms of it's ideology, it would deeply like for all this misogynist brutality to mean nothing. Film two has moments of feeling like an argument for the viewers to buy Leone's claims that his Final Girl nice guy ally Girl Power feminism sub plot makes this not misogynist. And it's all, very much bullshit. And I think he knows it's bullshit. And I think the reviewers and critics parroting his excuses know it's bullshit. Because, like porn, everything involved in this performance including the deployment of taboo and tropes of innocence is about creating a weird combination of illusions that gets people off and the misogyny IS the money shot here.
I'm an extreme metal fan since I was a teen. I'm familiar with the tropes here and it reeks.
One thing this film underlines, is that for however much a creator might want to project an image of gratuitous excess being about nihilistic fun it's really in the way it pursues it saying a lot about the thesis of the creator. Misogyny isn't a belief in nothing.
Looked at another way, Art the Clown wants to say "it's just a joke" about a lengthy array of brutal misogynist killings in a misogynist movie series with a reliably misogynist plot. The thesis is so heavy in the text that any meta textual efforts to redeem it in interviews are transparently bullshit and undermined by every second of the films themselves. That's not to say I think it should be banned or shouldn't be made or anything like that. I honestly would rather the fandom was more honest about things and admit, the graphic visceral obliteration of women, violation of consent, breaking of taboo around consent etc gets them off
There are brief, transient attempts at balance. There's a scene in the second film where eventually a guy gets his dick cut off which is remarkable in its innovation of actually having a man face anything like as sexualised of a killing as most of the women victims — an attempt to sure up the writer's "see we make gags at everyone's expense" pitch. Immediately afterwards the man's girlfriend is chased screaming and killed at much greater length, her face and her chest hacked into bloody gaping holes of flesh to be wept over by Final Girl Sienna.
Sienna in turn, as Final Girl serves mainly as an opportunity for escalation: she is going to survive, so she is then made witness to unlimited horror that the hero of the tale Art the Clown can inflict on her. Her "girl power" becomes recruited into extending the voyeuristic suffering possible within this weird pseudopornographic horror. When she finally kills Art she then faces supernatural apparitions of him torturing her to underline the point before being cast down to hell, drowned in a cage before laughing voyeurs, resurrecting and beheading Art. Some fake end credits are followed up by Art's female familiar Vicky furiously ripping blood out of her crotch, pissing blood all over the floor, and painting the words "cunt pig bitch slut whore filth" on the walls of her asylum room next to her name.
The film franchise is an effective work of art in the sense it's clearly found its audience. Art the Clown is going to go into the canon as a character horror fans all like to see plunging sharp objects into women. The branding works great, obviously. The word of mouth is enough of a success already that I don't feel like I'm giving undue credibility inadvertently to something by writing this essay in the first place (why I wouldn't for instance write about a number of other notably misogynist cult horror films).
There's something to be said here as well about the growing affinity among women for true crime - a genre liberally quoted from in Terrifier 2, but I can't nail down what. And I suspect something of that is in the weird appeal it seems to have had around women I follow in the metal and horror scenes, the way it plays with the captivatingly grotesque. I'm not really sure what to make of it. I recognise it from my own interest in extreme metal and horror. Given the focus on Sienna and Art, Vicky is set up at the start of film 2 and she gets the last laugh of the film. I guess something for us goth girlies to laugh along with and feel smug about in a movie series whose main thesis is that dismantling women is a rousing lot of fun.
I’m not sure if I’ll bother watching the third Terrifier film. But I think I would like to live in a world where media weren’t so credulous when faced with it.
On other issues with it: I’ve seen some mentions in reviews of the way that Art looks like an antisemitic cartoon with his long prosthetic nose. I haven’t seen mention of the efforts in the first film to play with transmisogynist tropes (Art carves the breasts and surrounding skin off a woman who has her last stuttering breaths watching on as he wears a wig, the cut off breasts and pretends first to be a victim and then saunters and dances around effeminately before carrying on).
I guess my takeaway is for those who enjoy this kind of thing to please be honest with yourselves about what it is you're enjoying, and for media coverage of the franchise to actually give a shit what women think and say.