Two years since Art delivered a baby

Can you believe it’s been almost two years since Art the Clown delivered a baby in “A Work of Art?” “The birth was my idea,” Spencer recalls. “What had we never really seen in a horror movie? I don’t remember Freddy delivering a baby!” Spencer had other plans, too, but they were scrapped. “It was a real badge of honor to have the creator of Terrifier tell me I’d gone too far…” Two years after Terrifier 3 premiered at Fantastic Fest, Spencer reflects on INK’s official tie-in. 

I didn’t think the child should survive the music video, but Damien Leone changed my mind. In fact, he came up with the idea for the audience to hear the baby cry at the very end, after all the carnage. 

We’d, of course, written plenty of songs inspired by our favorite horror films, but “A Work of Art” was the first time we officially participated. Since then, we’ve released official songs for Scream 7 and Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, and it all started with Damien Leone’s Terrifier 3. Growing up, there were so many heavy metal tie-ins with horror movies, from Dokken and Freddy to Alice Cooper and Jason, to Megadeth covering Alice Cooper for Shocker. There aren’t so many now. 

We befriended Damien and Terrifier producer Phil Falcone, as well as most of the cast, at horror conventions. The scene in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective where Ace Ventura attends a Cannibal Corpse show helped spark the idea for the “A Work of Art” video. It got me thinking about what it would look like to have Art run amok at a crowded concert. Not only did the Terrifier team give us their blessing, but they also got involved. As everyone knows now, David Howard Thornton plays Art in the video, and we were lucky to have Leah Voysey and Catherine Corcoran, too.

We wanted to push the practical effects further than we ever had before. One of the trickiest was splitting a fan in half with a battleaxe, which was especially cool because Chris Nelson had inspired us with the effect he did in Kill Bill, and we actually got him to do it again for our video.

For the Gatling-gun massacre at the end, we used real squibs instead of VFX. They’re powerful enough to rip open your shirt, and they hurt. At one point, a spark landed in my mouth and set it on fire. Probably not the safest thing in the world, but it looks incredible.
One of my favorite parts was finding a way to connect Terrifier with Scream. When we were asked to provide an Ice Nine Kills poster for Scream 6, I invented a venue called Abe’s Snakepit as a reference to Wes Craven’s old adult film director pseudonym, Abe Snake. They liked the reference so much that Abe’s Snakepit became the name of the bodega in the movie. 

So, when we made “A Work of Art,” I made the venue Abe’s Snakepit too.

In my mind, that officially connects the Scream and Terrifier universes. 

We premiered the video on the big screen before Terrifier 3 in New York, and afterward, Damien Leone leaned over and told me we’d knocked it out of the park.

Watching Terrifier 3 break records for unrated films was amazing. It’s the ultimate underdog story: this cult franchise built on a shoestring budget grew into a genuine cultural movement.