Even though /Film’s own Chris Evangelista dubbed 2016’s “Terrifier” “crap,” he did at least acknowledge that Damien Leone’s ultra-low-budget slasher was “loaded with some incredibly practical gore.” This has arguably been Leone’s strongest suit across the ensuing sequels, with both 2022’s “Terrifier 2” and 2024’s “Terrifier 3” ratcheting the gore up to levels that defy explanation. As /FIlm’s Jacob Hall wrote in his review of “Terrifier 3,” “The biggest credit one can give the ‘Terrifier 3’ effects team is that it’s frequently not at all clear how they’re pulling these sequences off.”

While the merits of Leone’s brand of ultra-violence can be debated, his talent for creating practical effects simply can not. The man knows how to craft a sickeningly gory sequence and seemingly hasn’t lost a step since his first “Terrifier” movie depicted a woman being sawn in half from the pelvis up. With “Terrifier 2,” the director made use of every resource he could find, creating murder scenes using some very unlikely (and very gross) ingredients such as sausage casings filled with fat and powdered milk to make blood less translucent. Leone’s favorite kill is the infamous Allie (Casey Hartnett) murder scene, in which Art completely decimates the young girl, skinning her alive and leaving her somehow conscious body for her mother to discover — a scene that required multiple days of filming and an array of low-budget practical effects to pull off.

While the scene itself is about as vomit-inducing as you could imagine, the sheer level of technical wizardry on display is undeniable. Leone and his small crew hunkered down in a barn for five days, where they built a set of Allie’s bedroom and created the obscene sequence with a mix of makeup effects and a life-size dummy that Leone crafted for the sickening final shot. But even the Allie kill scene wasn’t quite as ingenious as another “Terrifier 2” death, in which Leone used a prophylactic to render a very specific type of gore.

Damien Leone had been preparing for the “Terrifier” films all his life, revealing to The Horror Hour podcast that, as a child, he was “doing makeup in the middle of the night,” adding, “You know, everybody’s sleeping, it’s a school night, and I’m melting clay on the stove to make a clay head or something like that.” Those skills, honed over Leone’s life, allowed him to realize his dream of creating slasher movies that went well beyond what Hollywood typically allows, packed with realistic gore that is the result of some truly ingenious engineering.

Lauren LaVera, who stars as Sienna in the second and third “Terrifier” movies, was asked about her favorite kill from the franchise by Dexerto and highlighted some of Leone’s inspired design work. The actress pointed to Brooke’s (Kailey Hyman) death in “Terrifier 2,” wherein Art splashes the helpless teen with acid before eviscerating her with a spiked club. The coup de grâce comes when the deranged clown rips out his victim’s still-beating heart. According to LaVera, this was the kill she was most impressed by during her time on “Terrifier 2.” “I really loved Brooke’s kill,” she said, adding:

“When the acid was thrown on her face, you have to remember this was a very low-budget film, and her face needed to bubble. So they used a condom to make the face look like it was bubbling, and I just thought that was hilarious and genius. They used something so cheap, and it worked. It looked so good. I was just enthralled with these artists. I’m just always so impressed with the creativity that needs to be done on such a low budget.”

For those interested in just how Damien Leone made use of a condom to simulate a woman’s face burning from acid, the director posted images to Twitter/X of the practical effects and makeup used to create this brutal scene.

Though Leone doesn’t directly mention the condom itself, the director reportedly blew through tubes to make the condom enlarge and poke through holes on the mask he’d constructed for Brooke’s face. The finished effect was yet another feat of low-tech engineering that looked a lot more advanced than it actually was. Of course, once you know how it was done, you can totally see how the condom was used when rewatching the final scene. 

No doubt more stories about Leone’s craftsmanship will emerge as “Terrifier 3” continues to cause audiences to vomit and run from theaters. With the threequel going even harder than its predecessor, pushing the limits of what you think is possible when it comes to splatter filmmaking, we can’t wait to discover what unlikely ingredients the director used this time around.