Clowns have always been creepy, with episodes of Supernatural and The Sarah Jane Adventures confirming this, as well as Pennywise from IT. Art the Clown, however, makes Pennywise look like a child’s toy.

The film starts with an unknown woman on a talk show whose face is disfigured, and we learn she is the sole survivor of a massacre. This sets the atmosphere for the rest of the film.

Backstage, the TV host makes comments about the woman’s appearance, only for the woman to appear and attack her in a gruesome manner.

We flashback to the night of the massacre. Two friends, Tara and Dawn, stagger down the street from a party, and they run into Art the Clown. The girls go to a pizza shop to sober up, and Art follows them. Dawn loves it and takes a photo with him, while Tara is more creeped out.

Art is then kicked out of the shop by the owner for smearing his own faeces on the bathroom wall, which we see when the owner goes to clean it up. Tara gets her sister, Victoria, to pick her and Dawn up when she sees her tyres have been slashed. As they leave, Art comes back and kills the owner of the shop, leaving his head in an oven for the other employee to find before Art kills him.

Tara needs to pee and gets her sister to stop. She goes into an apartment building and asks a bug exterminator if she can use a bathroom. She encounters a woman who believes her dolls are children, and Dawn comes looking for her. That’s when Art attacks them. Drugging Tara and attacking Dawn.

When Tara wakes up, she sees Dawn hanging upside down naked. Art then starts cutting her in half with a saw in front of Tara, who manages to escape only for Art to shoot and kill her.

When Victoria arrives, she finds Art had killed the cat lady and is wearing certain body parts and chases her. The bug exterminator knocks Art unconscious as he was whipping Victoria. Art kills the exterminator and starts attacking Victoria’s face, and as police arrive, Art shoots himself.

We find out that Victoria is the woman from the start, and we pick up where it started at the beginning of the film.

The character of Art was first created by Leone for his 2008 and 2011 short films, 9th Circle and Terrifier, respectively. These two shirts would be featured in his 2013 anthology film All Hallows Eve.

Terrifier first came out in 2016 as an independent film and was written and directed by Damien Leone. It had a budget of only $35,000 and received a limited theatrical release which grossed $400,000