Three Gross Movies You'll Like More Than TERRIFIER

Hello new friends and old! I figured we could all use a break from the doom and gloom, so I decided to share some movie recommendations with you. Because I am a rotten ghoul, I am also going to tell you exactly why I do not like a popular film franchise. This is the Harm Cox Experience™, and we appreciate your patronage. But seriously, I just got laid off and this is my full-time job now. You reading this means a lot to me. We're gonna figure it out together. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Y'all, I tried, but these TERRIFIER movies are just not for me. Their entire appeal seems to hinge on the idea that Art the Clown is the coolest guy in the world, and that I should be delighted to watch him kick-flip a skateboard over a pile of gouged-out-eyes while he winks at the camera. TERRIFIER loves to jam your hand in a bowl of cold spaghetti and tell you it’s brains, and then it seems surprised when you don’t pass away in fright.

As always, I don’t want to stop you from watching a horror movie. But I am here to tell you that you could be watching something better. If you dug TERRIFIER and are ready to expand your horror palate, or if you just don’t feel like watching a clown smear his own shit all over the walls and giggle like a little stinker, try these movies instead:

STAGE FRIGHT (Michele Soavi, 1987)

There are many things I dislike about the TERRIFIER franchise, but my chief beef is a petty one: Art the Clown looks like absolute ass. His makeup is shitty and his costume is stupid. I am uninterested in murderers who fail to serve cunt, and Art looks like he went on Drag Race without learning to sew. Stop relying on that body count, Art.

If you want to watch a disgustingly creative horror movie with a murderer who knows his angles, I encourage you to check out STAGE FRIGHT. It’s a high-concept slasher about Irving Wallace, a murderer who breaks out of a psychiatric facility and dresses like a cunty owl to murder a bunch of loudmouthed theater kids. He is doing the lord's work, and he looks sensational while he does it.

It’s also a great horror movie in ways that TERRIFIER is decidedly not. It’s wildly creative and strange, a fun, loopy thriller that does a great job combining the beats of a slasher flick with the stylishly exaggerated visual aesthetic of giallo films. If you want to watch a movie where someone dresses up like a freak and turns co-eds into flesh confetti, there’s sure to be at least one gorgeously creative murder in STAGEFRIGHT that scratches your itch. You deserve better than Art the Clown. We all do.

BLOODY CHAINSAW GIRL (Hiroki Yamaguchi, 2016)

The frustrating thing about TERRIFIER is its confidence that it is doing something transgressive with its derivative gags and CGI gore. TERRIFIER made me watch a clown saw an upside-down topless woman in half vagina-first; when I saw Art get out his little hacksaw and realized the actress’s tits would be bouncing around the entire time, I rolled my eyes. There are a lot of saws in horror movies. So you can saw a lady in half? That don’t impress me much.

If you want to watch somebody do something disgusting to the human body, you are aiming way too low if you stop at TERRIFIER. There’s a whole world of unbelievably creative grossness waiting for you in the world of mid-2000s horror, and no country’s film industry was bringing it quite like Japan.

BLOODY CHAINSAW GIRL is a splatter horror-comedy that answers an essential question for horror buffs: what if Ash from Evil Dead and Dr. Herbert West from Re-Animator were Japanese schoolgirls who had crushes on each other, but were still intent on killing each other? This movie is as funny as TERRIFIER thinks it is, and also a better innovator in the cinematic tradition of finding out what a motivated person with a saw can do to a human body. 

Faithful readers of this blog will want to know that this movie also has some fun surprise transmasc representation in the character of Hanzo, a ninja-obsessed teen who is resurrected/given bottom surgery (?) by the West stand-in so he can be a ninja zombie bodyguard. Our Ash stand-in does not care that Hanzo is trans, and only mocks him for being a ninja dork before chainsawing him through the stomach. Allyship!

SALO, OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975)

Alright, enough. I know at least half of you are just skimming this looking for your favorite controversial splatter title. Where’s that heartwarming romantic comedy NEKROMANTIK 2? Or the universally beloved mockumentary CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST? How bout one of the later FACES OF DEATH ripoffs where they got footage of real people biting it, just for funsies?

I have watched the above films because I love horror movies and they have a historical place in the genre, but that’s the most I have to say about them. You don’t need me to recommend them to you, any more than you need me to go on YouTube and rank videos of traffic fatalities. These infamously horrible movies are like White Castle sliders: they’re made for a very specific audience and if you like ‘em, you’ll swallow ‘em. They aren’t worth consuming if their ooze does not delight you.

If you are interested in watching a movie that will expose you to visuals that corrode your soul for an actual artistic purpose, SALO is waiting for you. Pasolini’s final film is a bleak fable about a mansion full of fascist libertines who kidnap children and compel them to participate in a ritualistic festival of debasement, a 120-day torment where costumed adults play out a pageant of manners while visiting every kind of torture and degredation upon their captives that you can imagine. One by one, every single child is defiled and then brutally murdered to the delight of rich and powerful people who will never see a reckoning. It is as riveting as it is unbearable.

It is also galvanizing for a reason. Pasolini was a queer artist in fascist Italy, and his art was partially motivated by the urge to create things so transgressive that their messages could not be stunted or blurred by capitalism or the state. SALO was his statement of disgust for a society that is more concerned with social niceties than holding powerful people accountable for their inhumanity. Every nauseating thing in it happens for a reason, and the carnage adds up to something sickening and real. SALO is a movie that I forced myself to sit through because it had something to say, and I am glad I did that, and now I never have to watch it again. But if you have not seen it, and you really want to get your stomach turned by a movie, I would recommend it 100 times over TERRIFIER.

*just to be clear: I actually love juggalos. A lot of y'all are cool,  and it is not your fault that the most famous horror clown of recent memory is a cringy dork. Whoop whoop, go in peace.