Damien Leone said no to remaking Terrifier with less gore for a mainstream studio

Here's an interesting tidbit. Did you know that Damien Leone's now infamous slasher franchise Terrifier could potentially have been picked up by a major studio at one point in time? It's hard to imagine that, considering Leone made the first movie on a budget of just $250,000, and both movies so far have taken great pride in their grimy charm akin to the height of the 1980s "video nasties" era.

According to a new interview with Leone in an upcoming issue of Total Film magazine, a studio once showed interest in remaking the 2016 movie that elevated the franchise into the mainstream (the character Art the Clown actually originated in a 2008 short film that can be seen in Leone's 2013 anthology film All Hallow's Eve). Except they had one big catch: it would have to be significantly less gory.

"That’s not what I was interested in. They would say, 'It’s gotta be rated R, it can’t be as gory as you made it.'"

As fans of Terrifier and Terrifier 2 know, these aren't films with restraint when it comes to gore and bloodshed. They're far more intense than anything you'd see in a mainstream horror movie. The closest comparison you could make is Lionsgate's Saw franchise, and even those films cut away from the really gruesome stuff more often than Terrifier does.

The 2016 movie had an incredibly graphic scene where the killer, Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton), saws a woman in half while she's strung up between two poles by her wrists and ankles. The scene is shown in its entirety. Definitely too gross for some people, but also a genuine marvel of special effects work, especially working with such a small budget.

Then the 2022 sequel took the saw scene and significantly upped the ante with an even more gratuitous kill segment that felt never-ending. And yes, fans should fear what's in store for Terrifier 3. We've already heard reports that Thornton came close to vomiting on set for the first time, and Leone has talked about how they've spent time trying to "top" the antics of previous films.

Chatting with Total Film, he teased what's to come by saying another reason he bucked studio involvement is because "they'd never let me shoot the first 10 minutes of what I wanted to do [in Terrifier 3]."

The third film is a Christmas-themed horror releasing theatrically on October 11. It will also receive an international release this time.

The Total Film issue featuring Leone's interview will be available on Thursday, September 12.