We’ll forgive you if, upon watching the first trailer for Smile, Parker Finn’s new horror film about — you guessed it — creepy-ass smiles and the people who wear them, you might have thought back to that goofy Blumhouse movie Truth or Dare that came out in the pre-Covid days. Ah, remember when we all gathered together to mercilessly dunk on attention-grabbing movies centered around goofy gimmicks? Well, you don’t have to remember any longer: Smile‘s come to reclaim the creepy grin for a brand-new generation of… 16-year-olds with jack shit to do on Saturday nights and horror fans who still somehow go see some PG-13 horror even though they’ve got mortgages to pay and medication to take. You know, it looks like the kind of thing that we would have absolutely gone apeshit for, at least based on this trailer that Paramount dropped earlier on Wednesday, back when movies like Boogeyman made us want to hit up the multiplex with someone we were crushing on. If you want to head down memory lane and have full-body cringes remembering what it was like the first time you held hands at the movies, well, check this shit out.
Peep it:
Hope you survived that final jump scare because it seems like it straight-up wrecked a bunch of the YouTube commenters. We’re definitely not writing this from behind a couch, totally enveloped in a blanket so that these creepy fucks can’t get us. Not at all.
Here’s a synopsis:
“After witnessing a bizarre, traumatic incident involving a patient, Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) starts experiencing frightening occurrences that she can’t explain. As an overwhelming terror begins taking over her life, Rose must confront her troubling past in order to survive and escape her horrifying new reality.”
Smile opens wide on September 30. Are we proud of ourselves for that pun? You bet we are.