Last October 2, during the preview, the violence of this Christmas-themed horror film created many reactions. In fact, 9 people left the cinema even before the opening credits. LADbible, a British digital publisher, confirmed that one person also vomited during the first ten minutes of the session. “There were 11 exits in total, 9 during the opening scene, and it was confirmed that a fan vomited“, said the editor.
Director Damien Leone said he was surprised by these reactions: “Although I attended successive screenings, I was still able to witness some completely crazy scenes. One woman got up and left in the middle of the shower massacre. Another woman left the screening saying she started having a panic attack during a scene involving children where Art pretends to be a Santa Claus in a shopping mall.
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If the age limit had initially been set at 16 years in France, distributors ESC Éditions, Shadowz Films and Factoris Films published a press release indicating that the limit had now been set at 18 years and that this was regrettable: “Distributors deeply regret the final decision of the Classification Commission which decided to ban the film Terrifier 3, directed by Damien Leone, to spectators under 18 years of age. […] We can therefore only deplore this unexpected final choice, which will seriously harm the release of the film, expected by tens of thousands of French spectators and scheduled for October 9 (and of course maintained).”
For distributors, the public is able to understand the artistic approach behind this production: “The public to whom these films are aimed, even teenagers, is a passionate cinema-loving public, respectful of the works and the theaters which screen them. Terrifier 3 is an arthouse film in the purest tradition of the so-called slasher genre, with perfectly ‘grand-guignolesque’ and unrealistic violence. The film never takes itself seriously, and we know that spectators will have all the distance, all the maturity necessary to understand and apprehend this artistic approach. Restricting its access to spectators will always be a serious decision with a worrying message, isolating the authors by distancing them from their audience.”
