The Most Disgusting Horror Movie of Last Year Gave Us the Best Shower Horror Scene Since ‘Psycho’ — for Very Different Reasons

There are horror images so lasting that they define an entire genre. The stabbing of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is undeniably one of them. The shower curtain pulled back, the shrieking violins, blood spiraling down the drain, the shadowy knife-wielding murderer — it remains the most iconic bathroom scene in film history. But over 60 years later, Damien Leone’s Terrifier 3 revisits the same setting and pushes it to grotesque extremes. Instead of restraint and suggestion, Leone gives us a sequence that is unrelenting, grisly, and determined to etch itself into horror infamy. Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) doesn’t just break into a shower; he chainsaws through it, turning intimacy and vulnerability into a slaughterhouse.

‘Psycho’s Shower Scene Is One of Cinema’s Most Influential

Hitchcock’s brilliance in Psycho wasn’t about what he showed, but what he left unseen. The knife never visibly pierces skin, and the violence is created in the editing — 78 shots in 45 seconds, with Bernard Herrmann’s shrieking strings doing as much work as Anthony Perkins’ blade. It was an audacious sequence for 1960, one that relied on implication to shock audiences who had never seen a murder staged so intimately. Psycho‘s shower scene cemented itself not just as a horror milestone but as a cinematic one. Hitchcock broke taboos by killing off his leading lady mid-movie and filming the act in a setting audiences associated with privacy and safety (while also showing a toilet for the first time in film). The bathroom became a metaphor for exposure, the place where the facade of safety slipped away. It proved terror could erupt in the most mundane of spaces, turning an everyday ritual into a nightmare.

And Hitchcock set a template that rippled for decades. The slasher boom of the ’70s and ’80s — from Halloween to Friday the 13th — echoed his formula, using showers and bedrooms as stages for sudden death. By the 2000s, “torture porn” films like Saw and Hostel traded suggestions for spectacle, leaning on grisly detail rather than implication. Leone’s Terrifier films don’t emerge from a vacuum; they’re the logical extreme of this lineage, asking how much further the genre can push audiences before they look away.

‘Terrifier 3’ Gave Us a Shower Scene For Modern Horror Appetites

Art the Clown looking into Mia’s eyes in Terrifier 3. Image via Cineverse

Leone understands that Hitchcock’s technique can’t be replicated. Today’s audiences are desensitized, accustomed to decades of slasher gore, torture porn, and found footage. Instead of revisiting suggestions, Leone leans into excess. The Terrifier 3 shower scene doesn’t hide behind editing — it shows everything. Cole (Mason Mecartea) and Mia (Alexa Blair Robertson) are ambushed mid-shower and intercourse as Art revs up a chainsaw, severing fingers, half-amputating a leg, flaying flesh, and eventually sawing both victims in half. The camera never cuts away from the carnage, forcing viewers to witness every grotesque detail. Every second is designed to push the audience past the threshold of comfort.

The genius of the scene isn’t just the gore; it’s the reimagining of what the shower represents. In Psycho, water symbolized cleansing, only to be contaminated by violence. In Terrifier 3, water becomes incidental, drowned out by the sheer volume of blood coating the tiles. The hiss of steam is replaced by the roar of machinery. The bathroom’s supposed privacy is obliterated by Art’s intrusion, turning a site of vulnerability into an industrial butchering chamber. Leone’s staging transforms what was once symbolic into something literal: the bath not as a metaphor, but as a massacre. This is Leone’s calling card as a filmmaker. Working with modest budgets and a fiercely DIY ethos, he insists on practical effects that leave nothing to the imagination. Where Hitchcock masked violence in the cut, Leone dares you to see it all — the tearing of skin, the spraying of blood, the sound of bone giving way. It’s a spectacle born not from polish but from grit, a carnival of gore that’s as much about Leone’s determination as Art’s sadism.

‘Terrifier’ 3 Evolves and Builds on Hitchcock’s Masterpiece

The Terrifier 3 shower scene works because it acknowledges Hitchcock’s legacy without attempting to mimic it. Horror’s language has evolved. Where suggestion once sufficed, spectacle now dominates. Audiences expect extremity, and Leone delivers it without compromise. By pushing the brutality to grotesque heights, he creates a scene that shocks not because we don’t know what’s happening, but because we can’t believe how far it goes. It’s the inverse of Hitchcock’s elegance — a gauntlet of gore meant to test how much a viewer can endure. Just as Norman Bates became an icon through a bathroom, so too does Art the Clown cement his reputation here. The shower massacre is a statement of intent: no space, no ritual, no act of cleansing or intimacy is safe from his intrusion.

There’s also something revealing in how audiences respond. In 1960, people fainted during Psycho. In 2024, people cheer, groan, and cover their eyes at Terrifier 3, with some audience members even reportedly throwing up during its runtime. Leone has tapped into a cultural appetite not just for fear but for extremity, for horror that dares to go further than polite society deems acceptable. The shower massacre functions as both a dare and a celebration — a line in the sand that says horror still has new ways to get under our skin, even if that means tearing through it.

By taking one of horror’s most iconic set pieces and amplifying it into grotesque excess, Leone makes a statement as bold as Hitchcock’s original. The Terrifier 3 shower scene doesn’t erase the legacy of Psycho; it builds on it, showing how the genre continues to reinvent its most sacred spaces. Where Hitchcock made the shower terrifying through implication, Leone makes it horrifying through spectacle. Together, they map the arc of horror itself — from what you imagine in the shadows to what you’re forced to watch under the harsh bathroom light.

Release Date

October 11, 2024

Runtime

125 Minutes

Director

Damien Leone

Writers

Damien Leone

Prequel(s)

Terrifier, Terrifier 2

Franchise(s)

Terrifier

• David Howard Thornton

  Art the Clown