The Genius Marketing of Smile

I was expecting Smile to be sub-par. In this current horror movie ecosystem, a movie like Smile is tough to sell to people because, truthfully, the premise is quite funny. The trailers for horror movies will tell you if they are worth your ticket. So to separate Smile from the pack, it used unconventional marketing tactics.

The description of the plot of Smile from IMDB is, “After witnessing a bizarre, traumatic incident involving a patient, Dr. Rose Cotter starts experiencing frightening occurrences that she can't explain.” I don’t know about you, but with what types of horror movies I know are bad, the synopsis of Smile did not sound good. The movie that is compared to Smile the most, in terms of plot, is Truth or Dare (2018) because in that movie when someone was about to die, they would make a big VFX smile, and it looked terrible.

With the plot and comparisons to awful horror movies, the marketing department went in their bag to get ahead. They hired actors to go to baseball games, sit behind the batter's box, and smile the entire game. Some are wearing neon yellow shirts that say “Smile,” so you can see them in the crowd. They also sent them to the background of some morning talk shows.

The main hurdle that stopped many people was that the smiling in the trailer looked lowkey funny, and funny isn't scary. But with this unsettling marketing tactic, the smiling had gone very quickly from funny to chilling.

With that, we must ask, did the movie live up to the expectation of being subpar? Absolutely not, Smile is a modern masterclass in phycological horror. Smile covers topics from trauma, PTSD, suicide, and therapy and does all of them while also being a terrifying display of what going crazy feels like. Sosie Bacon gives an impeccable performance of someone with manic hallucinations, and no one believes her.

If you are sensitive to jumpscares or have heart problems where you can't take a lot of stress, Smile will put you in the ER. There is a minute per jumpscare rate of one every 10 minutes. Certain jumpscares I saw coming, but mostly they caught me off guard. A couple of shots gave me chills because I’m a massive fan of experimental camera movements.

Smile was fighting an uphill battle with the subject matter and the comparisons to other worse movies. But despite that, the marketing department made a 5-dimensional chess checkmate where the public was interested and creeped out to watch a surprisingly fantastic film. Watch Smile in theatres or on physical or digital forms when those become available and form your own opinion. Check my Letterboxd for more short-form reviews https://letterboxd.com/SpencerBengtson/