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Death Masks
The ‘Smile’ Films and Trauma as Contagion
Spoilers ahead for ‘Smile’ and ‘Smile 2’.
Good horror turns the innocent and everyday into nightmare fuel. A child’s voice. A doll. A smile from a stranger.
That alchemy is where Parker Finn’s films excel. Smile was the first horror film to make me legitimately uneasy since The Ring. Smile 2, despite a weak trailer, followed up beautifully. In a horror landscape littered with cheap jumpscares, Finn’s writing and the actor’s performances keep you in constant discomfort.
Smile’s monster is transmitted via suicide and appears to target people with significant past trauma. Specifically, it seems to choose people who have seen someone die in front of them.
In the first film, Dr. Cotter watched her abusive mother die. In Smile 2, Skye Riley causes an accident that shatters her body and kills her fiance. She self-medicates with drugs and alcohol to numb her mental illness. The demon finds these scars and pries them open, nesting in their minds, driving its victims completely insane.
Like many horror films before them, the Smile movies use the demon as a direct metaphor for trauma. If we push them down and leave them unaddressed depression, anxiety, and PTSD can all fester and become something horrible.
