The American Damien Leone resuscitates his monstrous creature in a second part of a great graphic brutality.
by Jean-François Rauger
We lend to the brilliant actor LON CHANEY (1883-1930) This final assertion: “The height of the terror is to hear knocking on your door on the midnight and to find a motionless clown on the Threshold. “Terring 2 seems to have made this idea its program. So much so that one could blame the film the slimming of its pretext and the virtual absence of all psychology and any socio-political reflection. We would be wrong. Fundamentally wrong.
Because it is in the quest for a kind of purity, the expression of an essence of horror, that the beauty of Damien Leone’s work resides. The cinematographic terror is rid of all the alibis of what is called “The Elevated Horror”, that is a desire for ambition drawing, often, from fashionable ideologies, which is only one way to devitalize the patterns of the genre. Cruelty here is without explanation, and the drive is alive.
At the origin of the film, there is a whole process, a chain of causes with effects that deserves to be told. Damien Leone, a young cinephile lover of horror films since the age of 3 (!), Made, in 2008 a short film, The 9 th circle. Art, a frightening clown character, appears there for a few minutes.
Cruelty refinements
Pushed by his friends, he made a second short film terrify, which this time gives the central role to art. But Leone’s dream is to transform terrify into a feature film. It will be done thanks to the competition of producer Phil Falcone and a crowdfunding campaign. Shot in 2016 for 35,000 dollars (32,750 euros), terrifying is noticed for its graphic violence, a tone and a style that seemed to have disappeared from chandeliers from horror cinema.
For his suite, terrify 2, the director collects nearly $ 220,000, still thanks to crowdfunding, the reputation of the first part encouraging fans to contribute to funding. Released indoors in October 2022 in the United States, terrify 2 brought back more than $ 10 million. Rumors of spectators vanishing during certain sequences were probably not for nothing in the success of the film.
The first terrifying seemed to reconnect with these small independent films made in the 1970s, where nihilistic research of sordid and unhealthy fed on an orgy of violence, period of hatching of the gore, directly but also insidiously , transform American cinema in depth.
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