SPOILER ALERT: This story contains minor spoilers for “Terrifier 3,” which hits theaters Friday.

Writer-director Damien Leone, the mastermind of the “Terrifier” series, is such a cheerful guy that it’s easy to imagine him in another life as a life coach, a trainer, a teacher. The conversation with him is peppered with lessons and inspiration he received during the shooting of his latest film, “Terrifier 3”:

“You never know where inspiration is going to hit you.”

“You have to go and make the fastest and best decisions you can.”

“I pull him aside and say, ‘I literally feel magic here. This is great.’ And that doesn’t happen often.”

The other shoe drops when you realize that Leone’s positivity is in service of one of the goriest horror films ever made. The unrated “Terrifier 3” unleashes the rogue Art the Clown at Christmas, where he once again stalks the final girl Sienna Shaw (Lauren LaVera). Along the way, the murderous clown kills dozens of people, often dressed as Santa Claus, while desecrating bodies left and right.

Yet there is method to Leone’s madness, as he perfectly formulates the films to show gorehounds something new and extreme. That’s how he ended up with one of the film’s signature set pieces: a take on Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic shower scene in “Psycho.”

“One of the scenes I think people will talk about when they leave this movie is there’s a massacre in the shower,” he says. “One of my favorite movies of all time is ‘Psycho,’ so I said to myself, ‘If Alfred Hitchcock were to make that today, would he shoot it the same way? Would it be a bit more graphic?’ I said, ‘I know if I had the chance to make ‘Psycho’ today and I did that shower scene, I would show everything you could imagine with a knife.” I know no one will let me make “Psycho,” and I didn’t want to just blatantly punch Art the Clown in a shower scene. So I said, ‘How can I make that scene my own? Let’s give him a chainsaw instead, because it’s crueler than a knife, and let’s make it two people instead of one person.”

Leone’s ambitious vision was supplemented by a major financial setback. After “Terrifier 2” earned nearly $16 million at the box office on a $250,000 investment, “Terrifier 3” ballooned to a $2 million budget – still extremely low by Hollywood standards, but it made a world of difference for Leone and his team.

“One of the reasons it took years to make ‘Terrifier 2’, other than the pandemic setting us back, was because I had to do all the special effects with my production partner, Phil (Falcone), and that’s a lot,” he says . . “It was a huge undertaking. That was more special effects, more jokes than I’ve ever written in a movie before, so we had to take a break for weeks at a time, go to his basement, create the effects, and then get back to filming. It played out every now and then throughout the duration of filming. That’s really no way to make a movie, and we knew we couldn’t do that again.

The higher budget allowed him to hire Christien Tinsley of Tinsley Studio, a special effects makeup professional who has worked on productions such as “Passion of the Christ” and “No Country for Old Men.” It was a game changer for the film.

“That was unfathomable, that I could have someone of that caliber jump into the ‘Terrifier’ world and create those special effects,” says Leone. “It was so cool, and it allowed me to spend more time with my actors on set, with my director of photography, and working on the look of the film and the production value.”

David Howard Thornton, who plays silent antagonist Art the Clown, says working with Tinsley allowed him to bring even more depth to his character’s notoriously bizarre facial expressions.

“They redesigned my mask,” he says Variety. “In the first two films I used the mask fashioned from Mike Giannelli, who was originally the face of Art the Clown from ‘All Hallows’ Eve’ (Leone’s film that introduced the character). It didn’t fit my face, so we had to make it fit as best as possible. This time we had a new one that fit my face and was made of a different material. We used foam latex and because it is much thinner it offers more possibilities for expression. You can see every movement my face makes, so I wanted to use that as best I could on this, and Damian said, ‘Go wild with the facial expressions.’ He’s always bigger, bigger, bigger. “Go as big as you can, especially the eyes.” I really enjoyed playing with that.”

Despite the benefits, Leone says the money brought new challenges that they didn’t face in the first two micro-budget films.

“You’re spread even thinner because you now have three times as many people and questions every day,” he says. “You just have to keep jumping from department to department. We had to deal with more union rules, which we never really had to deal with before. We weren’t on anyone’s radar, and now we’ve moved on from everyone radar. We also had to shoot the film much faster, because the clock is running, you’re off to the races and sometimes you just want to shout ‘time out’ to see if everything works.”

Sometimes those decisions have to do with rules of decency. While Art the Clown enthusiasts may appreciate that nothing seems taboo, Leone says he is observant in his films when children die.

“I’m always looking for lines to go to, to push the envelope,” he says. “Maybe you can just get over it. But you can absolutely fall into a degree of extreme disgust that I try to avoid. There’s a scene in the beginning where Art kills a kid off-screen and you just hear it. I could have shown that, and also the glorious way we executed the scene. I would never do that because it’s completely off-putting to me and you’ll alienate a large majority of your audience. It’s like trying to shock the audience into despair. I think it’s my job as an artist to try to walk that line in a more interesting and responsible way.”

For horror diehards who can stomach the whole bloody affair of “Terrifier 3,” there’s a cliffhanger that will immediately segue into a fourth film, which Leone has confirmed is in development. While he won’t reveal too many details, he uses his trademark enthusiasm to tease the next chapter.

“It will definitely be an epic showdown, an epic conclusion to this Art the Clown saga,” he says. “The idea I’m playing with in my head would probably be the most experimental in some ways, so I can’t dive into it too much. Really crazy things will happen in the next film.”