The Surprising Influences for Terrifier’s Art the Clown (It’s Not John Wayne Gacy!)

When you think of a killer clown, you don't usually think Looney Tunes or silent movie stars. You might often think of John Wayne Gacy, the real-life clown-turned-serial killer nicknamed the “Killer Clown,” or the balloon-toting fictional clown Pennywise from It.  

But that's why Art the Clown, the gleeful, wordless villain at the center of the Terrifier franchise, is so unlike any other pasty-faced joker that's ever haunted your nightmares. Art has nothing to do with Gacy—or any other famous clowns—at all, and everything to do with classic slapstick comedy. 

Art made his original debut in the 2008 short film The 9th Circle, followed by 2011's Terrifier (a short precursor to the 2016 feature). Those two stories were included in the 2013 anthology film All Hallows' Eve, and then the franchise officially began in 2016 with the full-length Terrifier, all written and directed by Damien Leone. 

In the shorts, Art was played by Mike Giannelli, but David Howard Thornton took over the role in 2016 after Giannelli's acting retirement. (Art was his only role). Together, Thornton and Leone transformed Art the Clown into a pop culture figure who has grown beyond the movie franchise to terrify the masses, including players of the video game Fortnite, and visitors of Universal's Halloween Horror Nights 2025. Not only has the clown been spotted wandering the theme park in honor of the holiday, but his haunted house features a "Symphony of Blood" that leaves guests "very wet." 

In a 2022 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Leone described the original scene that started it all. 

"I had this idea of a clown terrorizing a woman on a city bus," he said. "She's all alone, coming home from work or whatever, in the middle of the night, and then this clown gets on, and sits across from her, and starts staring at her and toying with her. It's awkward and uncomfortable, and maybe even funny, but then it gets progressively more intimidating and aggressive."

Leone wanted to make a gritty, violent slasher film, like the ones he enjoyed as a kid. He told Dread Central in 2018 that he was after something "fresh but modern" that looked nothing like the prevailing pop culture clown. 

"At that time the original Pennywise was really the only clown on the scene and he wasn’t even really a Slasher," he said. "I consciously went out of my way to make Art the Clown the complete opposite of Pennywise; Art is bald, he’s black and white, Pennywise is colorful, he has hair, Pennywise speaks, Art doesn’t, Pennywise doesn’t use weapons, Art the Clown uses any weapon he can get his hands on, so all these little things came together." 

He told /Film that he conceived Art as "the bastard child of Freddy Krueger and Harpo Marx." 

Leone told EW that Thornton was only the sixth actor to audition to play Art, and he shut the auditions down immediately after. 

"He has this amazing, almost silent film-like quality to his acting, and he's influenced by Mr. Bean and the Marx Brothers," he said. "When I saw him do his performance, I said, wow, this will really allow me to turn Art the Clown into a real clown." 

In terms of Thornton's performance, Art's pop culture inspirations also include Charlie Chaplin, the silent film megastar of movies like The Great Dictator (1940) and City Lights (1931), and Bugs Bunny, the much more talkative center of the Looney Tunes universe. 

"Definitely in my head I kind of see Art as being the Bugs Bunny of the horror world in that way," Thornton told /Film. "He's that mischievous, chaotic character—he even does drag."

Without ever uttering a word, Art has slashed his way through three feature length films now, and he's not done yet. In January 2025, Leone shared that the script for Terrifier 4 was being worked on, and was "shaping up to be the most epic, horrifying, thrilling, emotional and satisfying conclusion to the Terrifier saga." He also promised that the film will finally reveal Art's origin story, meaning we're about to learn why this clown loves killing quite so much. That's assuming there's more to his tale than the answer Leone gave in a 2022 Reddit AMA when asked what motivated Art to cause such chaos every day: "The fact that he finds it funny of course!"