Terrifier 3 director: 'If Hitchcock made the shower scene today, would it be more graphic?'

Now he's releasing the third entry in the saga, which unfolds over the festive period, and at $2 million dollars is by some distance the most expensive of the series so far (the last one cost $250,000, while the original film was made for just $35,000).

Of course, that increased budget brought with it a lot of opportunities to take his psychopathic, mute killer Art the Clown in new directions – but it also led to one or two challenges.

"More money, more problems is certainly real," Leone explains in an exclusive interview with RadioTimes.com. "There's no doubt about that. But on the flip side, the positives of Terrifier 3 having this much [of a] bigger budget was I can now hire so many more people to come in and help me realise my vision."

One such example is that, for the first time, he was able to hire a makeup effects team – having taken full responsibility for that aspect of the previous films himself – and this freed up a huge amount of time to work on other areas of the movie.

"Sometimes I'd literally be up for over 24 hours," he says. "And I'd have to just go into the next day of shooting, because it's just so much work. And putting on makeup, taking off makeup, stopping shooting to go in and hook blood pumps up to people.... it's very, very difficult.

"And all other areas of production have sort of the trickle-down effect where they start to suffer a little bit, not putting your all into working with your actors, or being able to compose shots. So I was able to really focus with my actors more, which I really enjoyed on this one."

But what of those problems he mentioned?

"So many more questions are being asked of me," he says. "So, you're getting pulled in many more directions, and also lots of eyes [are] on us in terms of unions and things now.

"So we couldn't be a sort of... it wasn't the Wild West, and we couldn't do some things that we would normally do in the original Terrifier or Terrifier 2.

"We knew that this time we were scrutinised, and basically had to play by the rules, so to speak. So that was tricky – and we also had to shoot this movie way quicker."

Perhaps another problem Leone might have had with the new film was figuring out a way to top the brutal kills from the first two instalments.

Terrifier 2, in particular, included some of the most graphic, gruesome moments in recent cinema history, with one scene known as 'the bedroom scene' having provoked an especially visceral response from many viewers. And the filmmaker admits it's "daunting" to continually come up with new ways to shock.

"The expectations are so high," he explains. "And people always ask, how are you gonna top the... first, it was how are you gonna top the hacksaw scene, then how are you gonna top the bedroom scene? So, what I really do now is, I'm more interested in the story and the characters at first when I'm writing the script, and I don't even think too much about the gore.

"And then once I have the story locked in, then I go, 'OK, let's not forget why we're here.' Why is everybody coming to this, really? It's Art the Clown and the gore."

This time around, perhaps the standout scene, or at least the most brutal, takes place in a shower, where Art butchers an unsuspecting young couple who had been covering his previous crimes in a true crime podcast. It's a genuinely horrific spectacle – we won't go into the specifics here – and one that Leone reckons will be much talked-about by fans.

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Of course, one of the most seminal moments in cinema history is the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock classic Psycho, and Leone admits that the inspiration for his scene came from imagining what the Master of Suspense might do if he was to remake that scene in today's horror climate.

"That is my homage to Psycho," he explains. "Just being a huge fan of the movie Psycho, I've watched it maybe once or twice a year since I was really young, and you know, one day you're just like, 'If Hitchcock made that today, would he be a little more graphic with the kill, the way he presented it? Or would he still keep it as sort of classy and stylised?'

"And I'd say if I made it today, I'd show you everything I could possibly do. But that's too on-the-nose, right? You got to push it in a different direction or make it bigger. So that just becomes, well, he wouldn't use a knife, like, he'd use.... let's use a chainsaw, and just, like, so it could be birthed that way.

"You never know what's going to make you come up with a new kill scene, but we're always trying to push it."

Push it, he certainly does – and indeed, there were reports of multiple walkouts at one of the first screenings of the new film in London. Some more cynical people might assume this was all part of a PR stunt to drum up interest and push more curious horror fans in the direction of the new film, but Leone claims that reports of shocked reactions have never been exaggerated.

"The first weekend part 2 was in the theaters, the thing that kicked off everything was a report that somebody passed out in the theatre, and the paramedics had to be called because it was so intense," he recalls.

"But there was actually a photo. Someone took a picture of that person, posted it on Twitter, and the picture... It's so ridiculous that you would think that we set it up, like most people think that we set up this whole thing, and it was very genuine.

"It was absolutely real. It's the person seated outside the theatre, faces blocked out with an emojis to hide their identity, paramedics walking over to the person, and above him on the wall is the Terrifier 2 poster. And that just opened the doors, the floodgates opened.

"And the next day, everybody's talking about this movie, and it sort of became like on mainstream talk shows and Howard Stern, Stephen King's tweeting about it.

"And then it sort of became this event and an experience, almost like a dare. Like, is this as crazy as people say? Can you survive this movie? So, that was a very surreal experience for us, to say the least."

You might be surprised to learn that, despite all the shock, Leone does have some lines that he'd prefer not to cross. For example, the new film sees Art target children for the first time – reportedly one of the main reasons for the aforementioned walkouts – but the director generally points his camera away from the action when these kills are happening.

"There are lines that I personally won't cross… not that I don't think you should; every artist should be able to cross whatever line they want as long as they're not harming somebody or something in the course of making the movie," he says.

"But even if we're dealing with a taboo subject like children, you know, there's ways to go about it where it could still be palatable, so to speak. There's ways to execute it where you're just not totally turning off the audience and they're getting up and walking out. So I'm very conscious of that, and I want to do that as an artist as much as I can.

"Because what I really want to do with these films is push the envelope, get right up to the line, step over it just a little bit, but then maintain some sort of mass accessibility."

Given the box office projections for Terrifier 3, we reckon Leone has just about been successful...

Terrifier 3 is showing in UK cinemas from Friday 11th October, and the first two films are available on Prime Video and Paramount Plus.

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