The moments that work in Terrifier are the ones without the gore. Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) is just walking with a bag of glass, and there are moments in the pizza shop and him on that bike. The disquiet of those moments was so upsetting that I was excited to see where the next movie would go.

Directed, written, edited and produced by Damien Leone, this takes place a year after the first movie. It’s Halloween again, and Art has returned from the dead, killing the coroner, inspecting his body, and seeing The Little Pale Girl, an entity that follows him throughout the movie.

Sienna (Lauren LaVera) and her brother Jonathan (Elliott Fullam) are obsessed with the drawings in their dead father’s sketchbook. While Sienna takes to the angel whose costume she is making for a party, Jonathan loves the pictures of Art and his victims. Their father died of brain cancer, which they claim led to the visions inside his books; that night, a fire wipes out Sienna’s costume, but her sword—a gift from her father—remains.

When she goes to a costume shop to rebuild her wings, Sienna has a panic attack instead of talking to her friends Allie (Casey Hartnett) and Brooke (Kailey Hyman) about Art the Clown’s victim, Victoria Heyes (Samantha Scaffidi, the final girl of the original). She has a nervous breakdown on live TV and murders talk show host Monica Brown.

By day, Jonathan watches Art and The Little Pale Girl play with a dead opossum while Art kills the costume store owner, Allie and Allie’s mother at night. That sentence in no way explains just how far these murder scenes go, some of which feel like they descend into Herschell Gordon Lewis-level gore porn for laughs.

Jonathan shows Sienna and their mother, Barbara (Sarah Voight), the sketchbook, as he has learned that The Little Pale Girl was Art’s first victim, Emily Crane. Jonathan believes their father knew how to stop Art, but his mother destroys the books and slaps him around. There is no need for revenge, as she dies moments later at the hands of Art, who takes the sword and Jonathan.

After a midnight party where Brooke doses Sienna with MDMA, our heroine is lured to the abandoned The Terrifier amusement park ride. There, she is killed by Art and resurrected by an unseen force before killing the clown numerous times to save her brother. One final time, she uses the sword to cut off Art’s head, which is taken by The Little Pale Girl. Moments later, Victoria Heyes gives birth to the living head inside the mental home, setting up the third movie.

Somehow, on a budget of $250,000, this movie made $16.1 million. There was hardly an ad campaign, either. The idea that a film that caused people to pass out and puke definitely had some allure.

I also have no idea why this movie is 2 hours and 18 minutes long, but 15-year-old me would have loved it. 51-year-old me thinks this movie is too long but recognizes that people tend to want to keep playing loud and fast when you’re playing loud and fast. I wish there had never been any information on Art, where he came from, or that he had any special powers, but I’m not making this movie. I’m just watching it. And any movie that has a comedy moment where a killer clown shreds a person and then reappears to pour bleach and salt on them has transcended criticism and just exists on its own.

I watched this film as part of The Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (BIFAN). You can learn more at their official site.