Parker Finn’s 2022 horror film Smile opens with its central traumatic episode: a young girl, Rose (Meghan Brown Pratt), finds her mother (Dora Kiss) dead in bed from some kind of drug overdose — a suicide. The bedroom floor is littered with dirty laundry, cigarette butts, and empty prescription bottles, their contents strewn about carelessly. As the camera pushes in on the traumatized child’s face, the film cuts to an adult Rose (Sosie Bacon), now working as a therapist in a psychiatric ward, being torn from her exhaustion-induced midday slumber by the piercing ring of a telephone, revealing the preceding scene as a lingering, ever-present memory.
Even though the plot’s inciting incident comes when Rose witnesses Laura (Caitlin Stasey), a supposedly sane graduate student, commit suicide in front of her by dragging a shard from a broken vase across her throat, a menacing grin frozen on her face even as she lies dead in a pool of blood, it is the opening flashback/dream sequence that lays Smile’s thematic foundation. Seeing the young woman take her own life tethers Rose to a curse which slowly begins to reveal itself through increasingly disturbing apparitions — a scheme designed to drive her to suicide and pass the curse along, as she will come to find out — but it’s her mother’s death which situates the story in its bleak emotional register.
Much has been made of Smile’s connection to “trauma horror” — an offshoot of the much-discussed “elevated horror” subgenre that morphed art horror’s abstractions into readable middlebrow allegory — which gained traction throughout the 2010s when trauma metaphors became horror’s bread and butter as filmmakers ousted the genre’s sleazier proclivities in favor of ponderous inquiries into psychological torment, sometimes expanded by tackling a wide array of social ills, from sexist gaslighting (2022’s Watcher) to slavery (2020’s Antebellum).
The 2000s had been dominated by reboots of and crossovers between iconic horror properties — The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), Last House on the Left (2009), Freddy vs. Jason (2003) — and “torture porn” film series like Saw, Hostel, and The Human Centipede which brought the lurid sensibilities of ‘70s European exploitation cinema in the vein of Umberto Lenzi and Jesús Franco, to the mainstream, transplanting them to the paranoid zeitgeist of the War on Terror era by evoking the brutal torture scenes in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and in the case of The Human Centipede trilogy, the sadistic human experiments performed in Nazi concentration camps.
By the time the new decade rolled around, these trends had largely curdled into dull rehashes of the same formula. The artistic merit of the reboot/crossover boom was always dubious but in hindsight the much-maligned Hostel films, the first two entries in particular, endure as essential texts of the bleak post-9/11 years — not dissimilar to how Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) grappled with the media spectacle made out of the atrocities of the Vietnam War. (Hooper’s decision to market the film as a true story was a direct response to the lies perpetuated by the United States government.)
Even so, audiences began to turn away from gore-soaked horror in favor of ostensibly more thoughtful genre fare. Jennifer Kent’s 2014 film The Babadook — perhaps the defining traumacore text, its titular antagonist acting as a cipher for the central mother-son duo’s grief — Robert Egger’s 2015 period horror The Witch, and Jordan Peele’s 2017 “social thriller” Get Out ushered in a new era and in turn inspired a slew of metaphor-laden, socially aware imitators which saturated the market while also growing less intriguing with each passing year.
In pursuit of that coveted respectability, the genre became saddled with leaden metaphors and turgid literalism which led its stylistic originators to abandon ship — Eggers and Kent looked to historical thrillers with The Northman (2022) and The Nightingale (2018), respectively, while Peele examined humanity’s pursuit of spectacle through a Black lens with his alchemic sci-fi horror film Nope. Countless pale imitators came and went — Trey Edward Shults’ tediously self-important It Comes at Night (2017), Mimi Cave’s bland Fresh (2022), Nia DaCosta’s preachy 2021 sequel to Candyman (1992) which amputated its predecessor’s subtext in favor of overt political signaling — and even well-received works like The Babadook faded into semi-obscurity.
Amongst the more enduring films of the decade, however, stood David Robert Mitchell’s highly acclaimed It Follows (2014), which combined metatextual awareness with sturdy genre filmmaking. In it, a young woman, Jay (Maika Monroe), is pursued by an evil shapeshifting entity after having a curse passed on to her through sex. The figure now coldly stalks Jay, perpetually walking towards her with the sole intent of killing her.
(Rather uninteresting) readings of the film as an STD parable aside, sexual anxieties of all kinds permeate the narrative. Jay being dumped on the street in front of her house after Hugh (Jake Weary) passes the curse on to her is explicitly staged like the aftermath of a sexual assault, for instance, and the entity’s connection to sex does add an uncomfortable psychosexual dimension to the fact that it often takes the form of its victim’s parents. At one point, Jay’s playboy neighbor Greg (Daniel Zovatto) willingly — or happily even, the selflessness of his act is unclear — sleeps with Jay so the curse can be passed on to him. When the entity eventually comes after the young Casanova, it takes the shape of his mother before killing him in what can only be described as a nightmarishly Freudian manner.
The similarities between It Follows and Smile have been noted frequently — and for good reason. Although the latter’s evil is a little more elaborate in its methods, using a variety of tactics to instill terror in its victim, the two share their broad strokes in common. But unlike Mitchell’s thematically intricate and highly ambiguous take on horror conventions, Smile opts for a less than subtle approach. Writer-director Finn does away with metaphor and tackles horror’s antagonist du jour head-on. What makes this gesture so interesting is how it opens the film up to a meta-reading.
Although It Follows was praised for essentially literalizing horror’s strangely repressed fixation on sex — the famous slasher film trope of the final girl is usually associated with sexually unavailable characters while on-screen sex is often swiftly followed by the brutal slayings of the “offending” parties — Smile received comparatively little praise for doing the same thing with its current fixation on trauma. When Rose and her cop ex-boyfriend Joel (Kyle Gallner) go to visit Robert Talley (Rob Morgan), the only person who managed to survive the curse, in prison — he killed someone else instead of himself — he puts it bluntly: “This thing needs trauma to spread. That’s what gives it power, trauma.”
What many proponents — and quite a few detractors — of elevated horror tend to miss, is the genre’s long tradition of grappling with trauma. It’s all over horror history, in fact. Before the likes of Kent and Peele gave the genre its current veneer of respectability — Ari Aster deserves to be brought up as well, since his grim 2018 supernatural horror film Hereditary has been credited with popularizing and to some extent legitimizing the current wave of elevated genre films — Edgar G. Ulmer’s pre-Code horror film The Black Cat (1934) manifested the atrocities of World War I, which its main character Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Bela Lugosi) lived through, in the shape of a black cat.
Similarly feline-themed, Jacques Tourneur’s 1942 psychological horror drama Cat People, aside from pioneering the jump scare, took on patriarchy, sexual repression, and generational trauma, sneaking its subversive themes into theaters under a B-movie guise. In Mark Robson’s 1943 horror noir The Seventh Victim — incidentally conceived as a prequel to Cat People — the disappearance of Jacqueline (Jean Brooks) brings her sister Mary (Kim Hunter) into contact with a group of city-dwelling devil worshippers whom Jacqueline was a part of. The film contended with mental illness and urban decay, and its extraordinarily bleak ending — especially by 1943 standards — contradicted the Hays code’s de facto demand for happy or, at the very least, bittersweet endings.
Although lacking Tourneur’s auteurist credentials, Robson’s frank (and surprisingly fatalistic) approach to depression and third-act descent into what Jonathan Rosenbaum called “a distilled poetry of doom,” startled audiences and excited critics. Retrospectively, the film — adapted from a screenplay by DeWitt Bodeen and Charles O’Neal — has also been noted for its queer subtext as well as praised for a scene which anticipates the famous shower murder in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). But it’s the surprisingly sympathetic portrayal of a character as tortured (and queer-coded) as Jacqueline that highlighted the dramatic and emotional possibilities of the genre.
While the sci-fi-obsessed 1950s filtered American Cold War anxieties through tales of alien invasion — Christian Nyby’s The Thing from Another World (1951), Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Fred F. Sears’ Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) — the ‘60s picked up where directors like Tourneur and Robson left off. Herk Harvey’s 1962 indie horror Carnival of Souls utilized guerrilla filmmaking techniques and emphasized tension and eerie atmospherics over creature-feature spectacle or the bloody thrills of the emerging exploitation horror scene, godfathered by Nobuo Nakagawa’s infernal Jigoku (1960) and Herschell Gordon Lewis’ schlocky Blood Feast (1963), the latter widely considered the first true splatter film and a precursor to the genre’s more sensational tendencies.
Later in the decade, Roman Polanski’s 1968 psychological horror classic Rosemary’s Baby would explore female trauma and sexual assault — as would his first English-language film Repulsion (1965) — as well as the intricate social mechanisms that protect abusive men. (The irony of these themes being present in films made by a man who would go on to be charged with drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl doesn’t escape me.) And although the post-1960s disillusionment would pave the way for horror that was a lot more nasty in its approach — the aforementioned The Texas Chainsaw Massacre being a prime example, along with the proto-slasher Black Christmas (1974) and the rape and revenge thriller I Spit on Your Grave (1978) — films like Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) combined blood-soaked imagery with lush production design, juxtaposing its grisly violence with heightened aesthetics which regularly stepped into the oneiric.
It’s worth bringing up horror’s long tradition of examining real-world issues — often pushing the medium’s artistic boundaries while doing so — since the last few years have seen an increase in blatantly ahistorical writing which has all but ignored that tradition while lauding middling genre entries like Ti West’s X (2022) and its sequel Pearl (2022), or Gerard Johnstone’s strained Child’s Play (1988) homage M3GAN (2022) as “highbrow” and “arthouse.” Misunderstandings of the term “highbrow” aside — the elevated horror films, even the great ones, are nothing if not prime examples of middlebrow art — articles like the one recently published in W Magazine do little but flatten the genre’s complicated, deeply contradictory past (and present) into a shallow liberal framework that views history as a straight line of continuous societal progression.
Also notable is that particular piece’s complete (though unsurprising) absence of foreign horror films, many of which contributed substantially to the grammar of contemporary horror — Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960), Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf (1968), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) — with the omission of Japanese horror feeling particularly negligent. J-horror’s explosion in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s proved to be tremendously influential on the era of elevated horror due in large part to it bringing trauma to the fore in a tangible way.
Kicked off by Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 1997 psychological thriller Cure, which itself took cues from Gakuryu Ishii’s 1994 underground classic Angel Dust, the Y2K years saw an influx of horror films from the East Asian island. In spite of its status as a cult favorite, Cure, a head-spinningly opaque detective story, often gets overlooked in favor of Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998), Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-On: The Grudge (2002), and Kurosawa’s own 2001 tech-horror Pulse — perhaps his most famous creation — all of which came to define numerous conventions of the horror genre as a whole.
Japanese horror filmmakers imagined trauma in a less insulated, less concretely domestic way — the realm of Western horror films in general is often confined within a specific milieu such as the suburbs, the nuclear family, or a (usually heterosexual) romantic relationship. J-horror by contrast renders it as an all-consuming force, not an aberration in an otherwise normal world as much as a permanent fixture in it. Ju-On ends with its curse — originated from a patriarch killing his wife, son, and cat — having ravaged Tokyo, its barren streets filled with countless missing person posters. Pulse is similarly apocalyptic: soul-crushing misery eventually envelops the entire planet, morphing its once bustling cities into deserted wastelands — the ruins of modernity.
The idea of spreading misery is also the basis of Ringu, where Sadako (Rie Inô), a young psychic girl who was murdered, uses her thoughtographic powers to create a disturbing videotape whose deadly curse can only be averted by copying it and therefore proliferating the trauma she herself went through. Her rage being imprinted on a videotape makes her trauma visible, a desire Sadako shares with Kayako, Ju-On’s vengeful spirit unleashing her deadly fury on whomever sets foot in the house she lost her life in.
Asami (Eihi Shiina), the antagonist of Takeshi Miike’s 1999 horror shocker Audition, is perhaps the genre’s most realized example of (female) suffering spat back at the world. The sadistic torture she inflicts on the widowed Shigeharu (Ryo Ishibashi) is born of her own life-long experiences with abuse at the hands of the men in her life — a feverish dream sequence even suggests sexual abuse during childhood. The suffering she consequently puts the mild-mannered, though still subtly sexist widower through is twistedly cathartic — her lifetime of pain finally finds its expression in the cruelty she inflicts on someone else — simultaneously subverting and playing into male neuroses about man-eating succubi.
It is that specter of J-horror which reverberates throughout Smile and the way its trauma curse operates. In the same way that Mamiya, Cure’s malevolent hypnotist, brings out the murderous rage lurking beneath society’s facade of civility — achieved by repeatedly asking people who they are — or Pulse’s internet ghosts only exasperate our digital depression, so too does Smile’s evil entity merely amplify the trauma already present in the world.
Like Sadako and Asami, the timid Rose lives a life of invisibility, her trauma hidden behind forced smiles and polite affability. The curse throws her existence into disarray, slowly destroying her relationships, her career, and her sanity, but it also makes her pain visible for the first time. The grad student’s suicide isn’t what curses her, she was cursed the moment she found her mother’s dead body. And after she gives herself to the grotesque demon that has been haunting her, Rose’s face is no longer twisted into a strained mask of uneasy friendliness but the same shameless grin that its other victims wore as well.
During the film’s final moments, Joel finds Rose standing in the dark, dripping in gasoline. She turns to face him, pulls a match out of a matchbox, and sets herself on fire, smiling as she does it. Joel’s face is illuminated by the raging flames as the camera zooms in on his eye, reflecting his former lover’s blazing silhouette — finally someone truly sees the depths of her anguish. Critic Ben McDonald described the “incendiary” final shot as “the final word on trauma horror as a genre.” I’m inclined to agree.