Terrifier 3 is secretly the best Christian movie of 2024

Terrifier 3 is depravity made manifest; it is undeniably the goriest, most shocking horror film you’ll see this year. Yet, as unholy as it may appear, Biblical imagery and ideas are in its DNA, making it one of 2024’s most fascinating Christian movies. “Thy Clown come, and thy will be done as it is in Hell.”

In Art’s (and Damien Leone’s) name, cinema screens have been polluted with blood; women have been sawn in half, men have been chainsawed through their balls to their heads, teenagers have been reduced to lumps of broken bone and pulsating flesh that’d make Cenobites gag. 

In short, Art the Clown is a demon (as confirmed by Leone himself), an agent of wanton brutality that prowls around, mute and silently cackling, looking for someone to devour. 

The Terrifier movies have made that bile-bubblingly clear, but there’s a deeper religious current, something beyond slasher villain vs final girl: a diabolical, profoundly Christian twist on good vs evil. 

Terrifier 3 is an unorthodox Christian movie 

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There are four categories of faith-based films and shows: saccharine biopics and dramas that almost always resolve their stories with the grace of God; movies adapting scripture, either faithfully (The Prince of Egypt, The Chosen) or with divisive creative license (Noah, Exodus: Gods and Kings); propaganda films that weaponize Christianity like an angsty street preacher (Left Behind, God’s Not Dead); projects that smartly interrogate the role and strain of spirituality (The Last Temptation of Christ, Silence). 

The genre is at its most incisive in the latter category. Take The Exorcist, one of the best horror movies of all time, which doubles as an effective, crowd-pleasing experience and treatise on faith in the face of evil. 

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The Book of Eli, a post-apocalyptic actioner that sees Denzel Washington strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger, literally finds salvation in the last Bible on Earth.

The most memorable (and best) is The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson’s unsightly yet beautiful chronicle of Jesus’ sacrifice in agonizing detail that, in Roger Ebert’s words, elicited “the power of belief”, for better or worse. It was an atypical portrayal of the Passion, yet it was America’s highest-grossing R-rated movie until Deadpool & Wolverine. 

There’s only so much you can compartmentalize the genre; like life, religion finds a way. Terrifier 3 is the ultimate example of a rule-breaker in that regard: an unrated, blood-and-guts extravaganza that’s among the most theologically interesting films since Gibson’s epic, and the first movie in 20 years to convey the suffering of a saviour. Only their name isn’t Jesus; it’s Sienna.

The Terrifier franchise isn’t just about violence 

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If you asked me to summarize the Terrifier movies in one sentence, I’d say, “A supernatural clown named Art goes around killing people in ridiculously gruesome fashion.” 

That’s both true and the tip of the iceberg. Yes, the main appeal of these movies is not only the sordid, bottomless depth of their violence (to the cries of the lamest segment of the audience, the threequel opens with a child being bludgeoned to death; in the spirit of the MJ meme, f**k them kids), but David Howard Thornton’s genre-defining, hilarious, and frightening performance. 

But, especially with Terrifier 2, you’d have to be oblivious or wilfully blind against its extensive, curious use of Biblical imagery and ideas. The very idea that Art could overcome suicide was the first hint at him being “the Beast”, aka the Antichrist, as described in the book of Revelation; “One of its heads seemed to have a mortal wound, but its mortal wound was healed,” 13:3 reads. 

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Sienna, an angel incarnate, dons a set of wings and golden armor, echoing the words of Ephesians 6:10: “Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.” In the Clown Cafe scene, she wields her father’s sword to deflect Art’s flamethrower; in Biblical terms, she uses “the sword of faith” as a “shield of faith” to “extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one.” 

Don’t just take my word for it. In the director’s commentary, Leone – who was raised as a Catholic but doesn’t consider himself particularly religious as an adult – confirmed the Clown Cafe scene wasn’t just a dream sequence: it was a “divine test that manifests itself within Sienna’s subconscious… if she’s not courageous at the end and doesn’t decide to fight back against Art, then she will not be the one.”

When she reaches her hand into the cereal box and pulls out the sword, “that is the moment where the sword officially becomes baptized. It breaks into reality, and the sword is literally on fire.”

In a later scene, Art whips Sienna mercilessly, mirroring the Scourging at the Pillar, before dunking her into a metaphysical water tank – a personal hell from which she escapes. To borrow words from Revelation 1:18, she is the one who lives; she was dead, but look, she’s alive forever, and she holds the keys to Death. 

Terrifier 3 is overtly religious 

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Terrifier 3 emphasizes the series’ religious through-line, as gruesomely knotty as that may be. 

It takes place at Christmas, with Art’s festive rampage acting as a direct affront to the yuletide celebrations; if there was a manger, trust that he’d blow it up. His fanboyism over a Coca-Cola-esque Santa, the almighty secular icon, is a more subtle nod to his rejection of the season’s moral obligations (even though he’d be at the top of the naughty list). Vicky giving birth to Art’s head in the opening scene is also a hilariously profane flip of Mary’s virgin birth.

We see a demon forging Sienna’s sword, held up by a seemingly sentient Mother Mary; a necessary evil for a necessary good, committed to a chain of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment (2 Peter 2:4). 

The final act is an onslaught of Christian iconography: Sienna’s uncle is crucified, she’s forced to wear a crown of thorns, her hands are battered and broken, and her cousin is dragged through a portal to hell, “the eternal fire prepared for the Devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:41).

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“You’re no savior. There is no hope, there is no God,” Vicky even screams in Sienna’s face, the first explicit invocation of Him. 

The film also (sort of) clarifies Art’s link to Sienna: he isn’t her father, but her dad was overcome by the same divine force that blessed Sienna’s sword with holy resistance (which is why it can’t hurt her, but it could theoretically kill Art), hence why he appeared in his sketchbook alongside drawings of her warrior outfit. Art was resurrected for the sole purpose of endless butchery, and Sienna is his opposite; an angel to go against a demon. 

In the Bible, it’s said “the one who does what is sinful is of the Devil, because the Devil has been sinning from the beginning.” Art has always been sinful, with or without Satan’s influence or power. To paraphrase John 3:8, the reason Sienna appeared was to destroy the Devil’s work.

In the closing seconds, Art flees and boards a bus, where we see a passenger reading a book with a familiar title: The 9th Circle, a wink to fans of Leone’s work (it’s the title of his first short film and Art the Clown’s debut) and an Easter egg that asserts the film’s connection to Christianity by referencing Dante’s Inferno, one of the most significant theological texts outside of the Bible. 

Art the Clown is an agent of Satan (or the Devil himself) 

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The 9th Circle is an important reference, as it offers two possible answers for Art’s origins: he’s either a demon doing the Devil’s bidding, or he’s Satan himself, the incarnation of pure evil.

As explained by Leone, Art was a human in the first Terrifier film – a reprehensible monster, but a person all the same. He was saved by the Little Pale Girl, a malevolent entity posing as one of his earliest victims and “the embodiment of evil.”

Terrifier 3 doesn’t provide any simple answers about his ties to Hell or “the Beast.” In its predecessor, he threw Sienna through a portal, and he’s effectively immortal. His demonic traits can also be found in the Bible; for example, Matthew 12:22 and Luke 11:14 talk of a “demon-oppressed man” who’s mute. 

Dante Alighieri once wrote, “Fear not, for of our passage none Hath power to disappoint us.” Destiny via Art’s cruelty is to be feared, for he is a cosmic power over his present darkness; his orbit is governed not by the laws of nature, but pain, testing the limits of life itself and taunting the prospect of transcendence.

In Leone’s original short (and the first segment of All Hallows’ Eve), Art appears as an envoy to Satan, injecting a young woman, kidnapping her, and seemingly delivering her to a cult, where she’s raped by the Devil. It’s unclear if that’s even canon in the Terrifier franchise (if so, I wouldn’t know where to place it in the timeline), but Art is undoubtedly a deceiver, “roaming throughout the earth, going back and forth on it.” 

The 20th verse of Revelation warns that, after a millennium in chains, Satan “will be released from his prison and go out to deceive the nations in the four corners of the earth.” What if Art’s story in Terrifier is a loose interpretation of this eventuality? The Devil is loose, and Art is his vessel (just as God is one but also the Trinity) – and only Sienna may hold the key to the Abyss. 

What Damien Leone says about Terrifier 3’s religious imagery 

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Its lack of theological clarity is what makes Terrifier 3 so intriguing. It doesn’t bastardize scripture, but it also doesn’t pander to viewers’ faith with a sermon masquerading as a film. Christianity is arguably the foundation of its bonkers mythology, but its scope is far wider (and crazier). 

Speaking to Dexerto, Leone explained that he “decided to just really go all in with this epic battle of good versus evil” after Terrifier 2. “There’s a lot of biblical symbolism and imagery in these movies now, especially in part three,” he said. 

“And something cool that I don’t think anybody would really notice upon first viewing is the college that Jonathan goes to is called St. Percival’s. There is no St. Percival. Percival was Arthur’s knight who had to retrieve the holy grail for him.

“So everything within that school if you see is knights, and the holy grail is on the center chest of the knight. Because I love that mythology, and we’re always playing up that mythology for Sienna’s sword, her Excalibur. So it’s all baked in there.”

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In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, coming after a mob was spotted outside a Kansas City theater protesting the movie’s “satanic Santa”, Leone outright confirmed that Terrifier 3 could and should be considered a Christian movie. “The Bible is very violent,” he said. 

“I laugh when we get attacked, often from religious people who haven’t even seen the movie. They’ll just see imagery or they’ll know it’s a violent movie, and they’re like, ‘You should find Jesus.’

“If you only saw the movie… you’d see some really pro-God stuff in this movie.” 

Sienna is the best, but most controversial example: in Leone’s eyes, she’s “blatantly” Terrifier’s Christ figure. “Not saying she is some reincarnation of Jesus Christ, but that’s all built into that character. She’s suffering, and she’s sort of the sacrificial lamb,” he added.

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When she wears a crown of thorns, some viewers may argue it’s a violation of the Second Commandment: “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the Earth.”

If you took the text at face value, any portrayal of Jesus, God, or even Satan would be considered a sin. The difference is in idolatry: has Sienna, even with Christ’s iconography, been created as someone to worship? Beyond fans with crushes, no: her hero’s journey may evoke imagery of the Bible, but it’s in service of its own mythos, a standalone testament.  

Sienna’s destiny is to deliver us from evil, and Leone already knows where she’ll face Art the Clown for the last time (Terrifier 4 may conclude the series, but that’s yet to be confirmed). Even Jesus had to endure the Devil’s dwelling before his resurrection; to ascend, one must descend, and the stage is set for a final stand in Hell. “Our father, who Art in heaven.”

With the movie in cinemas now, read our Terrifier 3 ending explained, how to stream Terrifier 3, why this is the film’s most horrifying scene, and how to watch the Art the Clown movies in order.