Movies
Bloody Disgusting
ByKyle Logan
"Terrifier 2" is shocking audiences in all sorts of ways. The film is reportedly leading some viewers to faint and vomit because of its extreme gore (via Bloody Disgusting), reactions that director Damien Leone has expressed mixed feelings about because he doesn't want his movie to literally hurt people. Equally shocking, albeit in a very different way, is the fact that the film is a major success. Made on a budget of around $250,000 (most of which was fan-funded), "Terrifier 2" has now passed the $5 million mark at the domestic box office and doesn't show any signs of slowing down. That success has led to Leone teasing a third "Terrifier" film.
Before we look forward to whatever else Leone and Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) may have in store for another sequel, we'd like to run down those scenes that are causing some viewers to at least leave the theater and at most have their insides leave their body.
A warning, then, that this ranking of the most disturbing scenes in "Terrifier 2" is going to spoil the movie, but may also spoil your appetite. There's no way to discuss the horrors of "Terrifier 2" without descriptions of violence with just about any weapon you can imagine. So read on if you dare, to find out what's the most disturbing scene in this already notoriously disturbing movie.
15. The introduction of the Little Pale Girl
Bloody Disgusting
Starting off comparatively light, the introduction of the Little Pale Girl (Amelie McLain) isn't disturbing for how gory or cruel it is, like most of the other scenes we'll be discussing here. Instead it's the pure shock of seeing a brand new, unforgettably horrifying clown face.
After killing the coroner who was set to inspect his body, Art goes to a laundromat to clean up. He strips down and places his clothes in the washer and waits nude for his costume to be cleaned. That in itself is already enough to unnerve most viewers, but when Art looks around a corner, he sees a young girl in similar clown makeup and the scene shifts into pure terror.
She smiles widely and slowly walks over to him. It's a strange moment because we aren't sure if this little girl is Art's friend or a threat to him at first, and there's a second when it seems like she may be an even scarier and more dangerous clown than him. But the two then start playing patty cake, and when we see through the eyes of the sole other patron of the laundromat, we can see that the Little Pale Girl isn't there, or at least she's not visible to him, so she may well be an imaginary friend of Art's. Which gives us one of the most troubling images in the movie: A naked Art, sitting in a laundromat playing patty cake with the air.
14. Eating bugs and razor blade cereal
Bloody Disgusting
Early in "Terrifier 2," protagonist Sienna (Lauren LaVera) has an extended dream in which she finds herself on a set for what seems like a children's show, as a woman in a bright blue outfit plays a banjo and sings a jaunty song, while other teens sing along sitting on a playset. We'll discuss how the dream plays out more in a moment, but first the film gives us a quick aside that's memorably upsetting.
When Sienna looks around at her strange surroundings in the dream, she sees that on an adjacent set, there's a commercial being shot for a cereal. That cereal is "Art Crispies," and the box features Art pouring blood into a bowl of the cereal. We see a child smile as he pours himself a bowl of the cereal, which looks like Rice Krispies covered in blood, razor blades, and bugs. It's a gross image on its own, but what pushes the moment into being truly disturbing is that the child then takes a big bite of the cereal with a smile on his face. It's a moment that doesn't need extreme gore to make you sick to your stomach, but it certainly is effective.
13. Open fire on set
Bloody Disgusting
Sienna sits in her dream with the other teens as the woman in blue sings a song welcoming kids to the Clown Café. The woman introduces Art, who appears excitedly from a nearby food truck to offerthe kids gifts. Sienna reluctantly accepts the box he hands her, and opens it to find a beating heart surrounded by worms. The box then begins to fill with a black sludge, as we see Art rummaging around in his trash bag.
And then he pulls out a tommy gun and opens fire on the adults standing in line. It's an extremely abrupt explosion of violence that jolts the audience to attention after lulling us into a state of ambient dread with the growing sludge in Sienna's box. Blood flies everywhere as he fires on the crowd, with one person receiving special attention as we see their face literally cave in from the assault of bullets.
There's a beat as Art runs out of bullets, sets aside the gun and returns to his trash bag as Sienna, unharmed but covered in blood, attempts to escape. Art then pulls out a flamethrower, and walks over to the banjo-playing woman who's started plucking away again, and lights her on fire. She keeps playing for a while as Art dances and dowses her and the entirety of the set in fire. It's a scene that's disturbing not just for the violence of the gunshots and flame, but for the deeply unnerving surrealism of the set, the teens dressed as little kids, and the cheerful banjo music.
12. Slow motion cat o' nine tails
Bloody Disgusting
The entire extended finale of "Terrifier 2" almost seems like one extremely disturbing scene, but it's not. The last stretch of the movie offers some of the most visceral and stomach-churning images of the movie, but there are so many of them that we can't just consider it to be one long sequence.
One horrifying element of the movie's climax is Art's cat o' nine tails. The killer clown sneaks up behind Sienna's little brother Jonathan (Elliott Fullam) and begins to beat him with the weapon, tearing at his skin and forcing the boy to curl up in the fetal position. But Sienna comes to her brother's rescue, or at least she tries to. She finds Art torturing the boy and attacks him with a pipe, but he's unfazed and simply turns his focus from Jonathan to her. We see the effects of the weapon on Sienna's legs and face before Art tosses her aside and returns his attention to Jonathan.
Sienna intervenes again, crawling over to her brother and protecting his body with hers. Art gleefully continues whipping the siblings with the cat o' nine tails as the movie shifts into slow motion. It's this shift that marks the high (or low, depending on how you're counting) point of the sequence. Almost all sound leaves the movie except the light score and the whipping and tearing sounds of the cat o' nine tails as Art repeatedly strikes Sienna's back over and over and over again.
11. Laying out weapons and decapitation
Bloody Disgusting
After Art and Sienna's first meeting — during which he stares, follows, and finally honks a bike horn in her ear at a Halloween store — Art claims the store clerk as a victim. The clearly irritated clerk asks what he can help Art with, as the clown goes to the front of the store and turns the open/closed sign around, ensuring no one will interrupt him.
Art offers up the horn as an item he'd like to purchase, and after getting a price, he begins rustling in his trash bag as if looking for money. He pulls out chains, a beer bottle, a mallet, and a meat cleaver before the clerk finally threatens to call the police, at which point Art finds some cash and starts counting out coins.
But the clerk is done. As Art keeps counting coins, he tells him to get out of the store, and that's when Art strikes. He smashes the clerk over the head with the beer bottle, pulls him over the counter and jams the broken bottle into the man's eye. The man tries to crawl away to safety, but Art goes for his cleaver and whacks the man in the head, cutting a deep wound and lodging the cleaver firmly. Art struggles to get it free and we can see that the man is still alive as this happens, before finally Art gets the cleaver free and strikes repeatedly at the man's neck until his head is free from his body.
10. Jeff's mutilation
Bloody Disgusting
When Sienna, her friend Brooke (Kailey Hyman), and Brooke's boy toy Jeff (Charlie McElveen) get to the carnival where Art has taken Jonathan hostage, "Terrifier 2" spends some time moving back and forth between Sienna looking for Jonathan and Brooke and Jeff in the car. We know that something is going to happen to them, but as they continue to do drugs, make out, and tease one another without anything happening, we begin to wonder whether they'll somehow be fine.
And then Jeff goes to pee behind the car. We see that he's closing his eyes as he relieves himself, when suddenly a knife slices in from out of frame and stabs him right in the crotch. Brooke hears him scream and looks out the back window to see Art repeatedly stabbing Jeff between the legs. She tries to start the car to get away, and as she struggles we see the eviscerated front of Jeff's pants where after multiple stabbings, Art grabs onto ... well,something that's barely recognizableas a part of a human body and literally yanks it off as blood splatters everywhere.
9. Serving mom dinner
Bloody Disgusting
When Sienna and Jonathan's mom, Barbara (Sarah Voigt), discovers that Jonathan has been suspended from school for (allegedly) playing with a dead animal, the mother and son have a big fight that ends in him running out of the house. He doesn't make it far before returning, as he has a run in with the Little Pale Girl and quickly decides to return to the safety of home.
But while Jonathan has been out, Art killed has Barbara with a shotgun blast to the face. It's a shocking moment both because it's unexpected and because the blast literally blows her face away. But that's not actually the Barbara scene that we think deserves a place among the most disturbing scenes in the movie — it's what follows.
Jonathan returns home and finds his mother's corpse sitting at the family dining table. He begins to panic, and only becomes more frightened when Art walks into the room wearing an apron and ringing a bell. The clown places some mashed potatoes on a plate and proceeds to put the potatoes, well, where her face used to be. The combination of food and gore makes for one of the most stomach-churning moments in the movie — one that will make you want to wait a while before even looking at mashed potatoes again.
8. Candy head
Bloody Disgusting
Art spends a lot of time with Sienna's friend Allie (Casey Hartnett), and we'll certainly be discussing a lot of that higher up on this list, but the least disturbing (and to be fair, it's still incredibly upsetting) thing that happens to Allie and her mom happens once they're already dead.
After spending an obscene amount of time torturing Allie, once she is finally dead, we see Art offer candy to some children using her mother's severed and hollowed out head as a bowl. He's covered in blood from murdering Allie and her mother, and blood is still flowing down the head, but the children and their parents are unconcerned, instead commenting on "how cool" the candy bowl is. One child says that her candy is sticky and her other reassures her, "It's just fake blood." Another child chimes in, "I like it."
It's a chilling moment that highlights how desensitized we've become to images of violence, and how these things are often perceived as "fun" in a movie that pushes violence to absurd extremes. It's a moment that's more impactful for what it makes us think rather than for what it shows — though to be fair, what it shows is also pretty nasty.
7. The smashing opening scene
Bloody Disgusting
"Terrifier 2" opens moments after the end of the first "Terrifier," as we see Art follow the gurgling and crawling coroner who is desperate to reach the police. Art lets the man make the call while he smears his signature on a mirror with blood from the exit wound at the top of his own head, but after he's done writing his name, Art turns his attention to the coroner.
Art picks up a surgical hammer from a table and walks over the coroner. He then delicately takes the phone from the man's hand, places it back on the receiver, and whacks the coroner on the head with the hammer. The man falls to the floor and Art hits him with the hammer again before grabbing his face, and pulling one of his eyes right out of its socket.
Art plays with the eyeball a bit, placing it in his own empty eye socket, before smashing the still living coroner's face in with the surgical hammer. But that's not all. He then pulls the now dead coroner's head apart with his hands, like a bodybuilder opening a watermelon, and extracts his brain.
6. Snacking on Jonathan
During the extended final sequence of "Terrifier 2," having seemingly defeated Sienna by stabbing her with the sword that she was given by her father, Art returns his attention to a passed-out Jonathan. The clown snaps and claps in the unconscious youth's face in attempts to wake him, eventually even trying to slap him back to consciousness, but when nothing works, Art decides to start snacking on the boy.
Art begins to bite into Jonathan's hand and rip pieces of flesh away. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Jonathan soon regains consciousness and is horrified to find the clown literally eating him. The boy screams and tries to crawl away but Art grabs his legs and takes big, tendon-tearing bites out of Jonathan's ankles.
The struggle goes on for a while and as Jonathan does his best to wriggle away, Art just keeps chomping away at his ankles. It's a sequence that plays on all types of fears, of course there's the gore of ankles being split open, but beyond that it's the sheer desperation of Jonathan's attempts to escape in the face of being eaten alive.
5. Allie's first attack
Bloody Disgusting
Art appears at the home of Sienna's friend Allie after the girls' outing to the Halloween store. He demands candy, but she refuses to give this silent, creepy grown man in a clown costume the time of day, and returns to getting ready for a party. It's not long after that she hears a noise from downstairs and discovers Art in her kitchen, pouring himself a glass of water before attacking her.
He chases her back to her room, where he manhandles her and pulls her head up by the hair, stabs her with a scalpel. He then allows her to escape for a moment while he switches tools from the scalpel to a pair of surgical scissors. He again grabs her and gets down to his gruesome work. And he continues beyond even this level of absurd brutality, turning his attention to her limbs and slashing her a few more times for good measure as her blood sprays onto the walls before he leaves the room ... for now.
4. She's still alive
Bloody Disgusting
When Allie's mom returns home, we learn (along with her) that Art has gotten into the house by breaking the glass on a porch door. That immediately sets her on edge, and she shouts out for her daughter. When she doesn't get any sort of response she runs upstairs to her child's room, where she finds a sickening scene.
Art sits with Allie on the bed. Allie's been so thoroughly mutilated that it's hard to tell what parts of her body we're even looking at. Her mother screams in horror as Art laughs, literally slapping his knees as he sits cross-legged on the bed and shrugging an "oh, little old me" shrug. That's when Allie moves. Despite the horrific amount of carnage inflicted on her, she's still alive, conscious, and aware of the presence of this nightmarish clown. And somehow, that's the most disturbing thought of all.
3. Clubbing Brooke
Bloody Disgusting
After killing Jeff (or at the very least leaving him to bleed out), Art pulls Brooke out of the parked car, picks up the knife, and attacks her. But she kicks him in the face and is able to run away. She's hurt from being dragged through a broken window, though, and when she falls and cuts herself deeper she only becomes slower. Yet she makes it to a filthy bathroom before collapsing, and that's where Art catches up with her.
She tries to run again, but she's cornered and her wound won't let her escape. So she tries to threaten Art with a piece of wood that she wields as a club and begs him to stay away. He stands in front of her menacingly for a while, highlighting the chair leg he plans to use on her, which has knives, forks, and nails stuck into it. But he doesn't strike with his makeshift mace — instead, he throws acid on her face and laughs as her skin bubbles and burns.
Then he begins to hit her with the mace, beating her body and legs until she falls to the floor. Once she's on the ground he begins hitting her squarely in the chest with the weapon until her chest literally bursts open. Having turned her into a human piñata, Art lays aside the bludgeon, pulls out her heart, and takes a big, wet, blood spilling bite.
2. Birth of a head
Bloody Disgusting
We've become used to end credit scenes in comedies and especially superhero movies, but none of those can compete with the sheer intensity of the mid-credits scene in "Terrifier 2." Actually, it's more accurate to call it a mid-credit sequence, as it's a few minutes long and covers a lot of narrative ground.
We're transported to the Miles County Psychiatric Hospital, where Victoria Heyes (Samantha Scaffidi), the sole survivor of Art's attack from the first "Terrifier," is being cared for and confined after attacking a TV personality. We see two orderlies chat about their night and about how Victoria is actually rather cooperative given her past experiences and the outburst that landed her in the hospital. But as the orderlies discuss the "zombie platter" that one of their wives made for them, we see Victoria scrawling words on the wall in her own blood. And as she finishes her graffiti, we see that at the center of misogynist obscenities, she's drawn a heart with "Vicky + Art" in the center.
We see her belly begin to swell as she writes, and once her art has been completed she drops to the floor and begins to scream as blood spurts from under her hospital gown. As one of the orderlies checks back in on her patient, she discovers to her horror (and ours) that Victoria's licking blood off the newly birthed and very alive decapitated head of Art.
1. Pouring bleach and salt in open wounds
Bloody Disgusting
As we've mentioned, after Art's initial devastating attack on Allie, he simply leaves the room. We see Allie crawl towards her phone using the three severely injured limbs she has left, and for a moment it seems that maybe she'll be able to reach it. But then Art delightedly scurries back into the room holding a gallon of bleach and a container of salt.
Art empties the bleach all over Allie's body, making sure that every open wound of hers is made more painful by the stuff. He doesn't even give the bleach a minute to settle before dowsing her in salt, flamboyantly pouring it into his hands and throwing it over her body. It's horrifying to watch, but as usual, it goes one step further when Art pours himself a handful of salt, grabs Allie, and proceeds to forcefully rub the handful of salt into her skinless back before pulling the skin off of half her face.
The extremity of the practical gore here is matched by some of the other scenes in the movie, but it's the absurd level of sadism in this scene that makes it the most disturbing moment in the entirety of this wildly disturbing movie.