THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
The brilliant actor Lon Chaney (1883-1930) is credited with this definitive statement: “The height of horror is to hear a knock on your door at the stroke of midnight and to find a clown motionless on the threshold. » Terrify 2 seems to have made this idea its program. So much so that one could criticize the film for the thinness of its pretext and the virtual absence of any psychology and any sociopolitical reflection. We would be wrong. Fundamentally wrong.
Because it is in the quest for a kind of purity, the expression of the very essence of horror, that lies the beauty of Damien Leone’s work. Cinematographic horror is rid of all the alibis of what is called “the elevated horror”, or a desire for ambition drawing, often, from fashionable ideologies, which is only a way of devitalizing gender motives. The cruelty here is unexplained, and the drive is raw.
At the origin of the film, there is a whole process, a chain of causes and effects that deserves to be told. Damien Leone, a young cinephile amateur of horror films since the age of 3 (!), directed, in 2008, a short film, The 9th Circle. Art, a scary clown character, appears there for a few minutes.
Cruelty refinements
Encouraged by his friends, he directed a second short film Terrify, which this time gives the central role to Art. But Leone’s dream is to transform Terrify in feature film. This will be done thanks to the competition of producer Phil Falcone and a crowdfunding campaign. Filmed in 2016 for 35,000 dollars (32,750 euros), Terrify is noted for its graphic violence, a tone and style that seemed long gone from horror cinema.
For its sequel, Terrify 2, the director collected nearly 220,000 dollars, again thanks to crowdfunding, the reputation of the first part encouraging fans to contribute to the financing. Released in theaters in October 2022 in the United States, Terrify 2 grossed over $10 million. Rumors of spectators fainting during certain sequences were probably not for nothing in the success of the film.
The first Terrify seemed to reconnect with these small independent films made in the 1970s, where the nihilistic search for the sordid and the unhealthy was nourished by an orgy of violence, a period of the blossoming of gore which would, directly but also insidiously, transform American cinema in depth.
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