“Terrifer 3” director says he may release extended cut — but fans probably won’t like it

Damien Leone is aware what fans want, but that doesn't mean he can give it to them.

Terrifier 3 director Damien Leone has the formula for his exceedingly popular slasher films down to a science. That's why he's cautioning fans to adjust their expectations for a potential extended cut of the film.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Leone shared that there's a "very good chance that there'll be an extended version down the line, but "it's not something I'm so eager to do, and also, I don't think a lot of fans would be happy."

Leone has made six films in the last 17 years featuring Terrifier's star slasher, Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton in the previous three, Mike Giannelli in the three before that). He understands all the "boxes I need to check" to keep the fanbase growing and keep the OGs who've been riding for Art since 2008's The Ninth Circle happy. That's exactly why he's somewhat wary of a Terrifier 3 extended cut — he knows what fans want to see and what he has to show them. In this case, those two things don't perfectly match up.

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"A lot of [fans], they're expecting the extended cut to be scenes that they imagined were missing" from Terrifier 3, Leone explained. "But no, we did not shoot those scenes. So the 'missing scenes' they want to see [are] Sienna [Lauren LaVera] going to the Terrifier to retrieve her sword. They want to see what happened with Jonathan [Elliott Fullam], or they think something happened with Art the Clown at the Beta Bash, the big house party."

There's just one problem. "We didn't shoot those scenes. There's nothing there that would be in the extended cut."

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Terrifier 3 follows siblings Sienna and Jonathan, survivors of Art's onslaught in Terrifier 2, attempting to piece their lives back together. But Art returns from the dead and strikes again. Then, it becomes a mad dash to prevent Art and his new accomplice, Terrifier's original final girl, Victoria (Samantha Scaffidi), from massacring the rest of their family and friends.

It's not that there are no scenes featuring this ensemble that didn't make the theatrical cut. It's that Leone doesn't think fans are primarily interested in that kind of material. From his vantage point, the online discussion that exploded after the film's Oct. 11 release has centered on potential scenes that may explain supposed "gaps" in the story.

But a lot of those gaps were actually intentional elisions, the result of Leone's broader stylistic conviction against didactic storytelling. "I love the ambiguity. I hate spelling everything out to the audience," he said. "I said this a long time ago, that I wanted to approach Terrifier, especially once I got into Terrifier 2, in a very David Lynch type of way."

"I'm not comparing my work to David Lynch," he joked, but the "nightmarish and dreamlike" quality of Lynch's narrative logic, in which "nothing is spelled out," is what Leone sought to emulate in his work. "When you're dealing with the supernatural and all this lore and mythology, unless you have characters that come into the story to just verbally spit exposition at you," strategic ambiguity is essential to keep the story coherent.

Leone didn't just talk about what wouldn't be in a Terrifier 3 extended cut, however. He also elaborated on what fans could expect to see as well. "A lot of the stuff that's missing are these really nice human moments with Sienna and the family," he said. "There's a lot of great scenes with Sienna and Gabbie [Antonella Rose] that I had to cut out, and I appreciate. I didn't have to; it really just made their bond so much stronger."

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There's plenty of unseen gore and grime, too. Leone described "a great scene. I won't spoil it, but there's a great scene between Victoria and Gabbie in the finale. Really sadistic. But it was just padding out the finale too much, and I felt like we were going to start losing people."

He added, "There's another cool scene with Art and Victoria in the insane asylum that I had to cut out as well. There's a handful of really cool scenes, so it is possible." But there's another potential obstacle on the road to a Terrifier 3 extended cut: "Now I'm also toying with the idea that maybe they could be cool in Terrifier 4 if they're a little bit of a flashback. I don't want to just waste them in an extended cut. They could serve a different purpose. So I don't know. I just have to see what makes sense. But there's a very good chance that there'll be an extended version down the line."

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.