Inside the Bloody Chainsaw “Psycho” Tribute and Budget

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains minor spoilers for “Terrifier 3,” which hits theaters Friday.

Writer-director Damien Leone, the mastermind of the “Terrifier” series, is such an optimistic guy that it's easy to imagine him as a life coach, coach or teacher in another life. The conversation with him is peppered with lessons and inspiration that he received from filming his latest film “Terrifier 3”:

“You never know where inspiration will take you.”

“You have to make the quickest, best decisions you can.”

“I pull him aside and say, 'I literally feel magic here.' That's wonderful.' And that doesn’t happen often.”

The other shoe drops when he realizes that Leone's positive attitude benefits one of the most bloodthirsty horror films of all time. The unrated “Terrifier 3” unleashes the unhinged Art the Clown on Christmas, where he once again pursues final girl Sienna Shaw (Lauren LaVera). Along the way, the murderous clown kills dozens of people, often dressed as Santa Claus, while desecrating corpses left and right.

But there is a method to Leone's madness, as he formulates the films perfectly to show gorehounds something new and extreme. That's how he ended up with one of the film's signature set pieces: a rendition of Alfred Hitchcock's iconic shower scene in “Psycho.”

“One of the scenes I think people will be talking about when they leave this movie is a shower massacre,” he says. “One of my favorite films of all time is 'Psycho,' so I said to myself, 'If Alfred Hitchcock made this today, would he make it the same way?' Would it be a little more descriptive?' I said, “I know if I had the opportunity to do Psycho today and I did that shower scene, I would show everything the knife could possibly do.” I know that no one would let me do Psycho and I didn't want to blatantly give Art the clown a knife in a shower scene. So I said, 'How do I take this scene and make it my own? Let's give him a chainsaw instead, because that's more brutal than a knife, and let's make it two people instead of one person.'”

Leone's ambitious vision was complemented by significant financial improvement. After “Terrifier 2” grossed almost $16 million at the box office with an investment of $250,000, “Terrifier 3” reached a budget of $2 million – still extremely low by Hollywood standards, but for Leone and his team it made a big difference.

“One of the reasons 'Terrifier 2' took years to produce, aside from the pandemic setting us back, was because I had to do all the special effects with my producing partner Phil (Falcone), and that's a lot,” he says. “It was a huge undertaking. There were more special effects, more gags than I've ever written in a film before, so we had to take a break for weeks, go into his basement, create the effects and then go back to filming. This happened off and on throughout the filming. That’s really no way to make a movie and we knew we couldn’t do it again.”

The higher budget allowed him to hire Christien Tinsley of Tinsley Studio, a special effects makeup professional who has worked on productions such as “Passion of the Christ” and “No Country for Old Men.” It was a turning point for the film.

“It was unimaginable that I could have someone of this caliber immerse myself in the world of 'Terrifier' and create these special effects,” says Leone. “It was so cool and it allowed me to spend more time with my actors on set and my cinematographer and work on the look of the film and the production value.”

David Howard Thornton, who plays the silent antagonist Art the Clown, says working with Tinsley allowed him to add even more depth to his character's notoriously outlandish facial expressions.

“They redesigned my mask,” he says diversity. “In the first two films, I used the mask cast by Mike Giannelli, who was originally the face of the clown Art from All Hallows' Eve (Leone's film that introduced the character). The model wasn't shaped to fit my face, so we had to adjust it as best we could. This time we had a new one that fit my face and was made of a different material. We used foam latex and because it is much thinner it allows for more expression. You can see every movement of my face, so I wanted to use this as much as possible, and Damian said, “Just go wild with the expressions.” He's always bigger, bigger, bigger – “Make it as big as possible, special the eyes.” I had a lot of fun playing around with that.”

Despite the benefits, Leone says the money brought new challenges that they didn't face in the first two micro-budget films.

“You’re spread even thinner because you now have three times as many people and questions every day,” he says. “You just have to keep jumping from department to department. We had to deal with more union regulations, and we'd never really had to deal with that before. We weren't on anyone's radar, and now it's our turn everyone's Radar. We also had to shoot the film a lot faster because the clock is ticking, you're on the way to the races and sometimes you just want to take a break and see if everything works.”

Sometimes these decisions require dealing with etiquette. While Art the Clown fans may appreciate the fact that nothing seems to be off-limits, Leone says he pays attention to when children die in his films.

“I’m always looking for boundaries to reach, to push the boundaries,” he says. “Maybe just move past it. But you can absolutely fall into extreme aversion, which I try to avoid. There's a scene at the beginning where Art murders a child off-camera, and you just hear it. I could have shown that and the great way we executed the scene. I would never do that because to me it's just completely disgusting and you're going to alienate a lot of your audience. It's like shocking the audience so much that they just despair. I think it’s my job as an artist to take this path in a more interesting and responsible way.”

For die-hard horror fans who get through the whole gory affair that is “Terrifier 3,” there's a cliffhanger that immediately segues into a fourth film, which Leone has confirmed is in development. While he doesn't reveal too many details, he uses his typical enthusiasm to announce the next chapter.

“It will certainly be an epic showdown, an epic conclusion to this Art the Clown saga,” he says. “The idea I'm toying with in my head would probably be the most experimental in some ways, so I can't get too involved with it. Some really, really crazy things are going to happen in the next part.”