Northeast Ohio native Parker Finn enjoys giving people nightmares.
And he’s good at it. Finn wrote and directed the movie “Smile”, where a psychiatrist is followed by an evil force that manifests itself as her loved ones wearing sinister grins. She soon discovers she’s just one in a long-line of people who have been haunted by a smile.
The concept for “Smile” began as a short film. “Laura Hasn’t Slept” drew inspiration from classic horror films like “The Ring” and “Rosemary’s Baby”. The harrowing story was so well-received that Paramount expanded it into a feature film in 2022, grossing over $100 million in the U.S. and Canada and amassing fans from around the world.
Now, Finn’s directorial debut is getting a sequel. The curse continues in “Smile 2,” where a pop sensation begins to see the terrifying smile ahead of her world tour.
Finn sat down with the Ohio Newsroom to talk about his upcoming film, in theaters this weekend, and his childhood in Bath.
On continuing the ‘Smile’ curse
“It's a dream come true. You know, the reception to the first film was surreal. I was just hoping that the film would find an audience and to see the way that viewers really connected with it and embraced it was incredible. And so when I set out to make the sequel, I wanted to make sure that if I was going to ask audiences to give me their time again, that I was going to do something really fresh and exciting and unexpected with it and try to really make it a new, worthwhile experience for them.”
On watching horror
“I was a major film kid. I was a video store kid. And horror was always one of my first loves. I was, you know, watching Rated R movies when I was way too young, which I'm sure had some sort of outsized impact on my psyche. But, for me, I love things that go bump in the night. I love practical effects. I love gore. I love monsters. I love freaking people out. But I'm really interested in horror as a vehicle to explore certain themes and to tell really involving character stories. I think it's such a great way to get people to think about how frightening it can be to just be a human being walking around in this world, and then to bring in some extraordinary supernatural element that gives them a little push and creates all this human horror. For me, that's what I'm really interested in.”
On growing up in Bath
“I live in Los Angeles now, which is sunshine pretty much all year long, and I find myself really, really missing all four seasons. But especially fall in Ohio. When I think about the atmosphere of fall, of the Halloween season, I'm picturing my childhood. The only thing is, when you're a kid every once in a while in northeastern Ohio, it snows on Halloween. And then you have the dreadful thing of having to wear the snow coat over your costume. It is always kind of a bummer. But I loved growing up in Bath and I feel like it's definitely influenced everything for me as far as a storyteller.”
On perfecting the jump-scare
“I always try to make myself the first audience member for my films. And I think about ‘What scares me?’ or ‘What might I expect as an audience member and how can I turn that on its head?’ How can I zag when the audience might think I'm going to zig? And really trying to think about expectations, place myself in the seat of the viewer and then try to defy those expectations and hit them with something that they don't see coming.”
“And I also really love sort of toeing the line between things that are really frightening, but adding this layer of playful absurdity to it as well. I think it can be really disarming for an audience. And if I can get an audience chuckling because they're so anxious or so nervous and then hit them with a really impactful scare, I think that that's really exciting for me.”
On writing ‘Smile 2’
“When I sat down to write this film, I immersed myself in every documentary or essay or interview that I could get my hands on with pop stars and really wanted to learn about their worlds. In both the public facing part of it, the part that we all know, but also kind of going behind that velvet rope and trying to understand who some of these individuals really were as human beings."
"And I was so fascinated by this idea of somebody who's so famous, who, there's this expectation put upon them to sort of always be on, always be performing, greeting the world with a smile. But then, you know, behind the scenes, that's a real human being who's going through real stressful situations that can be fraught with with guilt, with depression, with stress. And to me, that felt like a really ripe place to start for a ‘Smile’ story.”
