Art the Clown

The character made his debut appearance in the 2008 short film The 9th Circle which follows his pursuit of a young woman named Casey (Kayla Lian) in an empty train station on Halloween night. Merely a supporting character in this film, Art abducts Casey and brings her to a satanic cult to be sacrificed.[2] Art made his next appearance in the 2011 short film Terrifier, where he stalks and torments a young woman who witnesses one of his previous murders.[3] The character made his feature-film debut in All Hallows' Eve (2013)[4] which incorporates the prior two short films as segments on VHS tapes that Sarah (Katie Maguire) watches with the children she's babysitting on Halloween night. Art enters the real world and murders the children for a terrified Sarah to find.[5]

In Terrifier (2016), on Halloween night, Art fills a garbage bag with a variety of weapons and begins wandering the streets of Miles County. He stumbles across the drunken Tara Heyes (Jenna Kanell) and Dawn (Catherine Corcoran), the latter who provokes him. He slashes Dawn's tires and follows them into a nearby pizzeria and finds himself fixated on the distraught Tara. He murders the two girls and anyone in his path. He later begins a hunt for Tara's older sister Victoria Heyes (Samantha Scaffidi). After running her over with a car, he mutilates her face and commits suicide upon police confrontation, leaving her severely mutilated.

In Terrifier 2, following the mutilation of Victoria and his suicide, Art has become an urban legend in Miles County due to his body disappearing from the morgue. A year later, he is resurrected by a sinister entity and must hunt down the teenager Sienna Shaw (Lauren LaVera) and her younger brother Jonathan (Elliot Fullam) on Halloween night.

Art is set to return in the comic book retelling of the 2016 film.[6][7][8]

Leone wanted to create a clown character based on iconic slasher film villains, but wanted him to be the complete opposite of Pennywise from It (1990), being devoid of color and speech.[14] Art first appeared in Leone's short film The Ninth Circle (2008). Although he was only a minor character, viewers found him particularly memorable, prompting Leone to make the short film Terrifier (2011), centered on Art. He wanted to create a feature film about the character, but put the idea on hold when producers approached him to feature his short films as segments in the anthology All Hallows' Eve (2013), with Art as the thread connecting all the segments.

In the short films featuring him, and in All Hallow's Eve, Art was played by Mike Giannelli. When Leone began developing a feature film based on Art, Giannelli decided to retire from acting. When David Howard Thornton submitted an audition tape, he was cast as the murderous villain and is set to portray him in future installments.[15] Thornton says his performance was inspired by classic physical comedians like Charlie Chaplin and famous horror villains like Robert Englund's Freddy Krueger and Tim Curry's Pennywise, but that his main inspiration came from the various portrayals of the iconic supervillain the Joker.[16]