Horror sequel Smile 2 makes it very clear from minute one that it won't be taking any prisoners. The much anticipated follow-up to writer/director Parker Finn's 2022 breakout hit Smile kicks events off with a bang, beginning with a striking and brutal one-shot scene. Of course, we won't be diving into spoilers here - you'll have to see the film for yourself - but what we can tell you is that it makes an immediate impression.
Which is exactly what Finn was hoping to achieve, who returns to helm this second installment. Speaking to 12DOVE, he reveals that with the opening he wanted to do something he hadn't done before, whilst throwing audiences right into the action. Finn explains: "Where the first film ended, I knew I wanted to have some connective tissue, a sort of through line between them, and so it felt like a natural place to start.
"But I also knew that the opening scene was not going to feel like anything we had done in the first film, it was going to be totally something that felt really surprising in a Smile film. In the script itself, I had written that it's going to be a single unbroken shot because I knew that was really going to create this incredibly tense, suffocating feeling as as you're thrown into the opening. It was a major challenge to prep and shoot, but I'm really pleased with how it came out."
Finn also wanted to do something different when it came to the story, meaning Smile 2 doesn't focus on Kyle Gallner's police detective Joel, who you may remember had the curse passed onto him at the end of the 2022 original. Instead we follow Naomi Scott's Skye Riley, a troubled pop star who is on the dawn of a world tour.
But was there ever the idea that this sequel could have Joel at the helm? For Finn, there wasn't, as he tells us: "I love Kyle Gallner, he is such an incredible actor and I want to put him in everything. But I knew that if I was approaching a sequel I didn't want to do the obvious thing, or a simple continuation, or a retread of the original. If I was asking audiences to come back I wanted to deliver something really unexpected, fresh, and different."
Of course, 2022's Smile was originally designed to be a standalone movie, but the film becoming a box office sensation meant a sequel was swiftly commissioned. Finn admits that he can be "quite cynical sometimes of sequels", so therefore wanted to ensure that if he was going to make Smile 2 it had to be done right.
The filmmaker agreed then to make the movie when he came up with the character of Riley, which Finn says "unlocked everything" for him. As he concludes, that idea meant the sequel was justified: "I find myself being quite cynical sometimes of sequels. I think there are incredible ones out there but they need to be made thoughtfully with all of the care of the original.
"And so, I knew if I was going to do it, it needed to be something that was worth coming back to. The discovery of this character, this massive pop star Skye Riley, unlocked everything for me. That got me really excited. I wanted to go bigger, bolder, way more off the rails, and insane. There's this great escalation from the first to the second, which I wanted to lean into."
Smile 2 hits UK cinemas on October 17, before releasing in US theaters on October 18.
For more, check out our picks of the best horror movies and the upcoming horror movies you should be watching out for.
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