UPON WAKING Trailer (2025) Alexa Cate, Romance Movie

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UPON WAKING Trailer (2025) Alexa Cate, Drama, Romance Movie
© 2025 - Buffalo 8

"We could be stuck here fro eons and eons." Buffalo 8 has unveiled the official trailer for an indie romantic drama called Upon Waking, a supernatural love story from Max Rissman. This won the Alternative Spirit Award at its world premiere at the 2023 Flickers Film Festival, and it will be released soon on VOD directly in February just in time for Valentine's Day. When two young lesbians, struggling with their own personal demons, get carbon monoxide poisoning during the first date and fall into a coma, their disembodied spirits must learn to love one another & themselves to have a chance at waking up. "Through this film, we explored profound themes of love, healing, and self-discovery, and we hope it resonates with any audiences who are drawn to its rich and layered storytelling." Starring Vanessa Dubasso and Elsie Hewitt, with Sherilyn Fenn, Sulem Calderon, Chris Zylka, Emelia Hartford, Lydia Marlatt, and Annie Abbott. This film looks like an interesting supernatural concept, but not sure there's really enough to make it worth a watch.

Here's the main official trailer (+ poster) for Max Rissman's film Upon Waking, direct from YouTube:

Upon Waking Poster

Upon Waking is the story of Irene & Molly (Elsie Hewitt & Vanessa Dubasso), two women who experience a shared near-death encounter after falling into a coma caused by carbon monoxide poisoning on their first date. Within this supernatural realm, they confront deep-seated fears, heal emotional wounds, and discover the power of unconditional love. Upon Waking is written and directed by American indie producer / filmmaker Max Rissman, making his feature directorial debut after many other short films previously, as well as the TV movie Root for the Villain. Produced by Josh Cole & Nicholes Cole. This initially premiered at the 2023 Flickers Film Festival and it played at the 2024 LGBT+ Film Festival in Poland last year. Buffalo 8 will debut Rissman's Upon Waking direct-to-VOD starting February 14th, 2025 this fall. Who's curious?
We, humans, have a pattern. We're drawn toward that which hurts us to feel a range of emotions, despite the scars it leaves. And when it comes to consuming media on screen, we love to see lovers fated to be together but parting ways for the most trivial reasons. It’s a subtle representation, right?

No matter how sad the story, we’re immediately captivated by watching a relationship fall to pieces on screen. From a cancer patient falling in love with a disarming boy to star-crossed lovers never having their happily ever after, from right-person-wrong-time to love divided by class and social status, these tales have touched our souls and ripped our hearts out, and we still find ourselves returning to them.

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Tragedy in romances is an age-old reality that has stayed relevant to date. It’s not just about manufacturing movies that cater to fans of the trope but about portraying the ugly, unfiltered truth about relationships, first love, marriage, and how, when it all crumbles, you’re left with that empty, sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach.

These movies do just that. They are gut-punching, devastating stories about people in love. They’re the real tearjerkers. You might find movies on this list that have been a guilty pleasure for years, and movies that have truly stood the test of time in depicting love in its rawest form. Whatever you find and feel, please keep a tissue handy.

25
Love Story (1970)
A scene from Love StoryParamount Pictures
A timeless tale of class divide getting in the way of love, Love Story centers around Oliver Barrett IV and Jennifer Cavilleri, studying law and music respectively, in a sea of love so wild and deep, its almost tragic. Between Oliver’s father turning his back on him and frowning upon the two, and Jennifer being diagnosed with cancer, are moments of deep devotion, harmless teasing, and a genuine portrayal of relationships in the ‘70s – all paired with the most splendid musical score. Honestly, what more could you ask for?

24
Carol (2015)
Carol with Cate Blanchett and Noomi RapaceStudioCanal
Finding true love in 1950s New York while going through a trenchant divorce sounds overwhelming. More if you’re a closeted woman in your 30s. This is the story of Carol, with Cate Blanchett playing the titular character, Rooney Mara playing Therese, a department-store clerk Carol’s love interest. The two shared a love that is forbidden, but precious and whole and valid. Moreover, the use of props, colors, and costumes makes the entire experience truly immersive, while the ladies hopelessly wander toward self-discovery and belonging. Alexa, play We Found Love In A Hopeless Place by Rihanna.

23
Atonement (2007)
atonementStudioCanal
This time-honored tale of two star-crossed lovers will leave you screaming, crying, throwing up. If you know, you know. Atonement is the story of Cecilia (Keira Knightley) and Robbie (James McAvoy). Their love is only blooming, but when Cecilia’s 13-year-old sister (Saoirse Ronan, who was younger at the time) lies about a crime Robbie did not commit, the two are forced apart. Forever. Robbie and Cecilia both die for separate reasons, away from each other, never to be united. And just when we blame Briony for ruining their lives, she drops a truth. The movie is filled with waves of emotion, longing, grief, and above all, ungratifiable love. Moreover, being a period drama, the movie’s use of oil-painting-esque cinematography and costumes is excellent. Who can forget the heated library scene and Knightly’s iconic green dress?

22
Revolutionary Road (2008)
Kate and Leo Revolutionary RoadParamount Vantage
Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio seem to have a merciless habit of destroying us with their epic, unfulfilled romances. They did it with Titanic. And almost a decade later, again, with Revolutionary Road. The movie follows Frank and April Wheeler, a Connecticut couple just pushing themselves through life and their marriage while raising two children. Honestly, Sam Mendes’ immaculate piece of drama isn’t romance. It’s what comes after you’ve fallen in love. It attacks your ingrained fear of relationships, losing the love you once felt, and resenting a person for who they were and have become.

21
One Day (2011)
OneDay (1)Random House Films
Starring Anna Hathaway and Jim Sturgess as Emma and Dexter, One Day revolves around the story of two college graduates who part ways after their first meet but decide to meet every year for a day. As unfeasible as it sounds, the two keep it up for twenty years before finally getting together. But like every disastrous romance, Emma dies in a tragic accident, leaving Dexter (and us) shattered. One Day will destroy you; it will touch you, move you, pull at the strings of your heart, make you angry, and give you hope, but beyond all, it will destroy you. After all that time of waiting for the right time and yearning for an epic love story, what seems like a kind of love they both deserve turns out to be something they shouldn’t have had in the first place.

Related:
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20
Me Before You (2016)
Me Before YouWarner Bros.
Based on the bestselling novel by Jojo Moyes and directed by Thea Sharrock, Me Before You follows a quirky and energetic Lou, and a brooding and resentful and resentful Will. When will is paralyzed from neck down after enduring an accident, he hires Lou as a caretaker for six months. Despite being complete opposites and reluctant, the two form a beautiful connection, and ultimately fall in love. But is their love strong enough to pull them out of torment? What starts off as a subtle and fluffy romance gradually turns into an emotional rollercoaster. It reminds us of how even the most strenuous and uncynical love can lose against forces of nature.

19
Moonlight (2016)
A scene from 2016's MoonlightA24
It is no shocker that Moonlight won Best Picture. The movie does not just feature on the developing romantic life of the main character, but also tackles queer sexuality, parental relationships, self-discovery and the feeling of belonging. The film follows Chiron, a poor boy growing up in Miami, as he navigates his life and his struggles – and his imprecise feelings for a boy named Kevin – through the lens of early and late young adulthood. While the movie is beautifully shot, there more impressive inclusions are all the uncustomary and individualistic people in Chiron’s life who guide him through their own experiences. The movie is so intense and thought-provoking it’ll propel you into sadness once you finish watching.

18
La La Land (2016)
La La Land (2016)Lionsgate
You know you’ve seen this film before, but you didn’t like the ending. A musical romance between Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, La La Land is the story of dreamers. Mia aspires to be in Hollywood but is stuck delivering lattes to the showbiz people. Sebastian is a musician making ends meet by playing at crappy gigs and gloomy bars. When the two meet, they’re instantly draw toward each other. But as a chance to finally catch their dreams knocks at their doors, they have to make a choice. With stunning visuals, great acting, and catchy songs, La La Land is a masterpiece, sure. But what makes it so moving is how the movie will make you happy and sad at the same time. Much like life.

17
If Beale Street Could Talk (2018)
Kiki Layne in If Beale Street Could TalkAnnapurna Pictures
Barry Jenkins returns with his signature tragic premise to depict love, separation, and fighting for what’s right. If Beale Street Could Talk follows Tish, a pregnant African-American woman who stands up against a false system when her fiancé is sent to prison wrongfully. The movie portrays cruelness and the horrors associated with color with such heartbreaking intensity, it can benumb you. It tests your determination and your capacity to endure the stretches and extremities inflicted upon you and your struggle not just for love, but for peace and a life that is safe and just.

16
Your Name (2016)
Your Name 2016Toho
Your Name, or Kimi No Nawa, directed by Mikoto Shinkai, is a science fiction animation revolving around two high schoolers Mitsuha and Taki, living their ordinary lives in different parts of the country. One day, they suddenly wake up having swapped their bodies with each other, which leads them to desperately try to meet. The movie took the critics and audiences by a storm when it came out, and rightfully so. With its tender setting, larger-than-life color sequences, and that beautifully monumental ending, Your Name is a movie that will leave you more melancholic than sad and make you ponder the very nature of time. It sums up to something Mitsuha’s mother says, musubi dayo, which means time is a knot.

Related:
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15
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Jim Carrey as Joel Barish and Kate Winslet as Clementine KruczynskiFocus Features
Jim Carrey plays Joel and Kate Winslet plays Clementine in this fantasy romance where a sour breakup causes the couple to undergo a medical treatment that allows them to erase their memories. But scratching out the memories also deletes their entire relationship, the way the changed and grew into a different person – for better or worse. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is more a lesson on love than a love story itself. It teaches us to value relationships because they add weight to our existence. Disregarding love after a breakup is like invalidating your feelings, and however liberating it feels to forget, the memories of people we have are the ones we cherish and lean on to when the going gets tough.

14
Never Let Me Go (2010)
Never-Let-Me-Go-andrew-garfieldFox Searchlight Pictures
Another one of those movies where no matter how kind and deserving of love the main characters are, they end up forlorn and devoid of connection. Starring Andrew Garfield, Keira Knightley, and Carey Mulligan, Never Let Me Go uses a subtle science-fiction concept to portray the lives of three clones Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy, created with the sole purpose of donating their organs to people in need. Growing up in an English boarding school, they’re kept away from the mundanities and complications of the real world. But as they grow up, they realize that the world out there is brutal and uncaring of their sacrifices.

13
Blue Valentine (2010)
BlueValentineHunting Lane Films
Blue Valentine trails around the relationship of Dean and Cindy, a couple thriving in their own little world, but things don’t stay strong for long when the two have a tendency to self-destruct. The best thing about this movie is how every couple can relate to it. It can actually be defined as “Don't want no other shade of blue, but you. No other sadness in the world would do,” from Taylor Swift’s hoax, because from the jazz blues, to the blurry drunk sentimentality, the movie screams sadness that comes with a relationship going nowhere and love getting exhausting. 10/10 wouldn’t recommend it to committed people because the movie is sure to make you rethink everything about your relationship.

12
Malcolm & Marie (2021)
John David Washington and Zendaya in Malcolm & Marie (2021)Netflix
John David Washington and Zendaya trace a very dysfunctional and toxic relationship as Malcolm and Marie as they’re on the verge of breaking up, but the spitfire that comes from the both of them is both jarring and exhausting. Malcolm is bursting with pride as his Hollywood career is burgeoning, while Marie is deserves actual credits for all his fame. What started with a harmless "I know when nothing is something,” turned into a full-blown gaslighing session in one night alone. Malcolm & Marie is an honest depiction of power dynamics in a relationship, and while it is quite brutal, the truth sets them free from an unhealthy, hurtful, and disrespectful love.

11
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
The Leads of Portrait of a Lady on FireLilies Films
“Do all lovers feel they’re inventing something?” Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a French romance movie set somewhere around the 1770s, following Marianne, a painter who is tasked to paint a portrait of a bride-to-be in secret. But as the two start spending time together and Héloïse lets her guard down, we see a love so elegant and pastel, it gets our heart racing. The movie, filmed on a secluded island in Brittany, uses the atmosphere very delicately. From wide valleys, the roaring sea waves, lighthouse, to sands the stretch for miles, the visuals really enhance every emotion that the movie tries to convey.

Related:
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10
If I Stay (2014)
if-i-stay_1200x630Warner Bros. Pictures
Based on the novel by Gayle Forman, If I Stay follows the story of Mia (Chloë Grace Moretz) who is an aspiring musician planning to get into Juilliard as a cellist. As a 17 year-old, the worst choice she thought she had to make was to decide whether she could bear the pain of losing the love of her life, Adam, when she moves on to pursue her dreams. But a car accident changes everything. Leading to a comatose, the movie places Mia in a dilemma where she has to wrestle death in order to return to the two things she holds dear. What’s crushing is watching Mia’s out-of-body experience as she traverses sequences of her life and tosses her emotions around wanting to see her family again. A guilty pleasure movie indeed, If I Stay also has a great soundtrack as an added bonus.
9
Marriage Story (2019)
Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver in Marriage StoryNetflix
There is something about watching a marriage crumble on screen that is so horrific, captivating and satisfying at the same time. Maybe the cynic in us is delighted for being right. Maybe our deep-seated fear of falling in love but not staying in love validates and materializes itself. Whatever it is, Marriage Story will yank your emotions and it won’t be graceful about it. Adam Driver’s Charlie Barber is a stage director and Scarlett Johansson’s Nicole Barber is an actor. While going through an agonizing divorce, the couple lashes an all-embracing energy out at one another and traces every aspect of their relationship that led them up to this point. While oftentimes nostalgic and bitter, confusing and rancid, scary and unsophisticated, at its core, Marriage Story is a story about love.

8
A Star Is Born (2018)
A Star is BornWarner Bros Pictures
Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga came and served a spectacularly calamitous romance with A Star Is Born. Cooper’s Jackson Maine, is an established one in the music industry. When he recognizes a glowing talent in Ally (Lady Gaga), he not only launches her into the limelight but also starts developing feelings for her. But with fame and success on one hand and a messy relationship on the other, Jack struggles to keep his emotions and internal fears in check. The pair shows so much devotion from the moment they meet that it is impossible not to cradle the false hope of them smoothing things out throughout the time you see it go down.

7
Call Me by Your Name (2017)
Call Me by Your Name Timothee Chalamet Armie HammerSony Pictures Classics / Warner Bros. Pictures
Call Me By Your Name stars Armie Hammer and Timothee Chalamèt in a heartwrenching, unfulfilled summer tale of love and loss. Set in a beautiful villa in Italy, the movie follows seventeen-year-old Elio, who discovers a newfound attraction for his father’s grad student Oliver. It’s all teases and smiles until that ending rips your heart out, with an incredible track by Sufjan Stevens to intensify the pain. Despite the controversy surrounding its second lead, the movie proved to be quite famous and excruciatingly sad, and it hard launched Timothee into the industry as one of the most talented and promising young stars.

6
The Notebook (2004)
Gosling and McAdams - The NotebookNew Line Cinema
The movie is a treat, really. Adapted from a Nicolas Sparks novel, The Notebook stars Rachel McAdams as Allie and Ryan Gosling as Noah, two people entangled in a gorgeous summer romance before being separated by societal status and WWII. But they cross paths with one another; they do. In a more crushing setting. Noah is seen retelling their story to an older Allie, who now suffers from Alzheimer's and all the love and longing they’ve shared has faded in her memories. The Notebook shatters you. From Noah’s “If you're a bird, I'm a bird” to watching him search Allie’s face for any sort of remembrance definitely gets you bawling. Keep a box of tissues ready for this one.

Related:
9 Actors We'd Love to See In a Remake of Nicholas Sparks' The Notebook

5
Five Feet Apart (2019)
Haley Lu Richardson and Cole Sprouse in Five Feet Apart.Lionsgate
Five Feet Apart stars Haley Lu Richardson as Stella Grant and Cole Sprouse as Will Newman in this devastating love story. The two main characters are cystic fibrosis patients who cross oaths in the hospitals. But the risk of cross-contamination lurks, and all patients are advised not to be in one another’s vicinity. While Stella and Will become friends and eventually fall in love, they step close, inch by inch, with a distance of five feet separating them. As crippling as they come, Five Feet Apart is a story about finding love at the most life-threatening places and yearning to keep it despite the dangers it poses.

4
Romeo + Juliet (1996)
Claire Danes and Leonardo DI Caprio in Romeo and Juliet20th Century Fox
A tale of two star-crossed lovers that has etched itself in the history of tragic love stories, Romeo + Juliet is a gorgeous reiteration of Shakespeare’s play. The two Italian teens, played by Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio, are in love, but the love is forbidden by their feuding families. All the glory and pain of feeling that one fleeting emotion leads to the catastrophe that saddened us all. Baz Luhrmann’s excellent direction perfectly captures ’90s teen angst and pairs it with coming-of-age visuals, still retaining the classic, antiquated dialogue.

3
Titanic (1997)
Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in Titanic (1997)Paramount Pictures
Jack and Rose have ruled the hearts of many for decades. As for the movie, no list of sad, tragic romances is complete without mentioning Titanic. You know how the story goes. Jack and Rose come upon one another while journeying from Europe to New York City. From "draw me like one of your French girls” to "I'll never let you go, Jack" the movie has given us heart flutters, happy tears, high standards, and got us throwing hands in disbelief. While some call Jack’s death to be vain, some call it a necessity. Poetic, even. Regardless, Titanic has cemented itself in history for being a story of two ill-fated lovers.

2
A Walk to Remember (2002)
Still from A Walk to RememberWarner Bros. Pictures
A Walk to Remember begins with Landon Carter and his group of friends getting in trouble with another student at school. When Landon is assigned community service, he's also forced to join the school's drama club. He meets Jamie Sullivan and begins practicing lines with her after school. But while Jamie has warned him not to fall in love with her, she's also keeping a secret from him. The movie is the ultimate tearjerker with its soft setting, sincere dialogues, great acting, and that end. Oh, the end. It's cheesy at places, sure, but teen romance is supposed to be. Hands down, one of the best romantic movies of the 2000s.

1
The Fault in Our Stars (2014)
A scene from The Fault in Our Stars20th Century Fox
The Fault in Our Stars’ Hazel Grace Lancaster has always been a terminally ill patient. But after a rigorous medical treatment shrinks her tumor and grants her a couple more years of her life, she joins a Cancer Kid Support Group. There, she meets Augustus Waters, the charming and disarming teenager who claimed to see through Hazel Grace. The two get close but just enough, they travel to Amsterdam to fulfill Hazel's wish to meet her favorite author, and return devastated. For a 2014 movie based on a John Green novel, the audiences sure ate the tragedy up. Now? Who knows.

Movie Lists
Romance
Twenty years after the release of the world’s first digitally shot blockbuster, George Lucas’s Attack of the Clones, Sam Wigley talks to the early adopters who delighted in experimenting with a medium that would reinvent the industry.

25 November 2022

Collateral (2004)
Sam Wigley
By Sam Wigley
Sight and Sound
Features
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A blurry photo found online captures the day Hollywood began to be convinced by digital cinematography. The scene is a screening room at Skywalker Ranch 20 years ago, in April 2002. Posing for the group shot, backs to the screen, wearing the familiar range of chinos, blue jeans and casual jackets that mark out the A-list auteur, are some of the most famous directors in the industry: Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Mann, Oliver Stone, John Lasseter, Robert Rodriguez, Michael Bay, Roland Emmerich, Bryan Singer and Robert Zemeckis.

Peeking out of the back row is their host, George Lucas. He was gearing up to release his new Star Wars film, Attack of the Clones, which was about to become the first digitally shot blockbuster to hit cinemas. Thrilled with the results he’d achieved with British cinematographer David Tattersall, he’d convened this digital summit at his ranch as a show and tell; an opportunity for the advance party to share early experiences of working with digital. Coppola would screen some footage he’d shot for Megalopolis (a project he’s yet to finish); Mann showed some digital sequences he’d incorporated into Ali (2001). Yet this challenge to the century-old orthodoxy of celluloid caused rumbles of disquiet in the room. “Film is what we do. It’s what we use,” Stone was reported to have challenged Lucas. “You’ll be known as the man who killed cinema.”

If the gathering sounds reminiscent of that scene in Singin’ in the Rain (1952) in which a 1920s studio bigwig dims the lights at a Hollywood party for a demonstration of a talking picture (“Listen everybody, I’ve got a few little surprises for you tonight”), it should. In 2002, the industry was on the precipice of a revolution in the way movies were made and watched that would prove every bit as momentous as the coming of sound. Perhaps more so, in that the new technology wasn’t an embellishment so much as an ontological shift in the nature of the medium. Since the beginning, movies had depended on chemically enhanced celluloid to capture the light in front of the camera lens. In its place, digital cinematography offered a translation of reality: the light would be captured by microchip sensors and encoded as an infinite stream of zeros and ones.

“By the mid-90s the movie business was halfway into the digital revolution,” Tattersall tells me. “Sound, editorial, VFX and the art departments had all transitioned very quickly to digital systems and were enjoying all of the advantages of more efficient workflows and better quality control.” In order to close the digital production loop, advances in digital camera technology were needed, alongside an even greater challenge: an overhaul of the distribution system that would allow digital films to be screened on digital projectors, without the costly need to transfer the finished movie to 35mm.

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999)
The story goes that, over dinner in Los Angeles in the autumn of 1996, Lucas and his producer Rick McCallum persuaded Sony to develop a movie-camera-style high-definition device, capable of shooting at 24 frames per second and with a 2.35:1 aspect ratio. Lucas had hoped to shoot The Phantom Menace (1999) digitally, but found initial tests disappointing. “As a cheeky experiment, however,” Tattersall says, “a couple of quick shots deeply buried in the movie were shot with a Sony HDC-750 Hi Def camera, recorded back on to film and cut into the master negative.” Watch the brief scene at nightfall on Tatooine when Liam Neeson’s Qui-Gon takes a sample of Anakin Skywalker’s blood: if you’re primed to detect it, there’s the uncanny sensation of Hollywood sampling its own future.

***

An HD cam filming driver-passenger conversations from the dashboard – an impossible space to fit one of your old-school movie cameras (Abbas Kiarostami’s 10). An unbroken 90-minute take gliding through St Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum – an impossible length of time to capture in one go on 35mm (Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark). A nine-hour documentary that embeds us in the slow decline of a Shenyang industrial district, all shot by a crew of one (Wang Bing’s West of the Tracks ). In the spring of 2002, Attack of the Clones wasn’t the only world premiere using digital cameras to recalibrate our expectations of what a film could be.

Russian Ark (2002)
On 16 May, the day that Lucas’s film was released into cinemas worldwide, it also screened at the Cannes Film Festival, where the main competition was the event’s most pixel-heavy to date. Four digitally shot films were selected to compete, including 10 and Russian Ark, the latter filmed uncompressed to hard disk rather than tape (a first) on the same camera – Sony’s CineAlta F900 – Lucas had used. They were joined by Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People and Jiă Zhangke’s Unknown Pleasures, both of which began a run of digital features from their respective directors.

“Shooting on digital video was not a mainstream practice in China at the time,” says Jiă. “It was considered ‘amateur’ and mostly used for home videos. But I was not a mainstream filmmaker: my films were banned back then.”

Unknown Pleasures grew out of a 30-minute digital film called In Public (2001) that Jiă had made on commission for the Jeonju International Film Festival, filmed in the same locations in Datong. In Jiă’s own words, Unknown Pleasures is “about young people failing to keep up with China’s rapid economic transformation”.

Unknown Pleasures (2002)
At first, Jiă had the impression that digital was all about “off-the-cuff approaches and low definition… But even if I wasn’t yet aware of the medium’s potential aesthetic possibilities, I did think it might become a weapon in the struggle for more free creativity.

“I soon found out that digital has its own distinctive visual character, and realised that we shouldn’t try to cling to the celluloid aesthetic but instead explore digital’s particular possibilities and characteristics.” Working with his regular cinematographer, Yu Lik-wai, he also came upon many advantages to the new format: “It didn’t rely on elaborate lighting, it was easy to operate the camera with a small crew, the shoot became more flexible and it was easier to hide the camera. We used a small camera so that we could shoot in any public space without having to fork out rental charges [for locations].”

Winterbottom was making some of the same discoveries over in the UK, and on the same small camera: the Sony PD-150, one of the early professional-grade devices that recorded to tapes, known as Mini DV. “It was those aspects of digital that I liked,” he tells me. “By using the small cameras, you could go discreetly into busy cafés or bars or out into the street without drawing attention to yourself; without looking professional. You could put your actors into a public space, and then shoot for half an hour – with no lights or mics – without stopping. It was about taking the fictional story and putting it into real, uncontrolled environments.”

The candid, reality-capturing abilities of Mini DV were put to dramatic use on Winterbottom’s subsequent docudrama In This World (2002), filmed guerrilla-style as it follows two Afghan refugees on the perilous overland route through Europe. “It would really have been impossible to make that on film,” Winterbottom says. But when I put it to him that these films make him a trailblazer of early digital cinema, he bats the suggestion away, saying digital was already “old hat”. He reminds me he’d been on the jury at Cannes back in 1998, when pixels made their first play for the Palme.

Revolutionary road
The cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle tells me a story about his film school teacher visiting him on the set of Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen (1998), wearing “a cravat and cool jacket” and telling him: “‘You realise, Anthony, this is a revolution. This is going to be a revolution.’”

Festen (1998)
At film school in Copenhagen, the Oxford-born Dod Mantle had fallen in with Vinterberg and his pal Lars von Trier, who would become the brains behind the Dogme 95 manifesto – an anti-polish, back-to-basics filmmaking credo about as far from Lucas’s vision of an infinitely tinkerable digital cinema as one medium can hold. It was with the Dogme 95 films that digital cinematography got its big bang moment. Vinterberg’s Festen, in which a toxic family secret comes out during a birthday gathering, and von Trier’s The Idiots, about a commune of Danes getting their kicks by pretending to be disabled, caused a joint sensation at Cannes ’98; their handheld, digicam textures part and parcel of the films’ gnarly provocations.

“It could just as well have gone one way that I shot Lars’s or I shot Thomas’s, but I’m very glad I didn’t have to shoot Lars’s, because I would have had to get naked,” says Dod Mantle, referring to The Idiots’ notorious ‘disabled’ orgy scene.

Using a camcorder wasn’t mandated by the Dogme rules, but having tested other formats, Dod Mantle committed to shooting Festen on small Sony PC3 Handycams just two days before filming was due to start. “I wanted the camera to have that protagonist character, and that immediately requires ergonomics and spontaneous ability to move something without you conveying it to the crew.”

Love & Pop (1998)
How different film history might be if an earlier 1998 film had been widely seen in the West. Anno Hideaki was an animator who’d recently completed the film sequel to his post-apocalyptic anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995 to 1996) when he made an unexpected foray into live action. Anticipating GoPro aesthetics by nearly a decade, Love & Pop is something like the I Am Cuba (1964) of early digital cinema, Anno putting his tiny camcorders up into every conceivable vantage point, including inside a fridge, strapped to a moving bicycle and train set, and shooting downwards from inside a girl’s skirt. In the unlikely guise of a teen drama about Tokyo schoolgirls dating older men for money, Anno seized on the flexibility offered by smaller cameras to reach for some of the elastic visual invention possible in animation.

Next to Love & Pop’s helter-skelter ambition, even the handheld dashing about of early Dogme looks sedentary. Yet, with the benefit of a Cannes launchpad, it was the two-pronged attack of Festen and The Idiots that would shape early digital cinema, not just in galvanising cash-strapped filmmakers around the world to grab a camcorder, but also in primordially associating the low-grade, Handycam approach with either corrosive drama or a puerile, prankster ethos. Sight and Sound’s review of The Idiots compared it with “downmarket, fly-on-the-wall television shows” Candid Camera and Beadle’s About, and it would be a short step from von Trier’s antisocial hijinks to the digital japes of Jackass (which launched on MTV in 2000) and the kind of home movies proliferating on early YouTube (launched in 2005). A similar confrontational energy found its way into the likes of Chuck & Buck (2000) and Spike Lee’s media satire Bamboozled (2000), both shot on the same ‘prosumer’-grade Sony camera – the VX1000 – von Trier had used.

“Festen was the big one that we studied really carefully. It was very encouraging because you could see how visceral [digital] could be,” explains Rebecca Miller, whose own domestic drama Personal Velocity – shot by Bamboozled cinematographer Ellen Kuras and funded through Gary Winick’s low-budget digital filmmaking outfit InDigEnt – won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2002, the first digital film to do so.

Dogme initially got its tendrils into US indie cinema via Harmony Korine, who poached Dod Mantle to work on his Dogme-certified Julien Donkey-Boy (1999). But very soon no festival line-up would be complete without a smattering of camcorder dramas, usually laced with edgy, adult themes. Mike Figgis’s Timecode (2000) set four digicams running for an ambitious split-screen narrative about infidelity in Hollywood (the love rat being von Trier favourite Stellan Skarsgård). Richard Linklater’s chamber piece Tape (2001) – another InDigEnt production – confined itself to a Michigan motel room for a truculent reunion between three friends. Steven Soderbergh’s improvisational Hollywood satire Full Frontal (2002) doubled down on the dogma by insisting that his cast drive themselves to the locations, do without catering and provide their own wardrobe.

These are not pretty movies, and reviews of the time didn’t mince their words. “Shot on DV, transferred to film, cost next to nothing, looked like shit: cold, fuzzy, and coarse. If that was the point, I missed it,” wrote Film Comment editor Gavin Smith of Chuck & Buck. Variety called the German reunion drama Birthday (2001) “the latest in a string of ill-conceived and poorly executed digital video improvisations being trumpeted as fully developed films”. The Guardian said of Full Frontal: “It is so grainy at times that you begin to think something has gone badly wrong.” Not unlike the creaky, static output of early sound cinema, the digital corpus of the trial-and-error years now lies largely untended and unloved – absent from streaming services and bereft of Blu-rays.

“All digital at that time had a tendency to be quite greasy,” admits Miller. “It didn’t have the luminosity of film. Any time you had a hard edge, let’s say a white window with a darker edge around it, you would have artefacting [distortion caused by data compression] on the edge of the light part. Interior shots with this extreme dissonance between light and dark would be very ugly. What we ended up doing [on Personal Velocity] was pumping a lot of smoke into the rooms, almost like a filter in the air.”

Open Hearts (2002)
“Shooting on film can be beautiful when it’s quite dark because the grain has a life,” says Susanne Bier, who made her infidelity drama Open Hearts (2002) under the terms of Dogme 95. “The grains you got on old-school digital weren’t beautiful. I liked working on digital but I didn’t like what it looked like when the lighting wasn’t good enough. When you shot out of a window, it blurred out the white in a way that wasn’t attractive.”

For Miranda July, the degraded aesthetic of digital video was part of its appeal. In 1995, the same year Sony’s first consumer digicam hit shelves, July launched her chainletter-style feminist video project Joanie 4 Jackie, and began making her own experimental short films. “Here was a camera designed for parents to film ballet recitals – very domestic, harmless, foolproof,” she says, “but you could misuse it to make something disruptive, upsetting or ambitious. There was a kind of appealing seedy underbelly to the video aesthetic: porn, sex tapes, ransom videos, surveillance.”

These were years in which rough edges could be inspirational. When I speak to Bengali director Subrata Sen down the phone from Kolkata, it turns out that even the Variety-derided Birthday had had a huge butterfly effect. It was seeing Stefan Jäger’s film alongside another early German-language digital film – Jessica Hausner’s Lovely Rita – at Karlovy Vary in 2001 that inspired his own move to DV. The result, 2003’s controversial relationship drama Nil nirjane, was a landmark: India’s first digital film.

There’s something about Marey
In an interlude in The Gleaners and I (2000), her docu-essay about the act of collecting and living off leftovers, the septuagenarian Agnès Varda finds herself at a vineyard that has remained in the family of 19th-century moving-image pioneer Étienne-Jules Marey. Still standing is the stone hide where Marey would train his chronophotographic rifle on passing birds and animals, shooting not bullets but rapid-fire exposures that would break down their movement into proto-filmic sequences.

The Gleaners and I (2000)
Varda shows us some of these strips in motion, the flickering magic of a zoetrope resurrecting Victorian-era ducks and horses before our eyes. And though she doesn’t make a big deal of it, the moment gently collapses 120 years of moving-image art and technology. For The Gleaners and I is all filmed on a Sony DVCAM: what we’re seeing is Marey’s 12 frames per second now rendered as pixels.

“My working with digital cameras always amuses people,” Varda told Chris Darke in Sight and Sound at the time. “There goes grandma with her DV.” But the inconvenient truth is that, with Gleaners, the ageing ‘godmother of the French New Wave’ beat all of indie’s young turks in making the world’s first digital masterpiece. And her fellow travellers in the nouvelle vague weren’t far behind in pushing the new form in unexpected directions: Godard using blown-out DV to create impasto splashes of saturated colour in Éloge de l’amour (2001); Rohmer using blue screen to set the French Revolution story of The Lady and the Duke (2001) against artificial, illustrated backdrops.

“What’s missing in all this talk of digital technologies is the understanding that they’re only tools to shoot and edit with, they’re not ends in themselves,” said Varda. “To see stuff that’s technically sophisticated but that says nothing doesn’t interest me. For me, the DV camera and Avid are tools I use to get closer to people more easily and to shoot on my own – and to collapse the time lapse between wanting to film something and actually being able to do it.”

In the same period, Portuguese director Pedro Costa had also been looking for a way for his films to get closer to people. His 1997 release Ossos began an ongoing series of intimate, minimalist works in which he embedded himself within the Cape Verdean immigrant community of Fontainhas in suburban Lisbon. But shooting Ossos on 35mm had made him frustrated with the circus of film production: the trailers, lighting equipment, time pressures and financial trade-offs that were necessary with even a small crew.

“One day I went to this small shop downtown, just a counter in the subway station selling cameras and tapes and batteries. And I asked him what camera he would advise. He told me you basically have two: the Sony, which is blue, and the Panasonic, which is green. I went for green.”

In Vanda’s Room (2000)
Armed with batteries, Mini DV tapes and a tripod, Costa returned to Fontainhas to begin shooting what would become In Vanda’s Room (2000), his three-hour portrait of Vanda Duarte, a heroin addict who’d acted in Ossos. “I used to take the bus every morning and began working or taking notes or just watching. It was a very documentarian way of working. I was completely alone. And I felt completely free. I had separated from the film world and actually I’ve never been back.”

Among the early digital films, In Vanda’s Room and its follow-up, Colossal Youth (2006), stand out as much for their radical stillness as for their painterly approach to lighting, Costa using a bathroom mirror he found in Vanda’s house to create iridescent pockets of colour within gloomy rooms. “My Panasonic had an orange sticker on it that said ‘Move me’, but I decided to go against the corporation and I did exactly the opposite: I did very long static shots. I was filming long conversations in small rooms, so I couldn’t do travelling shots, and it would have been very tiring to do handheld.

“I’m a little against this urgency, this speed. My project is to go somewhere else: to go a bit more intimate, to go deeper.”

***

David Lynch is another filmmaker who intuited digital’s capacity for going deeper. He was jury president at the digital-heavy Cannes in 2002, but that same spring had begun releasing his own short DV experiments on his website, davidlynch.com – notably his surreal soap opera Rabbits.

Rabbits (2002)
“I got this Sony PD-150,” Lynch remembers. “You could do stop-motion, timelapse, anything you wanted. I just loved that camera. I loved the ease of working with it; how fast things could go.

“I made lots of little tiny movies, and one thing led to another and I shot the feature film Inland Empire [2006]. It was terrible quality compared to celluloid, but it saved time; it was kind of an interesting look. You could create a world with this camera and I just got fascinated by it.”

Inland Empire arrived as a hallucinatory, three-hour B-side to Mulholland Dr. (2001); another dark vision of Hollywood as a Möbius strip in which dreams are crushed in perpetuity. But Mulholland Dr. was shot on velvety 35mm; it was a nightmare delivered via an embrace. In the cold digital light of Inland Empire, it’s as if even that comforting topsoil of dream-factory glamour has been scoured away. Lynch’s smudgy, pixellated shots are often disconcertingly close; the actors’ teeth look yellow.

The small camera enabled Lynch to work as his own cinematographer, something that transformed his dynamic with the performers. “You could have a 40-minute take instead of a nine-minute take,” he tells me. “I could talk to the actors while we were shooting. I could run the camera myself. I could hand-hold this thing, get in close, move it around where I wanted to move it. Feel the shot. I could go in, I could go out; I could go over here, I could go over there. I could say, ‘Go again, start again’ and they could get deeper and deeper. Before they got tired or we’d have to reload and lose the feel, you could get the thing. It was so beautiful.”

David Lynch filming Inland Empire (2006)
Although few have explored digital’s hazy, expressive textures in ways that are unique to the technology since, Lynch remains evangelical. “The thing about digital is it’s absolutely anything you can think you can do,” he says. “There are billions of things we haven’t discovered yet. So you gotta get ideas, you gotta get in there and find out what it can do. You gotta work with it. It’s gotta talk to you. You’ve gotta become friends with it. And you’ve got to have time to experiment. The sky’s the limit. It is a vast world that’s there to be discovered.”

By the time Inland Empire was finished, however, the PD-150 was an antique. Second-generation digital movie cameras such as the Panavision Genesis and the Thomson Viper, while still primitive by today’s standards, were huge leaps forward in the race to close the gap between celluloid and high-definition. Compatible with all of Panavision’s standard lenses, the Genesis became an instant favourite of mainstream cinematographers moving into digital, debuting on 2006 releases such as Scary Movie 4, Superman Returns and Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto.

The rival, slightly earlier-to-market Thomson Viper would be the camera David Fincher chose for Zodiac (2007) and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), but which had first been put through its paces by Michael Mann and his cinematographer Dion Beebe on Collateral (2004) and Miami Vice (2006).

Miami Vice (2006)
“I used to have nightmares in the first two weeks of shooting Collateral that none of what we were shooting was actually going to become a film,” says Mann. “It just existed in my memory as some form of perverse conceptual art and it would never be in theatres.”

Mann had broken ground by shooting the primetime TV series Robbery Homicide Division (2002-03) in high definition and, before that, sections of Ali. “There was a singular quality that attracted me to digital, and that was belief. You believed what you were seeing and you were there more intensely. There’s a truth-telling style to it.”

His eureka moment came shooting Will Smith as Muhammad Ali witnessing riots break out across the city after the assassination of Martin Luther King: “From the rooftop he can see two blocks away, there’s a storefront on fire, police sirens coming.” Mann grabbed a video camera and put up a small light with a reflecting sheet – “like a bedsheet” – and “there was a special quality to it that was magical… by subtracting the theatrical lighting you felt that you were suddenly parachuted into a real event happening in real time.

Michael Mann shooting Miami Vice (2006)
“It’s with Collateral that digital came into its fullest expression for me, because the movie was happening all in one night in Los Angeles. And I wanted to see LA at night the way you could see it with the naked eye. During the winter, there’s a marine layer that comes in around 10, 11 at night. The yellow sodium vapour street lamps reflect off the bottom of those clouds and it becomes a soft illumination. You couldn’t possibly capture that with film and that became its own aesthetic.

“And it’s an aesthetic derived from the technology. It’s not taking the technology and trying to imitate an older form. If I have a negative judgement [of other filmmakers], it’s of people trying to make video look like film. The whole virtue of it is to arrive at a new form.”

In Miami Vice it’s the lightning-prone skies and humming roadsides of urban Florida that Mann captures with new, conductive immediacy. “You’re alive in the night world,” he says. “There’s a romance to things nocturnal that moves me in very strong ways. I wanted to convey the sense that we’re above the city or on the water or driving into the city.”

The end of an era
All of these explorations of digital’s potential would go unnoticed by the Academy. Beebe would get his Oscar recognition for his celluloid work with Rob Marshall – nominated for Chicago (2002); winning for Memoirs of a Geisha (2005) – not his high-def expressionism with Mann, and no digitally shot film was nominated for either best picture or best cinematography until 2009, when Slumdog Millionaire and Benjamin Button were each up for both. This landmark acknowledgement came just four years before digital cinematography would overtake 35mm as the industry standard.

From 2009 onwards, digital films screening via digital projectors began to become the norm too. The lamps went out in traditional 35mm projectors around the world. Purists such as Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino and Tacita Dean would sound the battle cry for the imperilled medium of film, but further strides forward in camera resolution meant that what had once been a chasm between the look (and intangible feel) of the rival formats became a hairline crack – something for aficionados to argue over, while audiences moved on or opened up Netflix (which began its streaming service in 2007). The sense of grief, of treasured things slipping away, that has engulfed film culture in the wake of these epochal shifts remains so raw that to celebrate the ugly-duckling experimentalism of what one Letterboxd list calls ‘The Bad Digital Era’ can feel indecent. Is it still too soon?

On that watershed Oscar night in 2009, there was an unintended Tinseltown perfection in the fact that it would be Princess Amidala herself, Natalie Portman, presenting the cinematography statuette to Anthony Dod Mantle for his work on Slumdog. It was like the worlds of Dogme and Star Wars, which had led the digital charge at an indie and blockbuster level, being symbolically drawn together.

On stage with Portman was Ben Stiller, who quipped that Danny Boyle’s winner was filmed entirely on a cellphone. It’s not a joke that works these days: all of that was right around the corner.

Directors on digital
David Lynch:
“It’s like a pencil and a piece of paper. Everybody has access to that. Not a lot is being done with it maybe, but everyone has access to a digital camera and sound and can record and work with things. It makes the world of motion pictures available to pretty much everybody – it’s just incredible. We’ll see what happens, what people do with it. The digital world is getting just incredibly great now. There’s something about celluloid that digital cannot do, so I’m waiting for somebody to invent something – a digital emulsion almost – to bring out what celluloid can do, inside the camera, somehow. If digital can somehow get this beauty celluloid has, it’d be great.”

Miranda July:

Miranda July filming Kajillionaire (2020)
“I didn’t know or care about the industry – it seemed old school. I thought moviemaking would only really become an artform if anyone could access it, the way anyone can paint or sing or write. Mediums don’t suffer from being available, they evolve. If movies always need a company behind them, they will never really be an art. I spent ten years trying to spread that idea to women through joanie4jackie.com. Our phones and TikTok, Instagram and [video messaging app] Marco Polo, are good for filmmaking as an artform. I hate that the algorithms are designed to override self-care but that’s going to end soon and meanwhile I like to see this kind of avant-garde, spontaneous filmmaking replacing old-timey conventions that are totally arbitrary at this point. It has to be that a movie can be any length… in any style that works (as opposed to conventional coverage), and can star anyone or no one. Video has helped all different kinds of people conceive of themselves as filmmakers (even if they don’t use that word) but the industry will always be very behind – with so much money at stake, decisions have to be fear-based and the familiar always feels safer. It will take about 20 more years for everything to become totally different – we have to get out from under these tech monopolies and you have to have grown up with them to destroy them.”

Michael Mann:
“My friend Chris Nolan is a huge advocate of preserving 35mm, preserving photochemical. And I totally endorse his position. That’s the way he sees. I would have all cinemas be able to do everything, to be able to do digital and photochemical. There’s no ideological difference to it. We respect how each other works. Directors are very egalitarian about this kinda stuff.”

Pedro Costa:
“The twist is that digital filmmaking is going back. Cameras are much bigger now. The main Alexa is bigger than the 35mm camera I used to work with. There’s a lot of new tasks and new technicians around the shooting to treat the digital image, to grade, to colour correct, etc. And so it’s what it was. I remember at that time, all of us thought, here comes a sort of democracy, here comes small, cheap equipment and young guys can buy it and can do cheaper films alone with friends, et cetera. It’s completely dead, it doesn’t exist any more. Digital shooting today, you need maybe more people than you used to need in 35. It’s ridiculous. It’s how the capitalistic system grabs you again by the back.”

Jia Zhangke:

Jia Zhangke
Xstream Pictures
“On the one hand you can say that digital is achieving maturity; on the other that it’s doing so by returning to the qualities of shooting on film. Maybe the only place you can find ‘pure’ digital imagery these days is in experimental art. The digital mainstream is bent on producing images for mass consumption. That’s a problem for us all: how conservative you are, how conservative digital makes your images, how aggressive you are, how radical digital makes your images. The ultimate question is not the difference between digital and celluloid, it’s still the difference between one human being and the next.” Translated by Casper Liang, with assistance from Tony Rayns

A short history of the digital revolution
1987: First digital feature film shot using Sony’s analogue high-definition system HDVS: Julia and Julia

1995: Sony and Panasonic launch the first consumer DV cameras

1998: First features shot on DV to screen at Cannes: Festen and The Idiots

1998: First digitally shot, digitally distributed film: The Last Broadcast

1999: The Blair Witch Project, a low-budget independent film incorporating DV footage, makes nearly $250 million at the box office

1999: First big-budget Hollywood film to incorporate some digital cinematography: The Phantom Menace

2000: First digital Palme d’Or winner: Dancer in the Dark

2001: First Inuktitut-language film is shot digitally: Atanarjuat, the Fast Runner

2002: First digitally shot blockbuster to be released: Attack of the Clones

2002: First film shot uncompressed to hard disk rather than tape: Russian Ark

2003: First Indian digital film: Nil nirjane

2006: First film shot with Panavision Genesis: Superman Returns; first film shot with Panavision Genesis to be released: Scary Movie 4

2008: First film shot with Red One camera: Che: Part One

2009: First mainly digital best picture/best cinematography winner: Slumdog Millionaire

2010: First completely digital best cinematography winner: Avatar

2013: Digital overtakes celluloid as industry standard

2013: First major Hollywood film to be released exclusively for digital projectors: The Wolf of Wall Street
After recently premiering in cinemas, Terrifier 3 cannot escape the headlines. Damien Leone's gory delight has integrated into the mainstream, ensuring its spot alongside the most iconic horror franchises. As Its villain, Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) has since been hailed a new horror icon of the 21st century.

He has left bodies in his wake in his three feature-length appearances, with the worst Terrifier deaths being unforgettable blood baths. Art has taken pleasure from mutilation; from the famous "shower scene" in the new movie to a kill involving a hacksaw, he is one to be avoided. Which is the worst Terrifier scene so far?

15
Tara's Fate is Finally Sealed
'Terrifier' (2016)
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After watching her friend be murdered, Tara (Jenna Kanell) manages to escape her bindings, runs away from Art, and eventually gains the upper hand. After using a two-by-four as a weapon, she knocks Art down and repeatedly hits him. However, Art pulls out a handgun and proceeds to shoot her to death.

This was shocking; Tara was presented as potentially final girl material, and director Damien Leone subverted the audience's expectations by killing her off in the film's second act. It effectively demonstrated that no one is safe. The kill was dark, as it reflected Art's relentless nature. He was toying with Tara, and when he perceived her as a threat, it was no longer enjoyable for him.

Terrifier
Horror
Release Date
March 15, 2018
Runtime
86 Minutes
Director
Damien Leone
Cast
Cast Placeholder Image
David Howard Thornton
Cast Placeholder Image
Jenna Kanell
Cast Placeholder Image
Samantha Scaffidi
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14
The Mall Scene
'Terrifier 3' (2024)
Art the Clown posing as a mall Santa in Terrifier 3. Image via Cineverse
Art the Clown is totally sadistic but one thing he has surprisingly stayed away from in the Terrifier films has been children. That all changes with Terrifier 3. The mall scene is one of the more humorous deaths of the film in terms of Art’s antics and reactions, but the actual kill itself is so bleak and dark that it’s a total shock to the system. In the scene, Art arrives at the local mall and sees that the mall Santa has gone on break.

Naturally, having previously killed a man in a Santa suit and stolen said suit for himself, he decides to pose as the holly jolly guy. Kids start flocking to him, but parents are understandably offput by him, and security ends up kicking him out. However, Art stands nearby and laughs manically to himself as he watches the kids dig into the presents he brought because he left a special surprise in one of the boxes. That surprise is a bomb, and when one of the kids opens it it explodes and kills him and four others. It may not be his most gruesome or gory kill, but the implications of it are horrifying. These innocent kids just wanted presents from Santa! – Samantha Graves

Terrifier 3
Not Rated
Release Date
October 11, 2024
Runtime
125 Minutes
Director
Damien Leone
Cast
Cast Placeholder Image
Lauren LaVera
Cast Placeholder Image
David Howard Thornton
Cast Placeholder Image
Antonella Rose
Main Genre
Horror
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13
Mike Gets the Boot
'Terrifier' (2016)
Art the Clown with a scalpel in his hand while smiling in 'Terrifier 2.'Image via Cinedigm
Mike (Matt McAllister) is quickly drawn into the drama as Art knocks him unconscious with a hammer. However, he shows resilience by saving Victoria (Samantha Scaffidi) and returning the favor. The clown eventually gets the jump on Mike, and after knocking him down, he turns his head into a bloody mess.

This kill was very dark and featured some fantastic practical effects as Mike's head became completely liquefied. Mike was a likable character and was only trying to look out for other people. The kill further illustrates Art's brute strength, as he was able to destroy Mike's face in only a few seconds.

12
Ricky is Killed in a Costume Shop
'Terrifier 2' (2022)
David Howard Thornton as Art the Clown tormenting Lauren LaVera as Sienna in a prop store in Terrifier 2Image via Cinedigm
After Art terrorizes Sienna Shaw when she tries to buy a set of wings for her Halloween costume, she eventually leaves to make the costume shop owner the next target. Ricky (Johnnath Davis) orders Art to leave as he tries to buy a horn without any money. Art then smashes a glass bottle over his head and violently lodges the bottle head into his eye. He is then quickly decapitated.

This scene was terrific; it firstly offered a quick sucker punch, as it followed Art hilariously trying on glasses. Following a slower period in the film, this Terrifier kill was dark and left viewers fearing what was to come, as it was Art's start of his killing spree. Furthermore, Ricky's death illustrated more of the fantastic practical effects that Leone is capable of. He can never be accused of not maximizing gore effects.

Terrifier 2
r
Release Date
October 6, 2022
Runtime
140 minutes
Director
Damien Leone
Cast
Cast Placeholder Image
Lauren LaVera
Cast Placeholder Image
Elliot Fullam
Cast Placeholder Image
Sarah Voigt
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11
Jeff Loses the Most Important Thing
'Terrifier 2' (2022)
Art the Clown With Knife 2x1
Jeff (Charlie McElveen) is first seen at the Halloween party as he meets up with his girlfriend, Brooke (Kailey Hyman). Jeff eventually travels with Brooke and Sienna to locate the latter's brother Jonathon (Elliot Fulham). He doesn't make it very far as the trio head to the Terrifier haunted attraction. When he stops to urinate, Art brutally stabs his genitals, and he eventually rips them off, leaving him to bleed to death.

This scene was not only dark in the literal sense but also metaphorically. The extreme genital mutilation was enough to make male viewers completely uncomfortable; it mirrored a scene in the previous film. Jeff was also presented as likable, as he wanted to help Sienna, and no one would ever deserve his fate.

10
The Coroner Meets His End
'Terrifier' (2016) and 'Terrifier 2' (2022)
Art the Clown, played by actor David Howard Thornton, strangles a mortuary worker in Terrifier 2.Image via Cinedigm.
After Art is resurrected at the end of Terrifier, the movie ends as he strangles the poor coroner (Cory DuVal). The sequel picks up from that point, as Art kills him with his own equipment. He uses a hammer to smash his head; Art then gouges out one of his eyes and uses it to fill the empty space where his old eye was. He then uses the hammer to bludgeon his head completely.

The horror sequel began in fantastic form and gave viewers an early sign of what movie they were watching. Known for implementing humor into his kills, Art was genuinely dark and terrifying here. Standing angrily over his victim, Art was also seen walking menacingly down the street in a fantastic shot. He felt untouchable at this point. The kill was also completely uncut, with viewers forced to see every gruesome detail close up.

9
Charles the Bar Santa
‘Terrifier 3’ (2024)
Eddie, Smokey, and Charles at the bar in Terrifier 3. Image via Cineverse
Art waltzes into a bar at one point in the movie and comes across three characters. Eddie (Bradley Stryker) the bartender, Smokey (Clint Howard) the barfly, and a man named Charles in a Santa suit (Daniel Roebuck). Eddie and Smokey get relatively merciful deaths as Art shoots them in the head, but for some reason he decides to put the Santa through some serious torture, despite the man being really nice to Art the entire time he’s there. Seriously, he was calling him clowny, allowing Art to sit on his lap, and telling Eddie and Smokey to leave him alone. He was a genuinely nice guy, he certainly didn’t deserve the fate he got. But it was pretty gnarly to watch nonetheless.

Art ties the man to a chair and douses his hands and feet with liquid nitrogen. He then takes a hammer and smashes them to pieces. But that’s not all, of course it’s not. Art then takes the liquid nitrogen to the man’s face, and promptly smashes it with a hammer, all the while the man is still alive and screaming and pleading with Art for mercy. Art rips off the man’s beard to complete his brand new Santa suit (and yes he does indeed wear the beard), and then takes some inspiration from a snowman decoration and sticks a carrot into the middle of the man’s face for good measure. – Samantha Graves

8
Brooke Dies
'Terrifier 2' (2022)
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After witnessing her boyfriend be brutally murdered, it isn't long before Brooke joins the Terrifier 2 kill count; as she enters the haunted attraction, Art throws acid over her face. As she screams in understandable pain, Art bludgeons her kneecap before destroying her ribcage. He then proceeds to eat her heart.

It is important to consider that this kill isn

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