Behind Smile’s ‘overwhelming, mind-breaking’ monster

polygon.com:

Parker Finn’s debut horror film, Smile,has been a significant theatrical hit for Paramount, even though it was never intended to play in theaters at all. The movie — an eerie metaphor for mental illness — was originally planned as a straight-to-streaming project for Paramount Plus. But test audiences responded so strongly that Paramount opted for a wide release, and the impact the movie’s horrifying villain had on audiences was likely a strong part of that decision.

[Ed. note: This story contains a major spoiler for Smile.]

Smile centers on a hospital therapist named Rose (Sosie Bacon) who becomes the latest victim of a pain-eating entity that can take on the form of anyone she knows, alive or dead. For most of the movie’s run, she never knows whether a given person in a room with her is the friend she expects them to be, or a monster wearing a familiar face.

But by the end of the movie, the creature literally rips off its mask, exposing something red, raw, and glistening, with a whole dangling series of toothy grins on its face, one below the other.

“I kept wanting to do something that felt like its reveal would be overwhelming and mind-breaking,” Finn told Polygon in an interview at Austin’s Fantastic Fest, shortly after the film’s world premiere. “I kept leaning into that — I kept explaining to everyone, ‘I want it to be gleefully evil.’ So it leans into the feeling of smiling, and this evil happiness.”

Finn says the image of the creature’s revealed face came to him “very early on, that exact frame,” and he drew a crude version of it to pass on to other creators, so they’d have some idea of what was in his head.

“I’m not a great artist. I’m very rudimentary,” he says. “But I handed that drawing off to a concept