If the embed won’t play, Behaviour Interactive’s October of Horror broadcast, where Art made his in-game debut, is also here on YouTube.
There are killer clowns, and then there is Art. Pennywise wants your fear; the Joker wants an audience; Art the Clown simply wants to see what’s inside you, preferably laid out neatly on a table. Damien Leone’s mute, monochrome menace is now heading into Dead by Daylight, Behaviour Interactive’s long-running asymmetric slasher game, and the studio has confirmed that players can try him out on the public test build from 27 October. The teaser that went up on social media this week shows Art in his black-and-white motley and doll’s-house top hat, grinning as he points a lit blowtorch straight at the viewer, under the caption “He’s burning to meet you.” Subtle as ever.
The Terrifier chapter was first announced in June at the game’s tenth-anniversary broadcast, where David Howard Thornton turned up in full greasepaint, which must have done wonders for the queue at the catering table. Art was then shown moving in the game for the first time during the October of Horror broadcast on 1 October. What Behaviour has not yet revealed is his power or his perks, so the test build will be the first chance for players to discover precisely which flavour of misery he deals in. The full chapter is pencilled in for November, with the exact day currently a matter for leakers and tea leaves. The data-miners also reckon that Sienna Shaw, Lauren LaVera’s winged avenger from Terrifier 2 and 3, will come along as the new survivor, though Behaviour has kept schtum on that front.
It has been quite the career arc for a character who started out loitering in the background. Art first appeared in Leone’s 2008 short The 9th Circle, haunted the anthology All Hallows’ Eve, and graduated to Terrifier in 2016, a film that looked as though it had been shot for the price of a second-hand Vauxhall and played like a video nasty that had escaped from a 1983 police evidence locker. Then Terrifier 2 started making audiences faint in the aisles, Terrifier 3 took around $90 million worldwide despite being unrated, and suddenly the silent clown was everywhere: as an operator skin in Call of Duty, as the star of his own retro beat ’em up, Terrifier: The ARTcade Game, and now as one of DBD’s licensed killers, rubbing shoulders with Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, Pinhead, Chucky and Ghost Face in the slasher pantheon. Dead by Daylight already has an original killer called the Clown, a portly carnival grotesque who lobs bottles of noxious gas. One suspects he is about to spend a lot of time sulking in the Entity’s green room.
Behaviour is working the Halloween calendar for all it’s worth, too. The game is presenting a run of the Terrifier trilogy in select US cinemas on 29, 30 and 31 October, with Regal loyalty-club members promised a code for a pair of Art’s sunglasses that unlock in the game on 24 November. Leone, meanwhile, has Terrifier 4 in development, set around New Year’s Eve, presumably because Art has already ruined Halloween and Christmas and now fancies a crack at Auld Lang Syne.
Whether he works as a killer in the game is another question entirely. Art’s appeal on screen is his gleeful pantomime cruelty: the mugging to camera, the silent laughter, the sense that each murder is merely the punchline to a joke only he finds funny. Dead by Daylight has a good track record of giving its licensed monsters the right animations and the right swagger, but the trick here will be making a character famous for taking his sweet time feel dangerous in a game built around the chase. Here at SFcrowsnest, we suspect most survivors will simply run, which, to be fair, is the correct response to Art the Clown in any medium.
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