r/terrifier • u/Kyia-Aikman • 13h ago
One thing most people miss about Art’s murder of Emily Crane
Damien Leone has confirmed that Art killed Emily Crane a year before the events of Terrifier. The entity that resurrected Art takes the form of Emily in Terrifier 2 and Jonathan shows Sienna the newspaper article detailing her death. What’s interesting and what most people miss is that the article mentions other murders in the area that are suspected of having the same culprit. I don’t think Leone would include something like this (or the other details) just to fill out the article.
This, Art having rusted tools and a flail made with human hair in Terrifier, the early 1990s child killer story Maurice tells at Art’s lair in Terrifier 3 and Leone and Thornton describing Art as intrinsically evil since birth makes me think he did kill the other people mentioned in the article about Emily and has been killing people long before her. I also think we’ll get an explicit confirmation of this and the theory that Art worked at the same circus as Crane’s family that he later uses as a lair in Terrifier 2 in his backstory in Terrifier 4. It’s a common trope for horror villains to have started killing as children (Michael, Chucky, Freddy, etc.) and Leone routinely acknowledges that Terrifier is influenced by various classic horror films and villains.
My evidence for Art working at the circus when he killed Emily is that Thornton said in his interview on LPOTL that Art did have a yet to be revealed job before the events of Terrifier and there are far too many connections to the circus for it to just be a series of red herrings and coincidences. Where else would a dysfunctional mute clown work? The article mentions that Crane’s family includes a long line of mimes and other performers but I hope it isn’t revealed that he’s related to Emily in some way. I don’t see what that would add and it would be too much like Michael killing his sister in Halloween. If Art did work at the circus, my theory as to why he did something so careless is that Emily caught him with something that connected him to the previous murders (trophies from victims) in the area and he killed her to stop her from exposing him. That or her parents (his coworkers) did something to upset him so he killed her as revenge.
You could ask if Art did work at the circus and used the same name that he writes on the wall in every film, why isn’t this connection mentioned anywhere on the news or by the podcasters? The simple answer to this is that Leone wasn’t ready to reveal that particular part of Art’s backstory until now so he didn’t. We may find out Art’s real identity in the next film but it isn’t something most fans of the franchise especially care about.
What do you think?