When two friends (Jenna Kanell and Catherine Corcoran) encounter a silent clown about town (David Howard Thornton) on their way home from a party, their Halloween night quickly goes from Pennywise to Pennyworse.

What appears to be yet another ’80s throwback proves more interesting than the bad acting and dumb characters first suggest. Damien Leone’s 2017 slasher has a rare point of view, and becomes surprisingly subversive in its coulrophobic chaos.

Either by design or out of necessity, Leone uses his $35,000 budget to recreate the trashy cinematography and cartoon violence of an old-school splatter flick. But rather than keeping the audience safe in the genre’s usual nostalgia, Art the Clown injects creative energy into his mute-ilation – and always with a wink to camera.

It is that tightrope walk between pastiche and provocation that makes Terrifier unpredictable, a circus freak quality that makes up for its reuse of video nasty leftovers. When Art writes his name on the wall in his own faeces he seems to be asking: can you make art out of shit? Admittedly you wouldn’t hang it in a hotel room, but what’s the point in mass-producing art designed to be neutral?