How David Howard Thornton became a horror film icon

After graduating, he moved to New York in 2006. Thornton waited tables, did odd jobs on television (he played an orderly on Fox's “Gotham” and a coffee shop customer on CBS' “Elementary”) and toured in the musical “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” to “' “Terrifier' changed my life,” he says. “As hard as it was to go through some of this, I wouldn’t change a thing because that’s what got me to where I am now.”

Art the Clown is influenced by silent film actors and “great horror villains.”

Thornton isn't the first Art the Clown: Mike Giannelli played the villain in the 2013 anthology film “All Hallows' Eve.” But he turned down the role for 2016's “Terrifier,” so Leone held an open audition and was stunned by Thornton's physicality. The director asked him to pretend he was happily decapitating someone, and “he just did these Jim Carrey-esque, exaggerated theatrical mannerisms and all these wonderful gestures and big grins,” Leone says. “He was born to play this character.”

The art has evolved since those early days when Leone applied Thornton's makeup while the two talked about movies with yacht rock and '80s tunes playing in the background. The actor made a name for himself in his youth with physical comedy on children's shows, and he combined that with his appreciation for film actors like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Andy Serkis and an admiration for “the great horror villains that came before,” he says Thornton. Art becomes “more confident and arrogant, and I had so much fun fleshing him out and becoming more villainous.”