A battle between interdimensional entities and
giving birth to a bouncing bundle of terror! Get ready to dig into all the
gory details surrounding the ending of "Terrifier 2." Beware! Spoilers ahead!
The "Miles County Massacre" is the name given to the events of the first
"Terrifier" movie in the universe of "Terrifier 2." There are frequent
references to this event throughout the sequel, which takes place exactly
one year after that event as Jonathan has developed an obsession with the killings.
"You think that guy's still out there?"
"What's up with you and this clown all of a sudden? You're, like, obsessed."
"They never found his body."
But it's not just Jonathan — there's a broader cultural interest in the events as well. A talk
show host interviews the sole survivor of the original bloodbath, Victoria Heyes. And there's
significant news coverage of the event marking its anniversary on TV, online, and in the newspapers.
"Terrifier 2" largely stands on its own narratively,
and viewers don't need to have seen the first film to understand what the "Miles
County Massacre" was. It also helps that the attention paid to the "Miles
County Massacre" in "Terrifier 2" is ultimately more thematically important than narratively.
"Please, welcome…Art
the Clown!"
Art the Clown made his first appearance in Damien Leone's 2011 short film "Terrifier," where the
character was played by Mike Gianelli. That short then became a segment in Leone's first feature,
the anthology movie "All Hallow's Eve." But already in "All Hallow's Eve" it seems that
Art isn't just a man dressed in clown makeup as he makes his entrance via a
TV set as the characters watch an evil VHS tape. David Howard Thornton took over the
role when Art took the spotlight for 2013's "Terrifier," which ends with Art seemingly
dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound before his body disappears from a morgue.
"Terrifier 2" pushes things even further as it reintroduces Art,
who still has a gaping head wound, but is otherwise fine. There's no real explanation
given for how the clown survived, but as the sequel goes on, we get some hints. It seems
that Art may be a cosmic or supernatural entity in the same way that some fans
believe Michael Myers from "Halloween" is simply the embodiment of metaphysical evil.
As we learn more about Sienna's father's visions in "Terrifier 2,"
there's some evidence that Art is far more than a human in a clown outfit,
and is instead something mythical. That would explain why he can pass into reality through
media and why he seems to be unkillable, but it doesn't quite explain his particular glee
in the horrific violence he commits — that remains disturbingly inexplicable.
Sienna is a high schooler struggling with the recent loss of her father to suicide
while attempting to maintain good relationships with her brother Jonathan and their mom Barbara.
When we meet her, she's making a Halloween costume based on the fantasy character
that her dad - an artist - created for her. Along with creating the fantasy character for
Sienna, her dad also gave her a sword that seems to hold mystical powers and is one of
the only weapons that can defend against Art's evil and cause significant damage to the clown.
From everything we can see she's just a regular teenager living through the ups and downs of life.
But in a dream sequence early in "Terrifier 2," we can see that there's something special about
her when her dream has an effect on reality and starts a fire. As the movie goes on,
Sienna becomes Art's target while Jonathan furthers his investigations
into the connection their father had to Art, and eventually, he theorizes that Sienna is
the only one who can truly defeat the clown. Her importance only becomes clearer when she
confronts Art at the end of the movie and even manages to come back from the dead.
We can't say for sure whether Sienna is the same kind of cosmic or supernatural entity as Art,
or whether she is simply capable of channeling the timeless being that her father discovered and
said he created for her. Either way, we can say for sure that she's a great final girl,
and there's certainly something magical about her.
"Terrifier 2" introduces audiences to a character that's never named but credited as "The Little
Pale Girl." Early on in the film, when Art visits a laundromat to clean up after murdering the
unlucky coroner who was to inspect his body, the girl appears in the laundromat and shoots him a
wide, creepy clown smile. She then approaches Art and engages him in a silent game of patty cake.
It's a bizarre moment that raises a lot of questions — one of which is quickly answered,
at least partially. We get to see that from the point of view of the only other person in
the laundromat, Art is playing patty cake with the air. So it seems that The Little
Pale Girl may simply be a vision of Art's, but Sienna and her brother Jonathan can see
her as well. The reason Sienna and Jonathan can see her and others can't is undoubtedly
due to the strange link that they have with Art that we'll talk about a little more in a moment.
After first seeing The Little Pale Girl, Jonathan does some research and discovers that she looks
exactly like a girl who is believed to have been Art's first victim. It's possible then that this
girl's soul has somehow been transformed and bound to Art in a way that has made her his attendant,
allowing her to keep him company as he terrorizes people. But she isn't simply
a passive observer. Instead, she takes an active role in Art's nefarious schemes,
as we see when she mimics Jonathan's voice in a call to Sienna. Albeit she
seems to suspect something isn't quite right about the phone call.
"I know when Jonathan's lying okay? I…I could hear it in his voice. Something's, Something's wrong."
Giving us reason to ponder what her possible supernatural abilities might be.
While we can't say for certain what the connection is between Art and Sienna,
we have some ideas. At first, when Jonathan shows Sienna that their dad had drawn Art
and was collecting newspaper clippings about his killings, it seems possible that perhaps
their father is Art. Either he faked his death to become this deranged killer, or he somehow
became the host of a metaphysical evil and hasn't entirely lost his connection to his human life.
But as the movie goes on, the former seems impossible given what we learn
about his death. The latter, though, seems like it may still be true, and that leads
to our two theories about what exactly the connection may be. The first is that her
father's tumor caused him to see beyond human reality and see two warring eternal entities,
one evil and one good, this would then allow for the possibility that the evil entity has
somehow taken over her father's essence. The other is that her dad somehow brought Art to
life from his own psyche through the power of his, well, art. This would also explain why he
was able to create a character for his daughter and a weapon that can stand against the clown.
Sienna's dream sequence near the start of "Terrifier 2" may be one of the longest
dream sequences in any horror movie. She dreams of a strange children's TV show set
where a woman sings a jaunty song about a clown café, young people hang out on a small playset,
and a line of adults is queued up at a food truck — a food truck with Art's face on it.
Nearby a young boy is filming a cereal commercial for an Art-themed cereal that
includes roaches and razor blades. We see the boy chew some of the disgusting cereal
and bleed from the mouth before reaching into the box for a surprise. Suddenly,
Art appears and kills everyone on set. He uses increasingly wild weapons like a big machine
gun and a flame thrower to devastate the sets and all the people on them.
It seems like it's just a horrifying dream, but when Sienna deflects the fire
from Art's flame thrower with her father's sword, she causes a real fire to appear in
her bedroom. And later in the movie when she's stabbed by Art with the same sword,
she falls into a tank of water on the set that she saw in her dream,
but now everyone is dead and mutilated. We can't be sure whether Sienna's dream was a glimpse of
something that happened in the real world, but it was certainly more than just a dream.
After Art stabs Sienna with the sword her father gave her, she falls through a hole in
the Terrifier ride at the carnival where Art has lured her. But she doesn't just fall into dirt
or another level of concrete — she falls into a water tank on the edge of the scene from her
dream. More than being confined to a water tank that's drowning her, she's also being held down
by something that looks equally like a frayed rope, a worm, and a decomposing human hand.
Again, it seems possible that this is her seeing something of Art's world,
that he has transported her here by killing her with the mystical weapon bestowed upon
her by her father. But she refuses to accept defeat. She struggles to get loose and while
she isn't able to succeed at first, she is finally able to break free and heal herself
through what seems to be a sheer force of will motivated by her love for her brother.
She thinks of Jonathan and how she wants to keep him safe from Art,
and the sword begins to glow along with her stomach wound. The wound then begins to heal
and she can break free of whatever is holding her in the tank before returning to the land of
the living and decapitating Art. To say that the power of love brought her back may sound cheesy,
but it also seems true. She was unwilling to allow her brother to die horribly at the hands
of the sadistic clown, and that power allowed her to will herself back to life as we know it.
While the first "Terrifier" clocks in under 90 minutes and overwhelmingly focuses on delivering
extremely disturbing horror sequences for the duration of its runtime, "Terrifier 2" is a
heftier film at a full 2 hours and 18 minutes. And while some might have been interested in a pure
slasher that lasts that long, Leone has packed this sequel full of subtler thematic exploration.
First and foremost are the themes of grief, trauma, and mental illness as Sienna, Jonathan,
and Barbara are all still reeling from the death of their beloved father and husband.
The movie spends time with them as they talk about their loss and the different ways that
they have responded to it, and whether those coping mechanisms are healthy. But the movie
is also interested in how the media fixates on and often exploits real-life tragedies. There's
significant time spent showing different kinds of news coverage of Art's murders, and especially
the attention paid to how poorly Victoria is treated by the talk show host after her interview.
"Yeah, well, if you think she looks that bad on television,
imagine what she looks like sitting two feet away from you. Thought I was gonna gag at one point."
Most abstractly, but perhaps most fascinatingly, "Terrifier 2" seems to be asking questions about
horror movies and what we want from them. Art is constantly mugging for the camera,
waving his hands, smiling, and laughing at the horrific violence he enacts,
essentially inviting the audience to enjoy his cruelty with him. But
the violence in the movie is so intense and so realistically rendered that it'll
likely be impossible for most viewers to experience these as fun kills in a slasher.
"Are you not entertained?! Are…you…not entertained?!"
The mid-credits scene of "Terrifier 2" doesn't involve Sienna or her family,
and instead re-centers on Victoria Heyes, who has been confined to a mental hospital after
she attacked the talk show host who insulted her. At first, we only see two members of the
staff at the hospital talking about her and how she's been remarkably calm as a patient.
But soon we hear Victoria screaming and we see her
writing obscenities on the wall with her blood. Then her stomach starts to swell,
and it rapidly grows until she gives birth to Art's somehow living head.
It's a wild sequence that is nearly impossible to make sense of, but our understanding is that
Victoria has become linked to Art in a similar way that The Little Pale Girl has, only Victoria
is still living. The fact that Victoria is still alive may mean that she is now Art's lifeline to
our world. He's been defeated by Sienna and her mystical sword but can return through Victoria.
If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide
Prevention Lifeline by dialing 988 or by calling 1-800-273-TALK (8255)​.