There’s Always Money in the Horror Stand

Plus: ‘Smile 2’ and ‘Terrifier 3’ reviews!

Ho ho ho (Terrifier 3). (Courtesy Cineverse)

One of my favorite lines from the cult Fox TV show Arrested Development is “There’s always money in the banana stand,” uttered by light-traitor George Bluth Sr. His children take this to mean that the family can always make money by running a frozen banana stand on the boardwalk; he means that there’s literally money in the walls of the banana stand, hidden from authorities and enemies. Hijinks ensue.

This is kind of how I feel about horror movies: There’s always money in the horror stand. Historically speaking, the best return on investment has always come from cheap horror movies finding mass audiences, from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to Halloween to The Blair Witch Project to Paranormal Activity to the entire business model of Blumhouse: If you make a horror movie for cheap enough, it’s hard to lose money on it and there’s a decent chance you make an enormous amount of money on it. That tradition has carried into recent years, with movies like Smile and Talk to Me racking up huge grosses on relatively modest budgets.

There’s been some chatter this year that horror is in a slump, that audiences aren’t showing up like they used to for the scary stuff. Aside from the breakout hit Longlegs from Neon—which has become that studio’s highest-grossing film by a wide margin—and a couple of popular franchise extensions (A Quiet Place: Day One and Alien: Romulus), the overall scene has been quiet, particularly on the big studio front. Still, the basic economics of the genre are sound even there. Night Swim (Universal) didn’t cost much to make and earned more than $54 million worldwide. The Strangers: Chapter One, at $47 million worldwide, is probably one of the brighter spots this year for Lionsgate, which has endured a series of horrendous bombs.

The most interesting stuff is happening in the indie space, and it’s here where we see horror doing especially well. There’s Longlegs, of course, which remains one of the best box office stories of the year. But IFC has a modest hit in Late Night with the Devil and Mubi has done pretty well for itself with The Substance, which has already tripled the studio’s $12.5 million purchase of worldwide rights out of Cannes.

And then there’s Terrifier 3. I’ll discuss the film itself in a minute, but I just want to highlight the amazing work that director Damien Leone and studio Cineverse have done turning this series of truly deranged gorefests with an increasingly insane mythology into a legit mainstream success story. Like: this is an unrated movie that will be playing on nearly 3,000 screens in its second weekend, one that reportedly cost around $2 million to produce and earned more than ten times that figure in its opening four-day weekend. I really cannot emphasize enough how nuts that is! It’s unheard of!

Though, again, not quite. It’s an iteration of the Texas Chain Saw model, building word of mouth and amping up violence and offering younger audiences who have become a bit bored by what they’re seeing something new and a little dangerous. And it’s mean. One thing that unites some of the biggest hits of the year—a thing we see in Alien: Romulus, Longlegs, Terrifier 3, The Substance, and Late Night with the Devil—is that these movies aren’t afraid to be cruel to the characters in them. They don’t all have downer endings, but none of them are terribly upbeat.

That’s my main takeaway from what has worked this year: Modern audiences look out at the world and know no one is coming to save us. They aren’t expecting good to triumph, at least not without paying a terrible price first.

Terrifier 3. (Courtesy Cineverse)

Terrifier 3 is, like its predecessor, a hard film for me to recommend to most of the readers of this newsletter, who are likely kind, decent people. This is an unkind, indecent film, and one that only really works because of its depravity, not despite it. Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) has become an icon because he kills people in horrible, disgusting ways; he does it slowly and, as weird as it sounds, lovingly, and he caps the murders off with a point, a smile, and a beep of his funny little horn.

Look, here’s the thing: I think the primary job of the movie reviewer is to let audiences know whether a film works or not on its own terms. Does the comedy make you laugh; does the thriller leave you tense; does the action movie leave you sufficiently amped? Horror comes in many varieties—it’s a genre that encompasses everything from the soul-pervading dread of The Witch to the comic splatter of Evil Dead 2—and one of those varieties revels in turning stomachs with realistic-looking violence created by grotesque practical special effects. And on its own terms, Terrifier 3 and its predecessors are enormous successes.

The lore of these films has gotten crazier and crazier. Art has evolved from a Michael Myers-style unkillable bogeyman into something more explicitly supernatural. He is working with (or possibly for) Victoria Heyes (Samantha Scaffidi), one of Art’s victims from the first film whose body has been taken over by some sort of demon from Hell sent to Earth to make Sienna (Lauren LaVera) suffer in the hopes of extinguishing her faith and bringing about eternal darkness on Earth.

I don’t think I’m exaggerating here; the movie is suffused with religious symbolism. And while I’m sure there are some who will consider it blasphemous to, say, put a crown of thorns on the head of the long-suffering Sienna—who, in the first film, was fitted with feathery wings and a fiery sword like a gender-swapped Archangel Michael—as she is being tortured in the hopes of making her renounce her faith in the world and give up hope, there’s a real case to be made that this is, truly, a Christmas movie, and not just because Art spends most of the movie decked out in Santa’s duds.

Technically, I think this metaphor would work a bit better if the film were set during Easter; maybe Leone is saving that for the sequel. (Imagine Art the Clown in a pink bunny costume, lobbing Easter egg hand grenades!) That said, I’m not religiously inclined or educated enough myself to construct a coherent theological argument on Terrifier 3’s behalf; it may just be that Leone loves the iconography and wanted to bring to life the most-metal Christmas horror movie ever made. How else to explain the dream sequence in which a statue of, I believe, the Virgin Mary holds a choke collar on a demon blacksmith crafting a sword capable of killing Art and Victoria?

The Terrifier flicks are interesting beyond the gore is, I guess, what I’m getting at, though they work well enough on that surface level alone. Never before has such a variety of terrifying implements been used in so grotesque a manner: He deploys chainsaws, rats, homemade bombs, even liquid nitrogen to horrifying effect. I don’t think anything in this movie quite tops the bedroom sequence from the second in terms of sheer eye-covering squirminess, but those looking to feast on a good kill or six will leave with their bellies full.

Smile 2. (Courtesy Paramount Pictures / MovieStillsDB)

The Smile movies are like more mainstream Terrifier movies: lots of horribly inventive kills though slightly less intense onscreen gore, all done to punish a single character until she snaps.

The original was an enormous word-of-mouth hit, opening with $22 million in 2022 before legging out to nearly five times that amount domestically, at least in part because it felt like a throwback to high-concept early-’00s horror, something like The Ring or Candyman. There’s only one rule, really, and it’s pretty simple: someone witnesses someone with a horrible Smylex grin commit suicide, leading the witness to start imagining similar smiles everywhere; after a week of this, they feel like they’re going insane because no one believes they’re being stalked by a horrifying smile demon and kill themselves in front of someone who becomes the next victim, continuing the chain.

Smile 2 picks up six days after the original ended, with the character we saw witness that film’s heroine’s death trying to pass the smile curse on by killing a pair of Russian drug dealers. (He’s exploiting a Smile demon loophole, you see. Just … go with it, it’s fine.) He botches it and the cycle starts anew, the curse winding up in the body of pop star Skye Riley’s (Naomi Scott) drug dealer, Lewis Fregoli (Lukas Gage), who kills himself by repeatedly smashing a 35-pound weight plate into his face. The sound his skin makes as it sloughs off his jaw is as horrifying as anything in Terrifier 3 and the repeated sound effect throughout the film signifies that something horrible is about to happen.

When the first Smile came out, I joked that it made the subtext about modern horror text. To wit, there’s a running gag that nearly all of the modern “elevated horror” films put out by A24 and the such are “about trauma.” Smile was literally about how experiencing trauma curses those who have to deal with it, fundamentally altering their brain. The sequel takes that idea and applies it to the completely insane world of pop superstardom. Riley is trying to get her life back on track after a Britney Spearsesque series of breakdowns and mishaps. Drugs, car crashes, dead boyfriends: She’s had a rough year.

Needless to say, it’s about to get rougher.

Smile 2, like its predecessor, masterfully deploys the jump scare, that horror trick where the camera lingers and turns and BOO big scary face and sharp noise and ahh I just jumped in my seat a little. I kind of hate movies that lean on this crutch but only because it works on me every time. It helps that your eyes are magnetically drawn to Naomi Scott, who just dominates the screen in Smile 2. She’s routinely filmed in tight close-up, her face filling the screen, her eyes darting manically around as the mental walls close in. It’s an amazingly intense performance, awards-caliber stuff. Between her work here and Demi Moore’s work in The Substance, it’ll be hard for the awards bodies to completely ignore horror this year, though I’m sure they’ll find a way.

Again, Smile 2 is a tough film to recommend for general audiences: It’s brutal, it’s gory, and it’s kind of a downer. But it’s also incredibly effective. If you’re a horror hound, you have a bounty of riches at the multiplex this month.