Ahead of the movie's theatrical release later this week, we have the first official clip from Damien Leone's Terrifier 3, which finds returning final girl Sienna (Lauren LaVera) encountering a painted face from her past while doing some Christmas shopping.
The Santa Claus that walks past the store looks innocent enough at first... until he waves a bloody glove at our distraught heroine.
You may have heard that the opening scene has been causing walkouts, vomiting and even fainting at early screenings. We're not sure if this is on the level (it's a tried and tested marketing technique, after all), but if some leaked screenshots from the sequence in question are any indication, we wouldn't be at all surprised if people were having some pretty extreme reactions.
Spoilers follow.
We won't be posting the images here - in part due to how gruesome they are - but you can click here to check them out.
Based on what we can gather, the scene sees Art the Clown attack a couple in the show with a chainsaw (which we saw in the trailer), before using liquid nitrogen on their still kicking bloody remains to really do some stomach-churning damage.
"Mark my words," Leone said of the opening sequence in a previous interview. "I guarantee you the first five minutes of this movie is going to be very controversial. But that's not even the big kill scene. So that's why I was like, I need to just make this movie on my own, because it's too insane If you thought Art the Clown's reign of terror in part two was extreme, you haven't seen anything yet."
"I got to meet with studios, like legit Hollywood studios, who wanted to make Terrifier 3. But before I even had a script, just having meetings and getting the feel that I was going to have eyes over my shoulders, and they were concerned about the levels of gore and this and that," he added.
"After surviving Art the Clown's Halloween massacre, Sienna and her brother struggle to rebuild their shattered lives. As the holiday season approaches, they try to embrace the Christmas spirit and leave the horrors of the past behind. However, just when they think they're safe, Art returns, determined to turn their holiday cheer into a new nightmare."
Terrifier 3 arrives in theaters later this month. Do you plan on checking it out on the big screen?