Indie cinema has two new blood-soaked champions: Damien Leone and Art the Clown.

This weekend, holiday horror threequel “Terrifier 3” beat the strong third weekend of Universal/DreamWorks' “The Wild Robot” and Warner Bros' historically poor second weekend. “Joker: Folie a Deux” has an opening weekend of 18 .3 million in 2,516 theaters took first place at the box office.

It's the fourth-highest opening weekend for a horror film this year, surpassing films like Universal/Blumhouse's “Speak No Evil” and “Night Swim” and Lionsgate's “Never Let Go” and “The Strangers – Chapter 1.”

It's a weekend that completely rattled Chris McGurk, CEO of the company that distributes “Terrifier 3,” Cineverse. Cineverse, formerly known as Cinedigm and owner of dozens of bespoke streaming services and media companies including the popular horror media group Bloody Disgusting, spent just $500,000 of its own pocket marketing “Terrifier 3,” a slasher sequel, which revived Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) for more bloodthirsty antics on top of the film's production budget of just $2 million.

“David beat Goliath,” McGurk told TheWrap on Sunday. “Even if we had just made $5 million, we would have had a home run. $10 million would be the grand slam of all grand slams. But to actually make over $18 million and win the weekend under all those studio tentpoles is just incredible. It's another really great opportunity for an independent film to see a small film like this made on this budget and marketed the way we marketed it.”

McGurk talked about the years of work by Cineverse and Bloody Disgusting that helped turn “Terrifier” into a new hit slasher series, and trying to spread interest in Art the Clown's bloody antics beyond the most die-hard horror fans to wake up.

Let's go back to “Terrifier 2” two years ago, which laid the foundation for this opening weekend. Tell us how this film came to be and how Cineverse and Bloody Disgusting were able to grow this fan base.

We've been fortunate enough to purchase two horror assets over the years. One of them was Bloody Disgusting in 2021, and they are the biggest name in online horror with editorials, reviews, festivals and the like, all done by great people who really understand the horror business. About seven months before that, we bought a streaming channel called ScreamBox, which I think is the second largest horror streaming channel behind Shudder.

They were out there looking for horror films for us and knew about this direct-to-video film from 2016 called Terrifer. It didn't work out so well, but there was real fire online. So the guys at Bloody Disgusting said to us, “You know, there's this franchise that could have the next Freddy Krueger with this character, Art the Clown.” We should really buy it and publish it.”

So they had a sequel made for $250,000, produced by Damien Leone, the writer and director, and his partner Phil Falcone. We bought it and did it as a stunt release, so to speak. We are a streaming company with 30 channels tailored to different audiences and all film releases serve this purpose. The original plan for “Terrifier 2” was just to release it in theaters for a weekend with Iconic Events and then release it on ScreamBox. But then it just exploded and made $1.2 million that weekend, and we thought we really underestimated it.

From there, we made over $10 million in six weekends, and Bloody Disgusting deserves a lot of credit for spearheading the viral marketing that led to interviews with Howard Stern and the New York Times. We probably got $5 million in media value from all the coverage, but we only spent $250,000 out of pocket. When it came time to make the third film, we knew we had something big for theaters and planned a lot more in advance for “Terrifier 3.”

And what went into this preliminary planning? What did you learn from “Terrifier 2” that went into preparing for “Terrifier 3”?

The first thing we learned more than anything was the power of our ecosystem. We have 30 bespoke channels with 800 million viewers to market to. We have over 40 podcasts in our podcast network and we needed to make the most of it. We've also built our own ad sales team and technology to help us understand where fans are and how to most effectively engage them.

But the second point, in my opinion, was the overall positioning of this film. Well, you know, we clearly got all the hardcore slasher and gore fans last time. Our whole goal this time was to focus on the dark humor and camp of the films and turn Art the Clown into the next Freddy that the Bloody Disgusting guys expected. Focus more on the scares and humor than the gore because the gore fans are already coming. So we tried to target the audience that could keep up with those gore fans, a more female audience and Hispanic and African American audiences as well.

It sounds a bit like selling a really spicy hot sauce. Lots of people love spicy food, but few of them love to really set their tongues on fire, so you have to sell everyone else on how good the sauce tastes.

Yes, something like that. We wanted to make the film really eventful and challenge people to watch it in a group because you don't want to be left out of the conversation. And it paid off because we saw strong group participation, with people showing up in groups of nine or ten.

Some horror films simply run for weeks, while others turn a profit on their opening weekend but ultimately fail to reach beyond their core audience. Based on the data you've seen, and given that “Smile 2” is coming out next weekend, do you see any chance that “Terrifier 3” will grow its audience?

Absolutely! Even if we don't succeed, we have already made a huge profit. But fans absolutely love this film. We have a 90% score on Rotten Tomatoes with audiences, and it's clear from the $18 million that we've already expanded the audience, particularly among women and through the strong participation of the group. And I think on top of that, the fact that we're the No. 1 movie in America will help drive the curiosity factor even further. We are the Little Engine That Could and I think this will attract newbies who will dare to watch this film.

And there's a chance that this will be even bigger, as the film ends with a clear sequel story.

You know, Damien said there was one or two more left in him. I think he actually said there might be a fifth. What's unique about it is that it's 100% true to his vision, without any studio interference or anything like that. From the beginning our thing was: “Come with us, we can market and distribute this film, but it's your film, uncut and unrated.” I don't think anyone else has the courage to do that. So we're letting Damien realize all his creative ambitions here, he's done fantastic work so far. I think he's very, very focused on the overall arc of this franchise, so hopefully you'll see an announcement or two in that area over the next few months.

Like any hit film, “Terrifier” is absolutely its own beast, but as you said, there is a whole network of podcasts and streaming platforms that cater to different interests. After what Cineverse did with “Terrifier,” are you considering breaking into other genres?

I think the verticals we're strong in besides horror are anime/Asian content, family content – we have a platform called Dove that focuses on families – and children's content like Barney and Garfield. We're actively looking for content in these industries, but as you can imagine, it's terrible that people are knocking on the door with films right now.

We sort of got out of the theatrical release business after we released this film in 2013 called Short Term 12, which was very popular with critics. I have the Golden Tomato Award in my office because it was the best reviewed film on Rotten Tomatoes that year. It was directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, who now makes Marvel films, and the film starred Brie Larson, Rami Malek and LaKeith Stanfield. The movie helped everyone's career and everything, but we released it theatrically and had to spend a few million dollars on it, and we lost a lot of money on the movie.

So we pulled out of theaters and focused on building that streaming network, and as “Terrifier” showed us, we're now in a better position for theatrical release because of the marketing and home platform structure that we have in place. Now that we've done that, we're much more confident that we can try our hand at these other industries as well. We're actively looking for more content that follows this model and wants to say to other independent studios, “Come to us and we'll help you market your films in what we believe is a much smarter, more targeted and much more effective way.” .” In that way, I think it’s going to be really positive for the independent film business.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

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