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TIE-IN ME UP, TIE-IN ME DOWN: “TERRIFIER 2” Gets Inside the Head of Art the Clown

Tuesday, December 10, 2024 | Books, Tie-In Me Up Tie-In Me Down

By JOEL HARLEY

Tim Waggoner is a prolific name in the field of tie-in literature. Having contributed original novels to the Nightmare on Elm Street, Supernatural and Alien franchises, the author has also penned novelizations of Halloween Kills (2021), a Resident Evil sequel and, most recently, Ti West’s X trilogy. Out now is his adaptation of slasher sequel TERRIFIER 2, originally written and directed by Damien Leone and released in 2022. The film is currently experiencing renewed interest thanks to threequel Terrifier 3, unleashing all manner of Christmas carnage in multiplexes around the world. This, in turn, was preceded in many territories by a double feature of the first two, released on big screens for the first time. Art the Clown is the name on everyone’s lips right now … if he doesn’t rip them off your face first.

This novelization faithfully follows the plot of Leone’s film, with a few cheeky changes along the way. Waggoner’s TERRIFIER 2 doesn’t pick up precisely where the original left off – it starts just before the end. Art the Clown is dead, having swallowed a bullet after being confronted by the police. Mysteriously resurrected during the subsequent postmortem, Art wastes little time getting back into the swing of things.

Master of the movie novelization, Tim Waggoner

It’s in the early stretch where it takes the most liberties, getting inside Art’s head (quite literally, as he probes around inside his gunshot wound and cavity where his eyeball used to be) as the Miles County Clown comes to terms with his resurrection. Meeting the Pale Girl, Art is transformed from flesh-and-blood serial killer to demonic entity, beginning the franchise’s about-turn into the supernatural. From there, we meet the Shaw siblings – final girl Sienna and her brother Jonathan. Halloween is coming, and the pair have big plans. So too, does Art the Clown, starting with Sienna’s pals.

This sequel features one of the trilogy’s most infamous set pieces, and readers will be keen to see how the book adapts its big gore sequence. Allie’s bedroom death scene makes for suitably horrible reading, told from her perspective as Art goes to work. This goes on for around six pages, vividly describing the brutalities performed in intricate detail while making readers party to Allie’s agonized final thoughts.

“Allie understood then that she had only thought she’d experienced ultimate pain. Pain was infinite, she realized, and there was always a new level to discover.”

Rubbing salt (or bleach) into the wound, Waggoner’s prose takes as just as much relish in describing her mother’s anguish as she discovers her daughter dead trapped on the brink of death, a demonic edgelord clown drooling over the remains of her desecrated body. The relentless splatter starts to feel a bit Garth Marenghi after the first few kills, but Waggoner embraces the series’ signature violence, giving the obscene gore his all.

However, the author has evidently gotten the memo where the misogyny is concerned, and his TERRIFIER 2 follows in the footsteps of Terrifier 3 in its care to make Art’s violence against women not seem like a predilection or fetish – including a scene in which Art tears off a guy’s junk and parades his penis around on his head like a unicorn. This concerted effort to downplay the virulent misogyny of Terrifier and the 2011 short is one of the few lines of good taste the series has drawn to make Art palatable to a wider audience – making the clown more of an equal opportunities killer these days. He may very well hate women, but if he does, the book isn’t touching that one with a ten-foot barge pole.

Elsewhere, the story remains weak, and the lore is silly. However, the author does what he can with the otherwise underpowered screenplay. This adaptation won’t do much to win the series’ detractors over, but it does go some way to flesh out the characters and explore those who got less screen time in the film. True, they’re not particularly exciting people (Sienna herself won’t get interesting until Terrifier 3), but the book does well to better explore them – adding in additional dream sequences for Jonathan and his mom, and killing off his silly little friends, too. The book also succeeds in tightening up the film’s horrendous pacing, better structuring Art’s rampage and making Victoria’s return at the end come less out of left field.

What’s more difficult to translate is the series’ sense of humor, lacking the visual comedy of Art stripping off in a laundromat or winding Sienna up in a fancy dress shop. The book gets a laugh-out-loud scene in Art’s unicorn impression, while Waggoner finds much humor in Art’s surprisingly droll inner monologue. He’s only ever been an interesting character when he’s doing foolish shit (the kebab shop in the first one, the bar scene in the third) and without David Howard Thornton’s performance, it’s hard to make him a compelling figure. It’s a testament to the writing, then, that TERRIFIER 2 manages to go under the hood (or little black top hat) to find what makes the Terrifier tick.

With Terrifier 3 currently going gangbusters at the box office and even more in the works (including Waggoner’s adaptation of the third film!), Art the Clown is the man of the moment. Love him or hate him, this grisly adaptation of his sophomore feature will only further his domination.

“Joke ‘em if they can’t take a fuck.”

Tim Waggoner’s TERRIFIER 2 novelization is out now from Titan Books.

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