Smile’s take on mental illness was designed to be messy and complicated
Audiences may relate to the deeply creepy horror movie Smile differently based on whether they’ve had any experience with navigating mental illness, in themselves or in someone close to them. Smile is frightening in some pretty standard creature-feature ways, with a ton of jump-scares and disturbing imagery designed to give people nightmares. But it’s also in large part about what it’s like to carry the weight of anxiety, trauma, or other mental pain, and about how difficult it can be to convey that weight to other people.
“I think it’s so relatable,” writer-director Parker Finn told Polygon at Fantastic Fest, where the movie first premiered. “Everybody walks around carrying these things inside of themselves that are deeply rooted in them at their core, that are based on their histories and traumas. And I wanted to use that, and also explore what it might be like to have your mind turning against you. For me, that’s one of my greatest fears.”
Finn suggests that due to events around the COVID-19 quarantines, feelings of stress and anxiety have become their own parallel epidemic. “I developed and wrote and ended up shooting this movie all during the pandemic, when I think we were all traumatized and feeling a sense of isolation and a fear of transmission,” he says. “The idea that trauma could beget trauma was really present in my brain, and I think it just crept its way into the script.”
Because these feelings are so common right now, Finn feels they may be more acceptable to discuss than they were even a few years ago. “I think it’s something that as a society, we’ve all started to confront more. I think it’s in the air,” Finn says. “It’s something we’re all aware of: Everybody’s got trauma of some sort in their life,
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