The privilege & cowardice of refusing to take a side

So! Things are shitty right now. Extraordinarily shitty. Terrifyingly shitty. So shitty that it’s a little surreal to just continue going about our everyday lives as if nothing is wrong. We’re all just waiting for someone to do something about how shitty things are, but the people who seem like they have some authority to do anything are either shrugging it off as no big deal or helplessly flailing.

Considering there’s a ketamine-addicted private citizen who right this very minute, with the blessing of the President, has complete access to information about every single person in the United States1, this is a very odd time to have no strong opinions about the state of the country. AND YET.

If you’re not into horror, you might not know who Damien Leone is. He’s the writer and director of the wildly successful Terrifier franchise. The success of the Terrifier movies is in their simplicity: they’re just about a killer clown who, like Jason and Michael Myers, mindlessly slaughters his way through one group of obnoxious young adults after another. If you’ve had enough of all this “elevated” horror nonsense, they’re perfect for you.

Full disclosure: I haven’t seen any of the Terrifier movies, specifically because all they seem to have going for them is extreme gore, with a gossamer thread of a plot holding it all together. I’ve gotten spoiled by the turn towards “artsy” horror in recent years, and the lure of “masked killer on a rampage” movies is no longer there for me. However, I do appreciate David Howard Thornton, the actor who plays Art the Clown, both Terrifier’s antagonist, and, like Freddy Krueger before him, a fan favorite. Thornton is an outspoken liberal and supporter of LGBTQ+ rights, often to the very vocal dismay of some of his so-called “fans.”

Thornton recently posted a plainly worded statement on social media that essentially invited fans who had a problem with his politics to fuck off and not watch his movies. Leone, in turn, put out the namby-pamby “can’t we all just get along” statement above.

He’s not quite throwing Thornton (his star and creative partner) under the bus, but certainly at least pointing the bus in his general direction. As the kids say, there’s a lot to unpack about Leone’s statement, which is ironic considering he’s trying to pass himself off as apolitical during a time when democracy hovers at the edge of the abyss. For one thing, though it’s framed as a statement directed towards fans, it’s very obviously a message to Thornton: keep your politics out of this. Leone wants everyone to know that regardless of how disgusting and inflammatory your beliefs might be, you’re okay in his book, as long as you keep throwing money at his killer clown movies, which, going by his own words, are meaningless and in no way should be regarded as anything but 90 minutes of special effects.

What a ringing endorsement for your own movies to say that they’re empty gore delivery devices and nothing more. There’s long been a collective delusion among horror fans (oh, let’s be more specific and say white heterosexual male horror fans) that horror movies being “political” (or at least reflecting current events) is a new (and most unwelcome) development. Evidently, George Romero put no thought into ending Night of the Living Dead with Ben, a Black man, being shot down by rednecks who either didn’t bother to check (or didn’t care) if he was a zombie first. We read too much into The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as being an allegory for “the massacres and atrocities in the Vietnam War,” even though those are Tobe Hooper’s own words. This whole “political” thing is very recent, probably around the same time as when they started letting women and queer people make horror movies.

Speaking of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, you’ll note that the top comment on Leone’s statement is from Caroline Williams, best known to horror fans as Stretch, the final girl in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. Williams has spent much of her time in the past few years both attending horror conventions and reposting content from Newsmax and The Babylon Bee, your #1 source on the internet for “I identify as a…” jokes. Like a lot of C-grade actors like Kevin Sorbo and Kristy Swanson, Williams swallowed the conservative pill at some point, and so it’s unsurprising that she supports Leone’s whiny “My movies don’t mean anything! We don’t believe in opinions here!” statement.

Williams has made her political beliefs clear, so I’m not sure what she’s cheering this limp “both sides have good people” nonsense for. Are we still doing that, the “both sides have good people” thing? Are we still fretting over whether or not to invite our racist, transphobic uncles to Thanksgiving dinner, almost a decade into this shit? Leone knows that (a) the horror community is rife with sexism, racism and homophobia (as much as those of us in it like to think it isn’t), and (b) it’s in his best interest not to piss those people off, so he’s chosen a side, and it’s the one his star is not on.

When you continue to coddle people despite their atrocious opinions, you’re on their side. Maybe you might not agree with their opinions (though something in the wording of Leone’s statement tells me he does, a little bit at least), but you’ve decided at some point that it’s important not to upset them, which, you’ll note, is something that does not concern those on the far right in the slightest. “Everybody’s okay with me” is not a brave stance to take in 2025. It’s craven, and it’s opportunistic, and frankly making movies for bros who wouldn’t recognize subtext if it reared up and bit them in the ass is a waste of both talent, and film stock.