"That, to me, is the essence of true horror - the clown, at midnight." - Robert Bloch.
The pantheon of horror icons has its obvious famed and feted members: Elm Street's Springwood Slasher Freddy Krueger, Camp Crystal Lake's hockey-masked Jason Voorhees and Haddonfield's Halloween boogeyman Michael Myers inarguably occupy the upper echelon with others such as Leatherface, Pinhead, the Tall Man and others (the Wishmaster, Pumpkinhead, the Leprechaun and so on) making up the lower tiers like some inverted choir of unholy angels of death. A recent addition to this roster in the last decade is Art the Clown, the daemonic clown star of Damien Leone's Terrifier series. None of which, I must here admit, I have yet seen.
I know, I know. I'm such a bad horror fan. But, y'know, there are loads of genre films from the 1910s I haven't seen yet, so it might take me a little while to get to everything released in the 2010s. That's my excuse anyway - the curse of being a completist of any kind is that these things take time.
I have, though, seen the hellish harlequin's debut appearance; not in 2016's initial installment of Terrifier (which I will get round to, I'm not avoiding them despite a slight case of coulrophobia which I'm sure stems from my mother placing an intensely menacing porcelain clown doll opposite my childhood bed whose haunting white enamel face would stare at me in the dark if I ever awoke during the night. Cheers for the psychological warfare, Ma) but in Leone's debut feature: 2013's portmanteau horror film All Hallow's Eve which I purchased on 101 Films' DVD - thanks to a review in The Dark Side, my long time magazine of the macabre of choice, which intrigued me - in about 2014. The film's first viewing had obviously captured my attention enough that me of a decade ago had scrawled down some comments in one of my notebooks that I only came across yesterday having long forgotten about it. Yesterday being Beltane and everything (and a very happy belated Walpurgisnacht to all of you at home), a rewatch of a vaguely Samhain-themed film seemed appropriate if I were to refresh my aged (I'm 45 now, you know) memory enough do decipher the scrawled scrip and transcribe the review I obviously meant to do a decade ago.
We open with an evocatively '80s-style title sequence with red credits on a black background with vintage-style film grain to accompany the retro synthy score - the same kind of weaponised nostalgia that the Duffer Brothers would deploy with Stranger Things' title sequence, getting people like me deep in the feels and triggering a reflexive grin - reminiscent of early 1980s genre fare; redolent of the forbidden fruit of the Video Nasties list. Inside a house appropriately decorated for the Samhain season (although the exterior house establishing shot [down a shot if you're a fan of the Horror Geek Youtube channel and read the words 'house establishing shot' in Mike's voice] is quite tight [again: "Hell yeah!" No, not like that, you pervs], belying the film's low budget - obviously they couldn't decorate the surrounding houses) we meet Sarah (Katie Maguire - who would go on the feature in Leone's Terrifier and its sequel as Monica Brown), who is babysitting precocious sprogs Tia (Sydney Freihofer) and Timmy (Cole Mathewson). Babysitting on Halloween is an obvious Carpenter riff to go alongside the other classic horror references - Carpenter and Hill's bogeyman masterpiece did, after all, go by the original working title of The Babysitter Murders - but echoes other chaperone-centric gems of the video store such as When a Stranger Calls.
When Timmy realises that his trick or treating bag has been bestowed with the unexpected gift of a mysterious VHS tape in lieu of candy, he and his sister goad their badgered childminder into playing it and find that it contains three short and weird vignettes - for this is indeed a portmanteau horror flick, of the like possibly first espoused by Fritz Lang in 1921's Der Mude Tod a.k.a. Destiny (though I'm sure I'm probably wrong and there are earlier examples of the subgenre; please do comment and educate me if so) and perfected by Amicus productions in the '60s and '70s (more on whom in a future piece I'll hopefully get finished this year!).
In the first story, we meet main girl Casey (Kayla Lian) who is alone in a train station at night when she is confronted with the terrifying - I mean, it's his USP right? - sight of Art the Clown (Mike Gianelli, who originated the role; very much the David Ross to David Howard Thornton's Robert Llewellyn in this equation [I like that, with my last post being Red Dwarf, it almost seems like there's an internal consistency or logic to this]) who progresses from weirding her out to injecting her with a roofie and dragging her down to... if not hell, then something very close. Definitely hell-adjacent, as the title of this segment is 'The Ninth Circle', and is actually a 35mm short film that Leone had shot in 2008 and was both the debut appearance of Art the Clown and, along with 2011's follow-up 'Terrifier' (not to be confused with 2016's full-length Terrifier) the genesis of this movie - the second segment and wraparound story being crafted to include the two shorts.
Waking in an underground tunnel-cum-dungeon (not a cum dungeon, that's something different probably), Casey finds herself shackled and chained along with fellow prisoners Sara (Minna Taylor) and Kristen (the awesomely-named Melissa Wolf) who inform her that there was another inmate who hasn't been seen since she was dragged away screaming into the darkness. The sequence feels reminiscent of the women-in-brutal-danger so-called 'torture porn' genre such as Eli Roth's Hostel crossed with the Brian Yuzna adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's 'The Whisperer in Darkness' in 1994's Necronomicon. In this daemonic domain into which the hellish harlequin has spirited them, Kristen is soon hacked to pieces by a cleaver-wielding creature resembling a cross between penultimate stage Brundlefly and the Incredible Melting Man, whilst strange pig- and bird-human hybrids cavort presided over by Satan and a witch that looks like a Carrionite stirs a cauldron.
What a trip.
After putting the sprogs to bed and trying to reassure them that such clowns don't exist (cue Edward Van Sloan emerging from a curtain to point and say "There are such things!" That doesn't happen in this movie, it just should), our intrepid childminder ventures on with the next - and weakest - segment. I see in my decade-old notes I scrawled "Possibly filmed last, lower budget?" without having known anything of the circumstances of the film's making, but it's nice that I was pretty spot on. This tale entails a woman named Caroline (Catherine Callahan) who as all on her own at night in her isolated house, a very big house, in the country. Sadly, rather than Blur and Joanne Guest turning up to party, her particular visitor proves to be an unwelcome extraterrestrial played by Brandon DeSpain. This grey-style Whitley Strieber refugee seems intent on achieving some kind of violent communion, resulting in an alien vs human prey chase through the old dark house. The whole affair is very minimalist with only the aforementioned pair of performers present, and the other two named characters - Caroline's absent artist amour John and her friend Dee - being voice only roles performed by actors playing other parts in the movie doubling up. The only other connection to the surrounding movie is the reveal that the painting that John had been working on is a portrait of the de rigueur Art. Art art, I suppose.
I have no idea how to refer to that second segment - the first and last stories have titles but I can't find one for the middle one. 'Alien' would maybe be blandly appropriate, but I think Dan O' Bannon got there first.
You know what? I've lost all interest. Let's chat instead about 'John'. This has nothing at all to do with the film, but with the fact that my friend John once wrote into Commodore Format - or maybe Zzzap - magazine, and the editor's reply referred to him as 'John'. With the quotation marks. Like, so-called 'John', if that is in fact your real name. What the fuck was that about? He was quite upset and incensed about it at the time. My only theory is that his dreadful handwriting was to blame, and they misread his surname, thinking he'd put "John from South Shields" as a weird pseudonym.
Anyway, that whimsical diversion aside, where were we? The third and final story is the aforementioned short 'Terrifier', which involves an unnamed woman (Marie Maser) who we know only by her stated occupation of 'Costume Designer'; she's making her way home at night from a work assignment on Halloween when she's forced to pull over at a gas station (well, a petrol station - it doesn't sell clouds of gas, but we're using the American vernacular for petrol in a "when in Rome" type way). Like the first short incorporated by Leone into the movie, it has a '70s grindhouse feel, with visual flickers, sprocket holes and film splices. Arriving to find a situation wherein the attendant (Michael Chmiel) is threatening to call the police on Art the Clown, who has been smearin ghis own faeces all over the station's toilet in some kind of fit of anarchic coprophilia, once Art has (apparently) departed she gets filled up by the attendant (not like that!) and is asking for directions back onto the Interstate from the back roads she's found herself on when a noise causes the attendant to investigate.
When he doesn't return, and she decides to look into it herself, she walks into an amazing scene of gore: Art kneeling over pieces of the guy, the diabolical pierrot grinning as he happily dismembers that late attendant with a hacksaw. Fleeing for her life, she finds herself in a nightmarish cat and mouse chase both on and off the road as she comes across some of Art's previous victims (and she will know him by the trail of dead) whilst being pursued by the seemingly unstoppable and impossible - he appears to be everywhere, even crawling out of the soil like a zombie looking for his cake at one point - creature until she awakes in his hellish realm with him cackling over her as she realises that all four of her limbs have been cut off and choice insults such as "PIG", "BITCH" and "SLUT" have been carved into her naked flesh. He's a nice pro-feminist guy, is Art.
Altogether, a bit of a mixed bag of stories ( the middle section in particular being the weak link) but certainly a memorable debut for a modern day horror icon who - whatever else one might think - makes quite an impression.
