Horror and the Zeitgeist: Making Art (the Clown) Great Again
There's something familiar to this guy's way of thinking...
“The cruelty is the point.”
That's a phrase we've heard a lot lately, in regard to electoral politics and understanding why people follow Donald Trump. His stated policies are incoherent and extremely mutable, so supporters tend to just imagine in their heads that ones he mentioned that they like will stick. Mostly, though, they love that he attacks their enemies and never apologizes for it, and believe that the consequences for his actions are somehow unfair persecution, meriting an equally unfair response.
But when I was rewatching Terrifier 3 on my new 4K disc, it struck me that this phrase sums up Art the Clown as well. Now, people who dislike horror movies generally and slasher movies specifically have always argued that cruelty is the point, and therefore people who enjoy such movies are depraved sickos who get off on violence. I'm not going to rehash that argument except to say that anyone who can't tell the difference between real and fictional violence should also avoid cartoons, cop shows, action movies, or any fantasy with a dualistic vision of good versus evil. (Imagine how much better the world might be if people understood the Bible was a poetic-license take on real-world events, and not an eyewitness history report...but that's another column.)
I'm talking specifically about Art the Clown's motivation as a character, and whether it says anything about the state of the world, as so many popular horror characters have in my lifetime. Now, I don't necessarily think horror filmmakers go into a slasher project thinking they're going to make political points. Quite famously, people took Night of the Living Dead as political commentary specifically because it ends with the Black hero getting shot dead by people who just assume he's a zombie. Romero, however, never intended that necessarily – the part wasn't written for a Black actor, but just happened to be cast with one. Later on in the series, Romero was more obviously making points about immigration in Land of the Dead, but that one isn't remembered as fondly, if at all.
Slashers really came into their own in the '80s, with the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises giving us Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees. Both represented different sides of conservative paternalism taken to an extreme – each wanted revenge on those darn kids today, but for Jason, the targets were teens having sex, doing drugs, or anything else off the straight and narrow. For Freddy, it was about punishing the (Boomer) parents by killing their relatively innocent kids in the most extreme, over-the-top ways possible. The parents would have been the generation of hippies and the sexual revolution, or as Ronald Reagan might have put it, cultural Marxism. The subtle message, perhaps, was that you need us, the elders, to discipline your kids properly, you reckless leftists with your unintended consequences! Your taking the law into your own hands years ago is now destroying your children!
Ironically, by reveling in gore and kill counts, the movies repelled Boomers and WWII'ers, and only the kids went to see them.
The '90s brought us Scream as its defining franchise, a series of slasher movies that commented ironically on other slasher movies, like so much media in the '90s. The killer maintained iconography across every entry, but had a different identity each time – like Generation X, whom we were told then were a generation defined by being undefinable, Ghostface allowed multiple identities to blend into him/her (we hadn't fully adopted “they/them” yet), becoming a whodunnit series in which so many red herrings were thrown out it would never be possible to conclusively guess who was under the mask until the big reveal. The best mysteries “play fair” with the clues they drop; Scream never really did. By the time Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes cameo'd in the third one as Jay and Silent Bob, the orouboros was complete. Pop (culture) will eat itself, indeed. As did the generation.
The aughts brought us 9-11, and along with the popularity of Jack Bauer and 24, the notion that torture might be acceptable in a ticking-time-bomb terrorist scenario if it saved lives. Saw, and its Jigsaw Killer John Kramer, took this to the extreme, constructing time-limit deathtraps that required victims to self-mutilate in order to spare their own lives, which they had “wasted” by committing some kind of moral sin or faux pas. Jigsaw himself was dying, and looking to make a few new apprentices first, though every one of them turned out to be a bloodthirsty psychopath rather than the twisted moralist he was. In the age of the Iraq War, the atrocities at Abu Ghraib prison, and VP Dick Cheney's loose views on torture, Jigsaw was us, reckoning with how much brutality was okay to make the world better and safer again. And how much we could deceive ourselves that the bad people were ultimately doing it to themselves while our hands were clean.
When it comes to the 2010s, I think of Paranormal Activity (I was in a documentary about the franchise, so I suppose I would), but other colleagues clearly think it's the Conjuring franchise that dominated. In either case, the threat is the same – unseen forces invading your home and safe spaces. You could put many names or faces to such a concept, whether they be unauthorized immigrants, homegrown militias, sleeper cells, our own families turning on us – whatever society feared in the teens, it was usually of the homegrown or homeland intruder variety. There could perhaps be no more conservative or retrograde a symbol in this realm as Annabelle – a scary-looking white doll who's actually just a mindless prop for the sometimes-visible black demon attached to her. Remind me who the leading Democratic candidates for president had just been, around that time?
Just to be clear, because it's going to be really easy for folks to deliberately misconstrue – I am NOT saying James Wan had some racist desire to depict Barack Obama as a demon manipulating Hillary Clinton. What I am saying is that horror often subconsciously reflects the fears of the moment, and the villains often reflect conservative morality taken to an extreme. The use of black to depict evil and white to depict innocence is older than any of these decades, but arguably connected to racial divisions in a way that's bigger than any one filmmaker. Black evil using white innocence as its shield reflects, if nothing else, the fear of the invisible other within, and its unseen influence.
The fact that the teens ended with an actual invisible enemy in COVID-19 was the universe displaying irony and a sick sense of humor, clearly.
And now we have Art.
Art the Clown's method begins with harassing the potential victim, provoking them into insulting or physically assaulting him. He takes that as pretext for revenge, then kills them extremely slowly and painfully, all while silently laughing at their suffering. In the case of Sienna, the one girl he can't kill, he sets out to kill everyone close to her, and deliver as much casual pain to her as possible. He's controlled by a female-presenting demon, but only in the loosest sense – Art wants to kill pretty much anybody, and if the demon has a particular pattern it prefers, Art's fine with it, as long as he gets to be his chaotic self.
Do I think director Damien Leone meant Art the Clown to be Donald Trump specifically? I do not. Leone tends to explain every decision he ever makes, in commentaries and interviews, and that has never come up. But do I take it as part of the zeitgeist that a force of chaos, strings loosely pulled by vested interests, is popular because he plays victim even when he started it, then mocks and tortures all the characters that annoy his audience, and that his cruelty is the point? I do indeed.
Even within the Terrifier movies themselves, Art has become a popular figure, inspiring multiple Halloween costumes. Sure, what he does is horrible, but he's so entertaining! Where have I heard that before?
Perhaps we should note here that Art is literally in opposition to God and Heaven, which have backed Sienna. As for Trump, well, read the Bible and see if you think all the things it condemns remind you of anyone. I am, and they do.
On the other hand, when you look at the overt Catholic imagery in Terrifier 3, maybe “the cruelty is the point” has another meaning. The cruelty to the Christ figure (and, perhaps, the Disciples) is the point, because he (or in this case, she, Sienna) takes it as a result of what you, and everyone else who ever lived, did. Which makes it ironic that so many self-professed Christians take the side of the cruel.
At least we'll probably get a few more great Terrifier sequels out of the next four years.