HThere’s a movie that opens with a self-contained prologue that cheerfully lays out its story, straight and square. The scene is a family home at Christmas time, the victims are relatives, and the perpetrator is Art the Clown, dressed as Santa Claus, with an ax in hand. The rules of the film are also made clear: anyone can die and being a cute kid won’t save you, but while some victims are innocent, others deserve their bloody end – at least according to horror movie logic. (In the case of this opening scene, the man who tells his wife, “I have to get up in three hours, you take care of this” is rightly sentenced to death.)

Is Terrifier 3 refined cinema? Not exactly, but this stuff isn’t as easy to remove as it seems. The number of horror films that promise to sicken your soul and shrivel your stomach is staggering, but the number that actually do so, especially among experienced horror viewers, is small. I’m happy to report that Terrifier 3 is truly gruesome; your own mileage may vary, but it’s not for the faint of heart. Art isn’t a deranged financial man like American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman — he’s a demon clown, after all — but he’s just as interested in the deadly potential of a wide variety of tools, including axes, bombs, dry ice, claw hammers, chainsaws, rats, his bare hands, teeth, etc. and writer-director Damien Leone delights in showing every gory second of graphic chaos and gratuitous cruelty.

Unlike Bateman, however, Art the Clown has a friend: Victoria, from the first Terriifier film, who works on the principle: if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, after she started as a victim and graduated as an accomplice. One mystery answered by Terrifier 3 is what these types of characters get up to while chilling at home; Art the Clown likes to lounge in a rocking chair and stare meditatively out the window, while Victoria’s free time consists of reclining in a nice deep bath of her own blood. It’s not for everyone, but for gorehounds this film will deliver.