Warning: This article contains SPOILERS for Terrifier 3 (2024)

While Terrifier 3’s cliffhanger ending is arguably even worse, its first scene sparked serious controversy in cinemas.

According to The Independent, the sequel’s opening scene led to “Walkouts and vomiting,” and it is not hard to see why. Unlike the first two movies in the series, which both take place on Halloween night, Terrifier 3 is set during the Christmas season. The opening scene expands on a concept showcased in the earliest teaser trailer for Terrifier 3, wherein Art the Clown sneaks into a family home dressed as Santa Claus and encounters an excited child. An extended riff on this gag comprises the opening scene, whose shocking gore and brutality inevitably lead to walkouts and stomach upsets.

What Happens In Terrifier 3's Opening Scene

Terrifier 3’s Opening Scene Is A Chilling Home Invasion Set-Piece

Terrifier 3’s opening scene is a ten-minute home invasion sequence that takes place chiefly from the perspective of a young girl as Art The Clown, dressed as Santa Claus, murders her family. The movie begins with the child waking up to footsteps on the roof. Assuming this is Santa Claus, she wakes her bickering parents. Her mother reassures her while her father ignores her, but the child soon heads downstairs when she hears further commotion. Down there, she finds Art the Clown dressed as Santa Claus and wielding an ax. Art hacks her brother to death as he sleeps.

Art immediately moves on to killing her father, with the subsequent noise waking up the girl's terrified mother. The unnamed mother makes it downstairs before she is cornered by Art and dismembered, with the clown cutting off her arm before splitting her head in two. Terrifier 3’s violence is as intense as early audience responses suggested, with director Damian Leone’s superb special effects making the sequence genuinely shocking. In an era when CGI blood has become commonplace, the brutal physicality of the opening scene’s gore is stomach-churning. Its most shocking moment is the sight of the young son’s dismembered body.

Terrifier 3's Opening Scene Has Made People Throw Up

Terrifier 3’s Opening Was Too Much For Many Viewers

While Terrifier 3’s creators were inevitably accused of exaggerating audience reactions to create hype for the horror movie, Terrifier 3’s opening scene did prompt walkouts and vomiting. This isn’t really a major shock, since the scene crosses a major taboo that few horror movies dare to address. It is rare for horror movies to depict the death of child characters in much detail, as this is particularly shocking even to hardened genre fans. Terrifier 3 breaks this famous horror taboo when Art kills a young boy and presumably kills his even younger sister off-screen.

While it might seem like this scene couldn’t possibly be darker, Leone was surprisingly concerned about taking the violence too far.

After discovering her hiding in a cupboard in the opening scene’s closing moments, Art grins at the camera and Terrifier 3’s title card appears. While it might seem like this scene couldn’t possibly be darker, Leone was surprisingly concerned about taking the violence too far. In an interview with Variety, the director noted “There’s a scene in the beginning where Art murders a child off-screen and you just hear it. I could have shown that and the glorious way that we executed the scene. I would never do that, because, to me, that’s just completely off-putting.”

Why Terrifier 3's Opening Scene Is Controversial

Terrifier 3’s Opening Sees Art The Clown Break A Horror Taboo

While Leone may have pulled back on Terrifier 3’s nastiest excesses, this was not enough to stop the movie’s opening scene from becoming incredibly controversial. Terrifier 3’s opening scene alone features more gore than most of 2024’s biggest studio horror movies, and since one of the victims is a young child, it is no surprise that mainstream viewers were shocked by the sequence. Terrifier 3’s strong reviews prove that the movie’s extreme violence wasn’t enough to alienate critics, and its extraordinary box office success shows that indie horror doesn’t need to be sanitized to succeed.

Terrifier 3 is currently playing in theaters.

That said, viewers should still be wary of just how gory Terrifier 3 is as a viewing experience. The reports of vomiting and walkouts during the opening scene are no shock given how violent the movie is, and the sequel only gets more gleefully nasty from that moment on. Leone’s Terrifier 3 starts as it means to go on, with a sequence that is not only legendarily gruesome but also simultaneously indicative of the movie’s tone as a whole.

Source: Variety

The Independent