At DreamWorks, they have reason to be satisfied wild robotits latest animated version. The reviews have been excellent and the box office performance since its release in the United States on September 27 has been very strong: it has currently grossed over $230 million worldwide and analysts have been surprised by the strength with which one had endured its third week on the billboard. Those remaining 14 million in American theaters proved that wild robot continues to attract the public, but they also aroused a suspicion: what if this additional box office was possible thanks to the fact that the young people who paid their entry did so to sneak into Terrifying 3?
Terrifying 3 It is rated R, which prevents minors under 18 from entering without adults. It’s also an independent production and far from the structures of Hollywood – the biggest company that backed it is Bloody Disgusting, a media conglomerate specializing in horror films – which has even more merit than Terrifying 3with a budget of only 2 million, has already collected more than 55 million worldwide. It’s a small phenomenon that – driven by rumors that people from Australia or the UK were vomiting and passing out in the middle of the room – might have stimulated the playfulness of some teenagers, once that they acquired their ticket wild robotSneak into a film famous for its explicit ultraviolence.
It’s hard to say whether this happened and unintentionally boosted DreamWorks’ revenues, while it’s much easier to argue against DreamWorks’ triumph Terrifying 3 —which arrives in Spain from Selecta Visión in time for Halloween— to the failure of Joker: Folie à deux. It’s not that they’re direct competitors, but both were released in a tight time frame and are directed by clowns. Batman’s famous enemy, starring in a sequel that critics and audiences rejected and which will cause Warner Bros. to lose millions of dollars. And facing him is Art the Clown, a ruthless serial killer that Damien Leone created more than 15 years ago. Art is present in almost all of Leone’s works behind the cameras and, as the director has already confirmed, we will see it again in Terrifying 4. or even Terrifying 5why not.
This 42-year-old New Yorker is very happy with the success of Creepy because, among other things, it allowed him to deepen his character while testing the extremes to which his commitment to the game could go. blood. Which gives us the first key to the phenomenon of Creepy: Its main architect is a lover of unredeemed offal, a sort of adolescent impetus who can’t believe how lucky he is that the industry allows him to take these steps. Fortunately, as long as he connects with the audience, he plans to enjoy it until the end.
Meet Damien
The art debuted in a short film called The 9th Circlewhile Leone had already started working as a makeup and practical effects specialist. It was in 2008, and three years later, Art reappeared in another short film precisely titled Creepykeeping Mike Giannelli as actor. These were very cheap short films that still made noise in the right circles, so in 2013 Leone was commissioned for an episodic film called Halloween Eve. Producer Jesse Baget’s idea was, in the style of the recently launched franchise V/H/Shave several directors, but Leone managed to have total control. SO Halloween Eve It consisted of his two previous short films plus an additional one, and a sequence shot in mortar to integrate them into the film.
Such a curious scaffolding gives Halloween Eve an almost experimental quality, with images from the shorts alternating with the reverse shot of a babysitter and the children watching them on television to evoke a kind of study in how we receive the cruelest terror. This intellectual vocation was completely sidelined with the defining film of Creepy, financed with crowdfunding in 2016 thanks to the small cult generated around Art. CreepyIn fact, it was a complete void of any plot clause to limit itself to the bloody misdeeds of his silent killer, but the proof that he had not been conscious was shown by Leone himself in reacting to the criticism who accused him of the same thing. , to have no argument.
Facing Terrifying 2 Leone pulled himself together. He read screenwriting manuals, attended meetings with senior writers, and made sure no one could accuse the sequel of being a mere meat fest. The result was endearing: Terrifying 2 It lasted 138 minutes, almost an hour longer than the first, and traced a clumsy mythology around Art that associated it with an antagonist – Leone did not miss the opportunity to explain that the Joker had found his Batman – named Sienna Shaw, played by Lauren. LaVera. Sienna had been chosen to fight the evil clown according to the wishes of her late father, a designer among whose drawings we found a winged armor that his daughter would have to wear when the time came.
This armor, of course, was an uncomfortable, hypersexualized outfit that, in the context of Halloween night, Sienna would heroically wear to survive Art’s attack. This brings us to another central element of the phenomenon. Creepy: there is no self-awareness anywhere. It is possible that Leone conceived Sienna’s father as an alter ego of himself, a demiurge who creates the heroine to fight evil. But it is a little more improbable that Leone realized the onanist fantasy that this event does not fail to imply, limiting himself to paying homage to an iconography heavy metal typical of the 80s. Like misogyny and the fixation on female suffering, these are traits of a recognizable imagination that Leone does not intend to reread.
It’s an attitude that has found its audience. Terrifying 2despite absurdly long footage and an unconvincing plot, was a box office success in a way its predecessor never could have been. Creepy (relegated to limited circuits and dying video stores), and its ingredients were saved for the third installment without eclipsing the central appeal. In other words, savage murders. The creative desecration of the human body according to the efforts of a makeup and VFX department, let’s say it already, worthy of winning the Oscar. Terrifying 3 It is an artistic summit in this regard, which beyond Leone’s scattered temperament invites us to ask ourselves why he pleases people so much, and what place he occupies in current horror cinema.
All the clowns of the past
The main reason is of course the art. It’s a very happy creation, played with great aplomb by David Howard Thornton after Giannelli’s retirement following Leone’s first short film. His iconicity comes both from his appearance and his mime gestures: the art does not speak, he only makes circus and exaggerated gestures, bathing his murders in an enormously effective black humor. Of course he’s not the first evil clown to appear in horror films, but this silence separates him from Pennywise. Article when it comes to continuing to express coulrophobia (irrational fear of clowns) caused, precisely, by the insistent influx of them in pop culture.
In the DNA of CreepyHowever, and in front of the clownish shadow, the affiliation of the films to a shaker where the slasher mixes with splash —that is to say, serial killers who harass teenagers in front of the copious splashes of blood—, and the cocktail is served with a strong aroma ancientseasoned by the sentimental memory of Leone. The films of Creepy They are anchored in the B-movie cinema that emerged so much in the 70s, when it was a question of offering barbarity without an alibi and practical effects of admirable quality. It’s a legacy that began to be quite fruitful in the early 2000s with Rob Zombie, whose formidable debut (The house of 1000 corpses) also had a clown as a killer: Sid Haig’s Captain Spaulding.
This return to the 70s has not lost its continuity, managing to thrive in an event as satisfying as Grindhouse —double session organized by Tarantino and Robert Rodríguez in 2007—, or movements like the torture porn -that they brought Saw and Eli Roth – and the one that might be most helpful in understanding Creepy: he mumble. left the neighborhood mumble this gave us Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig, the mumble He tried in the middle of this century to refresh American horror cinema in independent circles, where reflection had not had to avoid the old homage. It is precisely at this intersection that Ti West emerges, who enters The Devil’s House and his trilogy x (made this summer with MaXXXine) attempted to combine his respect for essences with an elaborate, even updated, reflection on them.
That’s not what Leone did. Not even now that Terrifying 3 disguises Art as Santa Claus and places his new adventures at Christmas, linking the film to the founding fictions of slasher style Black Christmas either Night of peace, night of death. Leone resembles West in the laborious recreation of 70s and 80s textures – the grainy photography of Terrifying 3as well as the John Carpenter-style synthesizer soundtrack, are very useful for this, but they reject any distance. Don’t respect tradition slasher splatter with analytical eyes, but rather feverish and passionate: with a contagious joy which, without ceasing to be mythomaniac, sees itself capable of internalizing what the original driving force was. And how I could grease it today.
What’s going on with the movies Creepy They succeeded because they were honest. They’re not fooling anyone. They have the gratifying, warm aroma of a trinket, narrative pretensions that amount to telling a simple story without blushing – even if that’s what costs the most, even in Terrifying 3—, and a central objective reduced to the methodical exposure of atrocities. Leone may think of himself as Sienna’s father, but it’s not hard to see him in Art as well: a radiant smile contemplating how the human body can break, playing with organs and tissues to confront the lightness of being while discovering, in an endless frenzy, how pleasant this lightness becomes. In its own way, it’s beautiful.
