Interviews
‘Smile 2’ – Parker Finn Explains Why the Entity Is Much More Savage This Round [Interview]
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.
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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