Before Art The Clown, There Was ChromeSkull
Gore movies aren’t anything new. While Art the Clown made headlines last year when Terrifier 2 had audiences upchucking into their souvenir buckets, the genre, since its inception, has been peppered with movies whose core is gore. The more blood spilled and limbs severed, the better. The Wizard of Gore, Blood Feast, and Ten Thousand Maniacs among several others were splatterpunk odysseys that tested the audience’s limit. Even the Giallo movies of the 1970s were at times little more than threadbare plots strung together with gruesome set pieces. That isn’t to diminish those movies as nothing but gorehound chum, but their reason for being—their legacy—is splatter.
Terrifier is the carnage clown of the moment, but years before he took the horror scene (and, really, the world) by the entrails, another masked maniac gave it one hell of a shot. ChromeSkull, who was Laid to Rest not once, but twice.
Per Tubi: A young girl with amnesia, found in a casket with a major head injury, recalls being attacked by a serial killer who’s still determined to kill her.
The early 2000s were nostalgic for the slasher epics and Grand Guignols of the genre’s past. Several new slasher icons entered the scene, all endeavoring to trounce the buckets of blood that came before. Some endured, like the Saw series’ Jigsaw, though most were direct-to-video oddities. Cult favorites are still regularly discussed but are increasingly at risk of being lost to time. Adam Green’s Hatchet series was a throwback sensation, but Victor Crowley’s best efforts in 2017 weren’t enough to renew considerable interest. The same applies to the late Robert Green Hall’s Laid to Rest series and its sequel, ChromeSkull: Laid to Rest 2.
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At the time of release, they were sensations. Dread Central reviewed the first film back in 2009, awarding it four out of five stars. Heather Wixson wrote, “Hall succeeds in giving audiences a relentless and creative killer as well as some badass, gorelicious kill scenes that definitely will leave the gorehounds out there happy.” The general horror press at the time couldn’t get enough of Laid to Rest and the chrome-plated killer at its center. Here was a horror movie that was earnest in its throwback carnage.
Laid to Rest’s kills were gruesome and plentiful. Like the Terrifier series, they were also so detailed, so unpleasant, they begged the audience to look away. Green’s Hatchet series, conversely, invited the audience to watch, to relish the many decapitations, the motors to the face, the giant chainsaws up the crotch. They were gory, but fun, exemplars of stellar practical effects that never felt gross. Those kills were almost anticipatory. How was Victor Crowley going to kill next?
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Laid to Rest’s kills, like Terrifier’s, are different. There’s still anticipation, but it’s distinctly more dreadful. The audience’s weary sensibilities are a boon to both franchises. They are tests of endurance. It’s why Terrifier’s success is so phenomenal. I intend to strongarm a friend into seeing the third film with me. So widespread is Terrifier’s brutality, most people in my life are terrified to see it. Laid to Rest was similarly unforgiving. It goes beyond a horror movie made for horror fans because plenty of horror fans draw the line there (and that’s fine, and yes, they’re still horror fans).
Prior to rewatching both Laid to Rest and ChromeSkull: Laid to Rest 2 recently, I tried to recall how I felt watching them at the time of release. I was a baby horror fan, so I was simultaneously horrified and enthralled. More than a decade after their respective releases, the kills in both films hold up (more so, given the franchise’s regular deployment of familiar faces, including Lena Heady). They’re painful, wince-inducing displays of excessive gore, more miraculous than fun. I wanted to know how they pulled those bits of flayed flesh off, even if I didn’t exactly want to see them again. In our review of the sequel, we even wrote, “Laid to Rest 2 could quite possibly be the most gut-wrenchingly violent slasher film of all time.”
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It was those rewatches, too, that solidified the spiritual connection to Terrifer. There’s a more wistful quality to the former. Robert Green Hall had, as recently as 2018, been planning a third entry. Were it to come to fruition, ChromeSkull might be as much an icon as Art. He passed away in 2021, all but ensuring ChromeSkull’s permanent place in the zeitgeist of horrors past. Still, as uncompromising displays of gratuitous violence steeped in deep mythology, both offer more than is readily apparent.
Minor spoilers for the Laid to Rest series to follow!
Laid to Rest takes a lot of the same swings the Terrifier series does. The first film’s heroine is unceremoniously killed off in the sequel, echoing Terrifier’s revolving door of final girls. Both introduce new villains and acolytes as peripheral tools to augment their slashers’ respective legacies. And both are uber-violent, of course, but there’s an artistry, a reverence for the splatter movies that shaped their creators, that turns unpleasant grindhouse excess into endearing homage.
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Laid to Rest has plenty of blown-up heads and mutilated corpses, perhaps even more than Art himself, though I can’t begin to explain why ChromeSkull didn’t become a slasher with the same legacy as Art. The lack of a theatrical release certainly didn’t help, nor did the sudden end of the series. ChromeSkull: Laid to Rest 2 set the stage for a larger, more intricate ChromeSkull universe audiences will likely never get to see.
Those promises might not have ever come to fruition, but for those already aboard the Terrifier train, Laid to Rest and its sequel are the next best thing. They’re frenzied, ferocious slasher movies. They lay body after body out with abandon, slicing through character actors and genre icons with glee. They’re not always pleasant—I have a particular revulsion for facial injuries, and ChromeSkull sure does love them—but they’re remarkable throwback exercises. Better still, both Laid to Rest and its sequel are streaming for free on Tubi. Art the Clown is about to slash his way back into theaters, though, after that Yuletide terror, he deserves a bit of a break, no? Why not let ChromeSkull pick up the slack? It’s got a lot of blood, but just as much heart.
Categorized:Editorials
