Damien Leonewho has managed to attract the attention of Stephen King himself with his film Terrifier 2, has given Hobby Consolas an exclusive interview in which we have been able to ask him about the future of the saga starring the tenacious, cannibal and bloody murderer art the clown.
In addition to showing his deep admiration for the master of horror and his surprise at his laudatory words, which were immortalized on the film’s poster, we wanted to ask him about the moment the genre is experiencing.
Hobby Consolas (HC): We are experiencing a resurgence of the slasher in parallel to other horror subgenres. What do you think is the reason for this renewed interest from the audience?
Damien Leone (DL): Um, that’s it. I agree, it is something that is happening. I think the slasher genre is thriving right now and I’d like to think I had something to do with it.. I don’t know if I did. I think sometimes there’s something you can’t define, but you know organically what makes fashion change.
Like there’s a limited number of possession movies you can watch or haunted house movies, and then people get sick of it and are thirsty for blood, literally. It’s time to gore graphic.
Luckily the stars have aligned and we have managed to enter that “window” of interest. So hopefully I can get more work done before that window closes again and it’s gone for another five or ten years.
HC: The influence of the cinema of the seventies and eighties is palpable in your cinema, but what are your sources of inspiration to create new and atrocious deaths?
DL: That is very, very true. The 1970s in particular is my favorite decade of cinema in general, not just horror movies. So I always try to capture that aesthetic of the late seventies, early eighties, if possible, in my workand not make it too misleading, hoping that it is genuine.
Regarding my sources of inspiration, sometimes I like to take very traditional tropes or shoot scenes that I’ve seen a hundred times in other slashers with a twist. And then I’m like, “How can I take this classic and make it so much more interesting?” This time I thought, “What would a clown do with a meat cleaver?” It will be different than what we’ve seen Jason or Michael Myers do.
One day I was in a Barnes & Noble bookstore and I was flipping through a book about Jack the Ripper, and it turns out there was an actual photograph of his latest victim, which was perhaps his worst crime. The victim is so horribly mutilated that only the remains of him are left in the bed. And it was really shocking and disturbing to me.
And I said, “Well, what if Art the Clown was responsible for doing it?” For example, “what did he do to this poor victim to end up in this situation?”
So I took that photo and reverse engineered it to try to show exactly what happened. That was the moment where I said, “okay, that image is going to be the genesis or the impetus for this now epic murder scene that I’m going to try to achieve.” And it was embodied in Terrifier 2 in the darkest sequence of the film. This was the source of inspiration and the creative process to achieve it.
HC: In your films, the camera shows everything and doesn’t move away to avoid emotional impacts and visceral reactions in the audience. Do you impose any limits on yourself?
DL: Yes, absolutely. There are definitely lines that I think I shouldn’t cross. Whenever I write something, I think five steps ahead of how much worse it could be. And then I always repeat myself and say: I have to stop here, because if I go there, I am going to alienate too many people.
So It’s always a personal challenge where I want to get to the line of graphic violence that’s more or less accessible to mainstream audiences and then bypass it by going a step further and see if I can see if they can handle it..
But if you go ten steps above that line, you realize you could lose them all. Listen, sometimes everyone’s tastes are different. Everything is subjective. What someone thinks is too graphic, someone else, another die-hard horror fan, will say that’s nothing and may think, “I’ve seen much worse than that.”
So It’s always a challenge trying to find that middle ground, that happy middle ground.. But hey, you never know. Actually, in the end, it just has to be based on the personal taste of the director.
HC: Terrifier 2 has some interesting revelations about Art, but there are also many unknowns ahead of the third installment. Will we continue to delve into his backstory in the future?
DL: Oh absolutely. There are so many questions that have been raised in the second part… And I have not wanted to answer them on purpose because I know what I am going to do with at least one of them. I will most likely make two more movies to tell this full story. And then I don’t know if I’ll have something left to tell.
If you give all the information in the second part, then there is nothing left to discover, or at least nothing really interesting. And then it cuts to Art the clown dispatching another group of people, which is what most people want to see anyway. As a storyteller, as I get older, I become more concerned with telling an interesting story and not just killing people in the worst way possible..
So I always try to do both. I think it’s important that these movies have that marriage of interesting story and characters that you care about juxtaposed with this very graphic and horrible gore…at the end of the day, it gives you something that you don’t really see all the time, and that’s what makes the movie interesting.
HC: Do you have any personal challenges left to tackle in this saga? Not all directors have full creative control to do what they want without any kind of censorship.
DL: Yeah, well, so far, I don’t have any censorship to worry about because it’s all independent. I’ve never had people look down on me and say can I do this or can’t do that.
It’s like we put horror in theaters completely unrated. We never presented it to the ranking board and it was a huge success so we could easily do it again.
The challenge is that there is now a lot of interest from Hollywood studios for Terrrifier 3. And the best thing about it is that the budget would be astronomical compared to what I have and I would have a massive launch, but then again, I would have a lot of people saying, “You can’t do that, you can’t do that.” That is too violent. We have to offer an R rating.
So I’m going to have to weigh the pros and cons when it comes down to it and I think I’ll always lean forward and focus on my creativity. I’ve always been interested in my artistic integrity, especially with this franchise.. So I don’t think I need to worry about censorship, I’m just worried about messing it up because we haven’t explained everything yet.
And everyone wants to know Art’s background and who or what he is and all that. So when I explain what that is, no matter what you say, probably 50% of the community will hate it and 50% will think it’s absolutely brilliant. So I hope… I hope more people like it and that what I do in the future doesn’t ruin everything that came before. I can’t please everyone.
HC: Lauren LaVera is an excellent performer. What caught your attention the most about this young and talented actress?
Oh my God. All! It was almost instinctive. As soon as I saw her, she fit the bill: I saw a combination of her acting and her physicality because she’s a martial artist. I thought, “This is Sienna.” Not to mention, I already created the poster before casting Lauren for the role, I designed the poster for Terrifier 2. And you see Sienna on the poster, although we don’t have the actress yet. And I was like, “That’s her.” I mean, she works.
Then I met Lauren in person because I had her come over and do some readings to see if she had chemistry with the other actors she was casting and to see if she would marry Eliot, who plays her younger brother, and Casey Hartnett, who plays Alli. And it was like she immediately she was a no-brainer. Her talent is so undeniable.
She gives a very layered performance: she’s so vulnerable, yet strong and empathetic. And that’s just what we needed. That’s what I was really looking for for this character. She wanted the audience to side with her and support her, which is very hard to do because everyone who sees this movie loves Art, and they basically just want to see Art kill everyone.
So I knew that if we got a decent amount of people out and had them root for Sienna or side with her, then we would have done our job. And seriously, most if not all of it goes to Lauren Rivera for the powerful performance that she gave, because if you don’t have the right actress in the part, she’s just not going to work.
HC: In recent statements, you commented that Terrifier 3 would be the scariest film in the saga and that you want to return to the origins of the clown. What idea do you have in mind?
DL: Yeah, well, I can’t go into details yet, but all these elements of Art will appear as the world of clowns, which will be very interesting and fresh. So that’s exciting. But yeah, I want this to be the scariest movie yet.
And for that I want to turn my eyes towards Fire. It was a 20-minute short film, and that’s when I thought the clown had really turned into a slasher for the first time. So I developed his lack of sense of humor. It shows Art chasing a woman who is in a car trying to get away from him throughout the entire film.
It’s very, very creepy, much like a lot of the genuinely creepy horror movies I grew up loving from the early ’80s and late ’70s. The thing is, I feel like I’ve lost a bit of that tone as it’s gone on, especially with Terrifier 2: It’s become more epic and there’s a lot more fantasy in it and there’s more action, which is great.
But I don’t want to keep going too far in that direction where we lose that creepy essence that made Art the clown what he is in the first place.
So It’s going to be a personal challenge to make this the scariest. I want people to be more terrified of Art than they’ve ever been before, so we’ll see if I can pull it off.. That’s my goal… doesn’t mean I’m going to achieve it. But I will try!
