‘Terrifier 2’ Opens In 850 Theaters Amid Recent Horror Movie Successes

Opening tonight in 850 theaters for a Thurs-Sun run (Thurs, Sunday and Monday in AMC, Thurs-Sun everywhere else), Bloody Disgusting’s Terrifier 2 will take its shot at relative box office glory between Smile last weekend and Halloween Ends next weekend. It is not expected to light the box office on fire. Still, it is an unrated, 138-minute slasher sequel that is getting something of a conventional (if limited-time) theatrical release not through Fathom Events (which just had its best September ever) or the like. Offhand, looking at a few local theaters, the 6:45 at the Simi Valley Regal is 50% full, and the respective 7:30 pm showings at the Porter Ranch AMC and the Woodland Hills AMC are mostly sold out save for the front three rows. I’m not haphazardly predicting fortune and glory this weekend. Still, just in case, it’s reminder of how much the Covid-era theatrical recovery has depended on horror films during times of feast and famine.

Going back to mid-2020, when everyone hoped that Tenet would usher in a slew of year-end tentpoles, the theatrical offerings between Chris Nolan’s time-inversion thriller and Wonder Woman 1984 (then scheduled for early October) was made up by the likes of A Quiet Place part II, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It and Candyman. The plan was obvious, as horror is still considered a ‘worth seeing in a theater’ sub-genre and horror movies are cheap enough that they don’t have to break box office records to break even. Even as the ‘recovery’ shifted from late 2020 to early 2021, most of last year was held up by monster movies (Godzilla Vs. Kong, Venom: Let There Be Carnage), horror originals or new-to-you adaptations (Old, The Unholy, etc.) and franchise-friendly horror flicks like Halloween Kills, Quiet Place 2, Conjuring 3, Spiral: From the Book of Saw, The Forever Purge, Don’t Breathe 2, and Escape Room: Tournament of Champions.

Save for James Wan’s $40 million Malignant (which was obviously too pure for this wretched world), pretty much every major horror release was at least a modest hit. Even Spiral: From the Book of Saw, which only earned $40 million on a $20 million budget, was successful enough (presumably after factoring in PVOD and post-theatrical revenues) to justify a Saw X. Godzilla Vs. Kong ($469 million on a $165 million budget) gave Hollywood hope that they could pull off a 2021 summer movie season. A Quiet Place part II ($160 million domestic and $297 million worldwide) showed us that genuinely anticipated movies from pre-Covid times could still expect business at least on par with pre-Covid expectations. And just this year, we’ve seen good-to-great performances from Scream ($140 million on a $24 million budget), Nope ($171 million/$69 million) and The Black Phone ($160 million/$18 million). It has been horror that’s kept theaters alive since Bullet Train.

Just this last six weeks, we’ve seen The Invitation (which played in the Dracula sandbox without being an explicit Dracula flick), Pearl (which will earn about as much as X from this past April), Barbarian, Don’t Worry Darling (somewhat sold as a supernatural fantasy thriller) and Smile (initially intended for Paramount+) earn good-to-great grosses relative to budget and expectations. Even if Halloween Ends doesn’t end the Blumhouse trilogy on an all-time high (happy 60th birthday to Dr. No), it’ll provide asses-in-seats revenue while multiplexes wait for Black Adam to end this distributor-caused slump. Horror is a genre that audiences want to see theatrically and cheap enough for studios to roll the dice on theatrical. A strong, simple concept (demons who smile at you before you die), a primal hook (a kidnapped child gets phone calls from the killer’s dead victims) and/or marquee baddies (Michael Myers, Ghostface, Jigsaw, etc.) all make for a safer theatrical bet even without conventional movie stars.

And yes, horror films have long focused on ‘not a white guy’ protagonists and dealt with of-the-moment economic and social politics well before it was cool. That audiences find communal horror to be cathartic in dealing with real-world horrors has also changed the conversation from ‘horror is evil and bad for kids’ to ‘horror is healthy and can work as cinematic therapy.’ However, if we were still having the ‘horror is evil’ conversation, Damien Leone’s Terrifier 2 would be exhibit A. I imagine folks at Bloody Disgusting might take it as a badge of honor. At its core, Terrifier 2 is, like its scrappy (and briefly popular on NetflixNFLX
) predecessor, about a scary lecherous clown who stalks and attempts to murder an attractive young brunette just because she momentarily catches his fancy. I felt the first film, where two young women are terrorized and marked for death by a scary clown for no particular reason, played like a feature-length version of #YesAllWomen.

It played to fans of down-and-dirty 1970’s-style grindhouse horror shows (think the original Maniac). I’ll admit that I rolled my eyes in 2017 at the film and its eventual cult popularity; it was a casual Netflix selection courtesy of my horror-junkie spouse. However, I’m less inclined to moralize after seeing the media lose their mind over Joker in 2019 (an R-rated drama with a few violent scenes that spawned 0.00 copycat crimes). It’s just as likely that the fans of the first Terrifier are some of the same demographics that have made true crime documentaries such a big deal on streaming. True crime is among the few genres that rather plainly states that misogyny is bad; sometimes men kill women just because they feel entitled and women are right to clutch their keys at night. Terrifier certainly plays like a feature-length “men are afraid women will laugh at them while women are afraid men will kill them” screed.

This sequel was partially funded by an IndieGoGo campaign that raised $200,000 in the first three hours. Terrifier 2 feels like an attempt to make the ‘ultimate slasher movie.’ But is it any good? Well, it’s better than its predecessor, partially because its first act offers actual character development and authentic family relationships before the hack-n-slash begins. While the desire for character was given as the reason for the 138-minute runtime, truthfully, most of the good stuff is in the first act. It’s the second and third acts that drag. Lose a very long dream sequence in the first half-hour, choose one climax instead of three (my wife said it played like Clue) and severely trim the very long post-credit scene and you have a tighter, more satisfying but still ‘epic’ two-hour slasher sequel. No matter, David Howard Thornton’s Art the Clown makes a compelling silent murderer, and Lauren LaVera makes for an agreeable and sympathetic primary target/protagonist/final girl.

Yes, the film is loaded with blood (20 gallons worth) and gore, even if I think (like Hostel II) just one mid-film murder goes beyond conventional hardcore horror movie violence and/or ‘good taste.’ Terrifier 2 is very much ‘for the fans,’ partially because it’s cheap enough not to have to win over that many new converts. It’s not going to make my ten-best list. Still, I mostly enjoyed myself, ironically liking the character-focused opening hour (which does more to develop its leads than, say, Hellraiser) versus the conventional splatterific final hour. I don’t know if it’ll make any domestic box office noise over the next few days, but I hope it does. As someone who grew up with a critical consensus arguing that (most) horror was the lowest of the low, it’s been fascinating to watch the genre’s reputation grow. Moreover, in terms of commercial value, cinema’s biggest bad guys have become some of theatrical’s biggest heroes.