As Joker Folie à Deux falters in its second week, horror sequel Terrifier 3 has soared. Does the latter tap into previously-overlooked movie-goer tastes?
For Warner Bros, the latest box office reports will make for grim reading. Writer-director Todd Philips’ sequel Joker Folie à Deux, which wasn’t doing terribly well financially to begin with, tumbled 81 percent over its second weekend to takings of just $7m in the US. This record-breaking drop-off in ticket sales left the way open for director Damien Leone’s low-budget horror sequel Terrifier 3 to take the number one spot, making around $18m.
Terrifier 3 and Joker 2 are from two opposing ends on the filmmaking spectrum. The latter is a studio-backed comic book movie made for somewhere in the region of $190m; Terrifier 3 is an indie shocker made for $2m ā a sum that only covers 10 percent of Joaquin Phoenix’s salary for the Joker sequel.
There are, however, some fascinating parallels between these two movies, and both might have something pertinent to say about current movie-going habits. The first, ‘well-duh’ point of comparison is that both are about murderous sociopaths in stage makeup, meaning the ‘send in the clowns’ headlines we’ve seen over the past couple of days have essentially written themselves.
Beyond their protagonists, though, both films rootle around in the history of moviemaking for inspiration. Todd Philips, having moved on from openly referencing Martin Scorsese character studies in 2019’s Joker, conjures up a hybrid of musical and courtroom drama in his sequel. The result is a film that mixes the 1970s grime and gloom of Joker with a hint of Old Hollywood glamour. Joker Folie à Deux’s cinematographer has also cited Francis Ford Coppola’s 1982 musical One From The Heart as a touchstone for its visuals. It’s an ironic film to bring up, given what a creatively risky and financially doomed film that turned out to be.
Terrifier 3, meanwhile, continues its predecessors’ efforts to revive the extreme gore of grindhouse cinema. The series’ distant ancestor is undoubtedly 1963’s Blood Feast, director Herschell Gordon Lewis’ unapologetically trashy horror. Made for just $24,000, it quickly became infamous for its extreme violence, which included everything from hacked-off limbs to ripped-out tongues. Critics panned it, but Blood Feast was an underground success, making millions of dollars in profits, spawning the ‘splatter’ subgenre and popularising the ‘barf bag’ as a marketing gimmick. (Terrifier 3 continued this proud horror tradition by getting its own barf bags in some cinemas.)
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Unlike Blood Feast, Terrifier 3 has largely been warmly received by critics ā its Rotten Tomatoes score, if you put stock in such things, is actually higher than Joker 2’s. Unlike Philips’ sequel, which seems calculatedly made to repel movie-goers who made the first one a hit, Terrifier 3 instead goes for the classic horror sequel approach: bigger, louder, nastier. There’s something to be admired about Philips’ against-the-grain approach to following up his own $1bn box office hit, though Warner Bros executives are probably wondering why he couldn’t have played it a little safer.
Joker 2 also continues a pattern that Hollywood studios are still struggling to escape from. By the time everyone’s expanded salaries had been paid and the film had been shot, the sequel cost three times as much to make as the original. Had Warner managed to make Joker 2 for around the cost of its predecessor ā roughly $60m ā then its current global tally of around $165m would have looked disappointing rather than outright disastrous.
Terrifier 3’s $2m budget is up considerably on its predecessors (Terrifier 2 cost $250,000 while 2016’s Terrifier cost as little as $35,000), but it’s now a mini-franchise with its own established fanbase. Some canny marketing ā Art the Clown made a recent appearance in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III ā and near-viral word-of-mouth helps explain how it’s become such a breakout success over the weekend.
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The comparative success of a film which contains such extreme splatter once again cements horror as one of the more dependable genres at the box office. Movie-goers, it seems, not only love horror, but are enthusiastic about going to see it in a cinema and enjoying it as a social experience rather than waiting to see it in the quietude of their own living rooms.
It’s a wonder whether there might potentially be a gap in the market for grindhouse cinemas themselves ā smaller, local theatres that specialise in low ticket prices and more outré genre movie experiences than you’d find in multiplexes. A kind of Blumhouse of cinema chains, if you like.
Until someone with the money and the stomach for such a business venture emerges, it’s left to Terrifier 3, and movies like it, to bring a hint of grindhouse edginess to the scrubbed-up sterility of modern cinemas.