Art the Clown is a "love letter" to all the horror villains Terrifier 3 director idolized as a three year old

Art the Clown in Terrifier 3 — (Image credit: Screambox / Cineverse / Bloody Disgusting)

Art the Clown has entered the ranks of slasher movie icons after his brutal, bloody crime sprees in the Terrifier franchise.

That puts him alongside the same kinds of killers that director Damien Leone idolized from the tender age of just three years old. "There wasn't a light bulb moment where he just came to me full on, as is," Leone reflects of Art's inspiration in the new issue of SFX magazine, which features Terrifier 3 on the cover and hits newsstands on October 2. "It was a little more gradual. But it's really just a steady diet of horror films since I was three years old. Literally. My mother named me after The Omen. True story. She was obsessed with horror movies. She loved that name. So I knew since I was very young, like two years old, that I was named after this horror movie, I was named after the Antichrist.

"I would watch horror movies with my mother – she was very liberal in that regard, she would let me watch pretty intense movies," he continues. "I really fell in love with slashers, boogeymen. I became so familiar and so obsessed with that genre in particular, where those were my heroes.