On Halloween, after a night of trick-or-treating, the children Sydney Freihofer as Tia and Cole Mathewson as Timmy discover an unmarked VHS tape tucked into their candy. Together with their babysitter Katie Maguire as Sarah, they watch the tape, which contains three stories featuring Mike Giannelli as Art the Clown.
The 9th Circle
The first segment follows Kayla Lian as Casey, who is drugged and kidnapped by Art while waiting for a train. Casey awakens chained in a room with two other women, Marissa Wolf as Kristen and Minna Taylor as Sara. When Sara is dragged away by her chain, Casey and Kristen follow her to see where their chains lead. Casey tries to break the chains with a large rock. A deformed humanoid appears and dismembers Kristen with a cleaver, unwittingly freeing Casey by severing her chains. She runs away and encounters a man with a shopping cart whom she begs for help, but the man recaptures her and she is soon tied down and surrounded by a hooded coven of witches. After watching the witches cut the fetus from the womb of a restrained pregnant woman, Casey is raped by Satan, Eric Diez as Satan. The pregnant woman’s plight is depicted with archive footage, including Anna Maliere as Pregnant Woman (archive footage). Sarah turns off the tape briefly, then returns to it, riveted by what she’s seeing.
Something in the Dark
The second segment centers on Catherine A. Callahan as Caroline, who has just moved into a countryside home. At night, a bright object crashes nearby and a power outage follows. Caroline’s phone and car malfunction, and she grows convinced that someone else is in the house. A call from her husband, John, a painter, briefly comes through before the connection breaks. She realizes she is being stalked by an alien and, after managing to disorient it, hides in a small room under a staircase. As the alien drags her off, she pulls back a sheet from one of John’s paintings, revealing an image of Art the Clown.
Terrifier
The third segment follows a costume designer driving down an isolated road. At a gas station, the attendant famously ejects Art, who had smeared feces on the bathroom walls. While the attendant fills the tank, he hears a noise from inside the station; when he goes to investigate and doesn’t return, the costume designer enters and discovers Art chopping up his body with a hacksaw. She escapes and drives away, only to have Art appear behind her seat and attempt to suffocate her with cellophane. She floors the accelerator, barricading herself inside a shed. Art digs into the shed and slashes her with a makeshift whip. She stabs Art in the eye with a scalpel and in the back with a knife, then escapes again and is picked up by a man who tries to drive her to a police station. Art pursues them in a car and kills the man, triggering a crash. After some time, the costume designer regains consciousness on a crude operating table and finds that Art has amputated her limbs and breasts and carved misogynistic obscenities into her body. Disturbed, Sarah shuts off the TV. A phone rings in the house, and when Sarah answers, the costume designer from the third segment pleads for help. The TV flickers to a dingy room where Art steps into frame and pounds on the glass. Sarah sees herself on the screen, with Art looming behind her. She wrecks the VCR in a desperate bid to end the nightmare, but soon after, she hears Tia and Timmy scream. Sarah races upstairs and discovers Art—bloodied and gleefully ready—waiting outside their room. When she looks again, Art has vanished, leaving behind only the terrifying sight of Tia and Timmy’s severed heads and the word ART written in blood.
