If they were to give an Academy Award for the best performance by a silent harlequin in a white clown suit who can mimic a fit of giggling while cutting people’s faces (don’t try this at home – the cutting or the silent laughing), the award would be a slot for Art the Clown, the mascot of everything you’ve ever seen slasher mayhem and the depraved mascot/killer of “Terrifier 3.”

Art the Clown is to Freddy and Jason and Michael Myers what the Sex Pistols were to The Who and the Stones: their punk end point, their scandalous high point. Back in the day, slasher films were about masked hulks chopping off people’s limbs or stabbing them with butcher knives. (How strange.) ‘Saw’ and its sequels upped the ante, subjecting the characters to elaborate, machine-made torture involving every form of mutilation imaginable (with the added joke of: every victim deserved it!) . You might wonder: How can the “Terrifier” movies top that?

The answer has to do with something Art the Clown has in common with Kamala Harris: the joy factor. It’s implicit in every slasher film — going back to the granddaddy of them all, “Psycho” — that the guys with kitchen knives and chainsaws get off on what they do. That’s part of what’s scary: they love their job, so you’re not going to convince them to quit.

But Art the Clown takes over the concept enjoy murderous sadism to new levels of sick puppy madness. The character is played in all three “Terrifier” films by David Howard Thornton, an actor who disappears into his costume: white makeup, hooked nose and bald clown headgear, mouth with black lipstick, dirty, rotten licorice teeth that look as if they are borrowed from the nun, all covered by his little top hat, which is just so cocked. From the inside, Thornton gives a great performance, as Marcel Marceau, inhabited by the devilish spirit of Charles Manson, with a touch of the divine. In his silent clown way, he imitates ordinary human emotions – the grin and the wide eyes of surprise, the innocent moués, the cartoon-sad frowns – with a stylized frivolity. He’s going to mock and mirror what you’re feeling right back at you, right before he saws your legs off or loosens you like a stuck pig.

The “Terrifier” films, so nasty in their ultra-violence, started out as an underground phenomenon but are now a mall-theater franchise with a complicated backstory, much like the “Scream” films. At the New York premiere of ‘Terrifier 3’ that I attended earlier this week, the audience was a whirlwind of cult celebrity and goth party chic, meaning these films had arrived as a brand. (That also applied to the new Art the Clown dolls.)

In “Terrifier 3,” Sienna (Lauren LaVera), who has emerged as the series’ heroine/final girl, is released from a mental hospital (she’s been in and out) and joins her Aunt Jessica (Margaret Anne ) to stay. Florence), Jessica’s husband, Greg (Bruce Johnson), and their child, Gabbie (Antonella Rose). There is a lot of discussion around the kitchen table, perhaps too much, about everything that has happened before.

Damien Leone, the series’ strikingly inventive writer-director, knows how to stage a rousing opera or opening fanfare in which a family is dismembered. But he’s not exactly a wizard of expository dialogue. He makes these films cheaply, and they have a quality that is outside the system; they are actually collections of set pieces. And the flashbacks in which Art the Clown, who was decapitated at the end of the last film, is strangely reconstructed by Victoria (Samantha Scaffidi), who becomes his one-eyed rotting and walking corpse assistant, play like a highlight. of scenes from “Re-Animator” being shown out of order. “Terrifier 2,” the entire two hours and eighteen minutes, was a more seamless piece of filmmaking.

But “Terrifier 3” puts the “E” in Extreme, and it has a great gimmick, one that simultaneously nods to and lives up to the franchise’s expectations, when Art the Clown is set up as a fake Santa Claus who spends his Christmas chaos unleashes. He steals his costume from an off-duty Santa store after freezing his limbs with nitrous oxide, causing them to crumble into dust with a hammer blow. The film’s prosthetics and makeup effects were created by Christien Tinsley, who works with a depraved practical magic that reminds me of early Rob Bottin (“The Thing”).

Moments later, as we recoil and perhaps marvel a little at Art the Clown’s ingenuity in the slaughterhouse, he pulls out an instrument of death so classic – a chainsaw – that we wonder what he’s going to do with it that’s new. Well, here’s the thing. With every chainsaw murder you’ve ever seen on screen, you only see…so much. (“The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” in its poetic nightmare grandeur, is known for its restraint in its blood.) But Damien Leone and Art the Clown are going to show you what is not a “Chain Saw” sequel, not a scene: that-helped-get-a-Scarface-an-X-rating, ever did. We start with two naked students committing adultery in the shower, after which Art, like Santa Claus, saws through the shower door, then starts sawing off hands and limbs and then places the chainsaw right between the guy’s buttocks, after which the party begins. starts. I’m just getting started.

The film’s climax involves squirming rats, a large glass tube shoved down someone’s throat, and a head carved into a brain, leaving us asking, “Who was that?” (The detail revealing the identity is horribly witty.) “Terrifier 3” is two hours long, and you might wonder why a film about the exploitation of violence porn, something usually attached to the short side is, would be such a lengthy smorgasbord of gruesomeness. But that’s part of what “Terrifier” fans crave: a full immersion in depravity. The horror is on the screen, but in another sense it is in the audience. It’s the fact that a significant portion of regular viewers now view this as entertainment. I don’t mean to sound so judgmental; I am one of them. Looking back on the days of “Friday the 13th Part III” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street 4,” I always found slasher sequels annoying. Still, the prospect of a new “Terrifier” movie doesn’t discourage me in the same way. It leaves me in a state of suspense: what the hell will Art the Clown do next?