Prepare for Parker Finn’s upcoming horror sequel Smile 2 to go bigger and harder when it comes to the horror. The first film scared up $217 million back in 2022, but Finn isn’t coasting for the sequel or holding back when it comes to the scares.
Smile 2 opens wide in theaters on October 18, 2024, and it’s been rated R for “Strong bloody violent content, grisly images, language throughout, and drug use.”
The sequel follows global pop sensation Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), who begins experiencing increasingly terrifying and inexplicable events right as she’s preparing to embark on a world tour. What’s clear straight away is that the R-rating is earned; the entity tormenting Skye gets far more violent than in the last outing. Is that heightened savagery a byproduct of it progressively getting stronger with every host, picking up from Smile, or is that really more of a byproduct of Skye’s much more turbulent mind than Rose’s (Sosie Bacon)?
Finn tells Bloody Disgusting, “A little of both. And I love that you latched onto that because that was exactly what was on my mind, was this sense of feeling like it’s such a personal thing for each person it interacts with. I really wanted to make sure that it felt really truly tied to Skye and her world, this big world that she has. So it felt very right to go bigger, to go more brutal, more insane, more savage, as you put it.”
The escalating horror isn’t just an organic result of its lead character; the filmmaker took great care in ensuring that returning Smile fans would be surprised. And that it wasn’t just another repeat of his debut film.
He explains, “I wanted to make sure that if I was going to ask audiences to give me their time again, that I wasn’t just doing a traditional continuation or a simple retread of the first, but something that felt truly surprising and unexpected that had Smile coursing through its veins but also had its own identity, its own metabolism. When it came to figuring out how I was going to stress people out, how I was going to scare them when they’re coming into this film potentially having seen the first. They start ahead of the character, and I was wondering, can I use that against them? Can I find brand new ways to scare them? Anything we might think we know about the entity after the first, it’s like, well, we’ve only seen that through one person’s eyes so far. What if it’s totally different for someone else? I really wanted to up the ante everywhere I could across the board.”
The first step was landing on a lead protagonist, and Smile 2 introduces one of horror’s more complicated heroines in recent memory in Skye Riley. This pop star comes with a lot of trauma, emotional baggage, and immense pressure. Launching a world tour means that so many careers rides on her success, isolating her well before she’s afflicted with a supernatural curse.
That excited Finn. He details the research he put into her character: “I had dove headfirst into every documentary, every essay, every interview I could get my hands on about these women, these pop stars, and what their lives were like both the public-facing part, but also behind the scenes and I found it so inspiring. I mean, there’s stuff that wormed its way into the movie. Out of that research, because I really wanted to ground it and build some credibility. I love the idea of somebody who is so public-facing that all these expectations are put upon her to play this character, to always be performing, to sort of be facing the world with a smile, but we go behind that velvet rope.
“We meet this real human being who’s quite tragic, quite flawed. She has some serious stuff that she’s dealing with, but she’s harboring it all inside. She feels that she can’t speak about it to anybody. Even though she’s surrounded by people all day, every day, she’s the loneliest person in the world. It just felt that there’s something about that level of fame, about all the expectations put upon you that you don’t have any agency over your life. You’re sort of trapped by this character you’ve become. To me, it felt like a perfect starting place for a Smile film.”
Lukas Gage stars in Paramount Pictures Presents A Temple Hill Production A Parker Finn FIlm “SMILE 2”
While Finn took care to push his visual storytelling and scares much further this round, the terrifying smile remains the same. The filmmaker shares his tips for recreating this eerie look on camera: “I wanted to make sure that there was the through line of the smile, but I love that the smiles in these films are human performance. We’re not using big, goofy CG stuff. We’re not trying to create filters on people’s faces. I love the uncanny valley of it being real human performance.”
For those trying to recreate it at home, Finn offers this advice: “There are certain tips and tricks that I always end up giving the actors about it. I find that it’s not about necessarily over-emphasizing your own smile, but really using a friendly smile and disconnecting the eyes in a way that feels a bit dead, a bit off. There’s a little trick with a bit of a tilt of the head and sort of staring up from underneath the brow that kind of creates that iconic smile. When you marry that with the tools of filmmaking, the framing, the sound design, everything else that we’re putting into it really creates an unsettling package.”
Smile 2 is now playing in theaters nationwide.
The post ‘Smile 2’ – Parker Finn Explains Why the Entity Is Much More Savage This Round [Interview] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.