October is always the best month for genre fans, with loads of upcoming horror movies to look forward to each year on top of all the candy devouring. 2024 is certainly no exception, with Damien Leone’s Terrifier 3 set to make audiences hoot and howl (and vomit and leave the theater in certain cases). David Howard Thornton’s body-wrecking terror Art the Clown is now a merch-friendly slice of horror iconography, but he’s got ideas for where to take his talents next: Gotham City.
Thornton talked to Total Film ahead of Terrifier 3’s debut, which incidentally coincides with the release of Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie à Deux, the rare comic book movie to earn the ire of critics as well as the fanbase that made the first film a billion-dollar prize. Now that it’s clear Joaquin Phoenix is done lending his talents to the Clown Prince of Crime, there’s room for someone else to step in and take over the role when James Gunn’s DCU kicks off in earnest with David Corenswet’s Superman.
By all means, Art the Clown’s feet seem ideal to step into past performer’s footsteps as DC’s most iconic villain, and Thornton seems like he wouldn’t need to be asked twice to take the role. As he put it:
The Joker is my favorite villain of all time, and that’s a character I would love to play myself one day. So hopefully someone like James Gunn gives me the opportunity to tackle that character because I would like to do a lot of fun things with him.
Having absolutely perfected the art of silent-but-deadly performances as the Terrifier franchise’s signature face-painted freakshow, Thornton doesn’t even need dialogue to strike heart in his victims or even innocent bystanders. So the idea of having this dude take on a more humanistic baddie with similarly chaotic motivations sounds like a match made in heaven.
For all the excellence that actors such as Heath Ledger, Jack Nicholson and more have brought to the role, those performances were so carefully and meticulously delivered, and didn’t tap into the unpredictably unhinged nature of the character in the way that Art the Clown is known for. I think David Howard Thornton could easily find a way to mash together the sporadic giddiness of Caesar Romero’s Joker from the ’60s Batman series with the amoral viciousness of a slasher villain.
I can’t readily think of an actor who could play a Batman that would readily and believably stand up to that kind of pant-shitting weirdness. But that would be up to James Gunn after he gets this memo and hires Thornton post-haste. Even if there aren’t any specific plans to immediately bring The Joker into the DCU, locking this actor down in the first step to making magic.
It turns out clowns and horror intersect for David Howard Thornton in a different way as well. While addressing the myriad slasher inspirations that feed into his performances as Art the Clown, he revealed that not even he believes Art is horror cinema’s scariest clown. As he explained:
My scariest one would probably be Pennywise. I mean, he was always my favorite back in the day because it’s just that that whole concept of this thing, it feeds off of fear, and it can change its form depending on what scares you the most.
Hopefully that means Thornton will be tuning into HBO’s upcoming Stephen King-inspired prequel series IT: Welcome to Derry, and if it happens to inspire him enough to send James Gunn a bunch of audition tapes to play the DCU’s Joker in the most frightening way possible, I am so here for it.
Terrifier 3 will slice into theaters on October 11, 2024. Be sure to throw a bib on before heading out, just in case.