"Terrifier 3" has slashed the box office to pieces in just a few short weeks, but that success didn't happen overnight.
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00:00Wickedly playful and totally unhinged, Art the Clown is a phenomenon nobody saw coming.
00:05So, how in the world did director Damian Leone manage to invent such a grotesque creature?
00:11How did he find David Howard Thornton and rocket him to fame? And how did he turn a
00:15low-budget short film into a worldwide sensation? The answer is more wholesome than you'd expect.
00:21He just followed his dreams. Leone revealed to Entertainment Weekly that the original idea for
00:26Art just popped into his head one day. He said,
00:28"...I had this idea of a clown terrorizing a woman on a city bus.
00:32It's awkward and uncomfortable and maybe even funny,
00:35but then it gets progressively more intimidating and aggressive."
00:39Swapped a city bus for a train station, and that idea became the opening scene
00:42of Leone's directorial debut, a 2008 short film titled The Ninth Circle.
00:48Shot on a shoestring budget, this short film established a couple of Art's signature traits,
00:59including his gleeful sense of menace. But it was Leone's follow-up short,
01:032011's Terrifier, that turned Art from a caricature into a character.
01:07Believe it or not, that was almost the end of Art. Leone told Dread Central that Terrifier
01:12was rejected by multiple horror festivals, so as a last resort, he uploaded it to YouTube.
01:18It got enough word-of-mouth attention that Leone was approached about putting
01:21together a horror anthology film. Ultimately, that turned into 2013's All Hallows' Eve.
01:27Leone edited his first two short films into the movie and bookended it with the story
01:31of a babysitter and two children watching a mysterious VHS tape.
01:36"...I was sick."
01:37"...Okay, that is enough for tonight."
01:40All Hallows' Eve put some attention on Leone and his demonic brainchild,
01:44but not enough, and he wanted more. He told Dread Central,
01:48"...nobody had enough faith in it to make an Art the Clown spinoff.
01:51I always believed wholeheartedly in the character."
01:54Determined to make a feature-length Terrifier film, Leone turned to Indiegogo with the modest
01:59goal of raising $15,000. The first campaign made less than a third of that, until a surprise
02:05benefactor named Phil Falcone came through with the rest of the cash. Falcone became
02:10a producer, and against all odds, Art's first film rolled.
02:18"...I think we should get our food to go."
02:20Terrifier later hit the horror-centered streaming platform Screambox, where it began to get a
02:25following. When Leone returned to Indiegogo to fund a sequel, asking for $50,000, the campaign
02:31poured in $115,000 in the first day. Terrifier 2 took off at the box office, and Art the Clown
02:38officially became a cult phenomenon. After that, Leone received offers from major studios,
02:43but when he refused to neuter his creation, Terrifier 3 was once again rejected by Hollywood.
02:48Leone chose to independently fund Terrifier 3, a wise idea since it lit up the box office and
02:54has become the highest-grossing, unrated film of all time. Of course, Art wouldn't be Art without
02:59the talent of David Howard Thornton. In the original short films, the character is played
03:04by Mike Giannulli, but when Thornton was hired on for the feature films, he used his own love of
03:09horror and his experience in the clowning world to deepen Art's character, making him the unique
03:14individual he is today. He told Rue Morgue,
03:16"...in my head, Art is like the love child of Harpo Marx and Freddy Krueger."
03:22"...Nothing. I'm just doing my terrifying part."
03:26Thornton's pantomiming has definitely added new layers to Art,
03:30carrying the character from a pipe dream to a box office juggernaut.
03:34And with talk that Terrifier 4 is on the way,
03:36fans can't wait to see what other tricks the clown's got up his gore-soaked sleeves.