‘Terrifier’ Hits the Trump Tipping Point: Can the Real Damien Leone Please Stand Up? — Opinion
Good luck trying both side-ism with a franchise famous for cutting women in half.
Since bursting onto the genre scene, Damien Leone’s “Terrifier” series has become the most controversial success story in contemporary horror. To some, it’s a revolutionary triumph of low-budget filmmaking that boomed at the box office. To others, it’s an ultraviolent slasher about a killer clown with a fondness for sexual brutality and, in “Terrifier 3,” dead children.
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To those paying attention, it’s both.
Now, an ongoing PR disaster for the filmmaker is dividing American audiences even further. On Monday, Leone posted on social media proclaiming that anyone “regardless of their political affiliations” was welcome in the “Terrifier” community so long as they’re “a decent human being.”
By most accounts, the director’s remarks were a thinly veiled response to the progressive online presence of his star evil clown, David Howard Thornton, and final girl Sienna Shaw, actress Lauren LaVera. Neither wanted to talk to IndieWire about the rapidly rising controversy (Leone didn’t respond to our request either), but their progressive views have been readily visible online for months.
Following the election, LaVera received death threats on X after encouraging women to arm themselves against potential violence. She later left the platform, owned by Trump appointee Elon Musk, describing its content as “a lot of unclocked bigotry.”
Leone was not compelled to speak out about the state of politics and “Terrifier” then, but his recent remarks — resembling an overdue apologia made mostly for Republicans — ignited significant backlash.
Leone has nodded respectfully to some progressive positions, including LGBTQ rights, and critically did not come out with any specific political stance. Whether you can enjoy movies made by people you disagree with is a matter of personal ethics and taste, but the director poked a hornet’s nest by inviting the internet to argue whether the genre itself is inherently political.
He wrote, “‘Terrifier’ is NOT in any way, shape, or form a political franchise. I did not get into filmmaking to become a politician or promote any political agendas or ideologies, especially through a killer clown movie.”
The ridiculousness of the situation is clear, but it doesn’t absolve Leone of his responsibility as a major force in film. The severity of the violence he’s embraced as a director with the “Terrifier” movies has drawn even more scrutiny to the horror genre at a time when concerns about censorship are already high. Who these extreme films are being made for (nudity and all) is now a matter of public interest.
Audience data from PostTrack, as reported by Deadline, says that “Terrifier 3” ticket-holders leaned 61 percent male — with 18- to 24-year-old men making up the largest demo, at 37 percent. Younger men were a key force in the highly gendered politics of the last U.S. Presidential Election, and online abuse against women, like what LaVera experienced, surged when ballot counting was done.
Throw in remarks made by Cineverse CEO Chris McGurk to IndieWire’s Brian Welk last fall and further parallels between “Terrifier” marketing and the Trump campaign emerge.
“I’m reading this stuff about the election, and regardless of what you think about what worked or what didn’t work, they’re saying that the Kamala campaign was incredibly inefficient because she spent all of her time on national media while Trump and company went to the podcast world that she avoided,” said McGurk. “In a way that’s sort of a macro version of what we just did right here.” (Cineverse and Iconic Events declined to comment.)
Leone has faced accusations of misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and “complicity through silence” for several days online. He’s long weathered such criticism from non-horror folks, but now many ex-“Terrifier” fans are saying they will not return to theaters for “Terrifier 4” precisely because they see Leone as a de facto Trump supporter.
And the drumbeat grows. “Horror has never been neutral. Horror has always belonged to the outcasts, to the rebels, to the people who refuse to be erased,” wrote queer immigrant filmmaker Dima Barch for Dread Central, criticizing Leone’s statement. “I refuse to be erased.”
If the “Terrifier” director’s latest PR move was intended to protect his franchise from fracturing, then it badly backfired. The sense that Trump voters are no longer welcome in some circles has never been stronger, but Leone’s attempts at centrism make it difficult for many minority genre lovers to stay on board with his work.
“I fear ‘Terrifer 3’ wasn’t the feminist text I thought it was,” I messaged frequent IndieWire contributor Katie Rife the day after the election.
“They will be looked back on as the defining horror films of the Trump era,” she said, right as always.
As a film critic, certain movies hang in your orbit well after their initial release and become the projects you “champion” long term. That was the case for me and “Terrifier 3.”
After giving the Christmas-themed sequel a positive review out of Fantastic Fest 2024, I appeared on several platforms explaining why I saw the movie as a major success for low-budget filmmaking — and even a “feminist” triumph based on its Valkyrie-like hero.
I stand by my assessment of Leone’s work as a special effects wizard (he’s a genius in that regard), and I wouldn’t change a thing about my compliments for Thornton and LaVera’s fierce acting performances. But after reckoning with my own changed perspective on the films, I’d argue you don’t need to see Leone’s social media or voting record to acknowledge the innate Trump-iness baked into the “Terrifier” franchise.
How a distributor reaches an audience can be just as important as what they reach them with, and the so-called “Joe Rogan’s Army” of male podcast listeners has become an omnipresent force for sexism across pop culture. It’s worth noting the appeal of physical violence to the far-right in the era of “cage-match politics” too. Trump has a blossoming relationship with the UFC, and performative violence aimed at women as well as men abounds in the “Terrifier” films. Art the Clown is also a frequent source of right-wing meme-ification in some of the darkest corners of the internet.
Whether Leone chooses to ever openly embrace or counter the politics surrounding his work — something countless fans are arguing he’s already done with his recent statement — “Terrifier” seems to benefit from the same media pipeline and culture used by Trump to reach voters.
“People think only vile, repulsive people watch these [movies], and it’s not true at all,” Leone said to me during an interview last October. “It’s people who are often very passive, and they’re trying to find ways to deal with the horrors of reality. That’s why the horror movie is a multi-billion-dollar industry.”
It’s funny Leone pointed to the bottom line of the horror business. More than defending their morals or doing what’s right, many Trump supporters have identified the economy as a major motivating factor in who they chose for president. In 2025, the struggle for some Americans to afford basic necessities has collided with the needs of other marginalized groups and left both sides of the aisle laying claim to the title of “underdog.”
A similar tug of war is playing out for “Terrifier” now — not just between Leone and Thornton or LaVera behind the scenes, but also between Leone and much of his liberal audience.
None of this proves the “Terrifier” movies are actively advocating for Trump, but in the spirit of casting the widest net for his movie’s success, Leone has been perceived as behaving less like an artist and more like a politician, no matter his actual intent. This, coming from a filmmaker whose runaway horror hit defied expectations by going into theaters unrated and winning big at the box office, has left many of his more punk rock fans feeling manipulated — and rightly so. (As several users on Reddit and X pointed out, it’s also a wonderful example of the Streisand effect that makes you wonder whether “Terrifier” viewers would have cared about Leone or Thornton’s politics at all if not for the statement on Monday.)
When I asked Leone specifically about the allegations that his films were sexist in our interview, he pushed back. “I could try my best to convince people, but if people are going to label me then I don’t think I’m going to change their opinion,” the director said then. “I just have to be happy with the truth. And I think that when all this smoke clears, Sienna will be standing as this very strong character regardless of gender. People should judge my misogyny on that character.”
As the weight of the Trump administration sinks in, the violent subjection of women (a cornerstone of Leone’s catalogue, for good or bad) is decidedly political. The director’s attempts to straddle the red-blue divide like a grindhouse buzzsaw are problematic at best, and while he might be able to fix the debacle with a clear, concise statement, the authenticity of his voice as a zero-fucks-given filmmaker has been brought under severe and deserved scrutiny.
It’s worth noting that horror and women’s bodies will be front of mind at the 2025 Oscars, where Coralie Fargeat stands to break the genre’s greatest awards ceiling with the decidedly feminist “The Substance” competing for both Best Picture and Best Director.
While Leone wants viewers to measure the gender politics of “Terrifier” on its final girl alone, I’ll be evaluating his future films by how pro-woman they truly are — and what the director will (and won’t) do for his real fans getting tortured by different kinds of clowns.
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