STACK #218 December 2022

MOVIE FEATURE

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FUN FACTS Smile is the most successful horror film of 2022 to date, having grossed US$210 million at the global box office. The movie is based on Parker Finn’s 2020 short film, Laura Hasn’t Slept . Its star, Caitlin Stasey, also appears in Smile . Smile was originally titled “Something’s Wrong with Rose”.

scary movie fan, so I gained an appreciation for them early on, and I still like them a lot,” she says. While Gallner insists that nothing truly spooky happened on Smile ’s New Jersey set – beyond all the gore and special effects – he does recall being scared out of his wits while making The Haunting in Connecticut with Virginia Madsen some 13 years ago. ”We were all staying in a super haunted hotel in Connecticut, and a lot of weird stuff happened to me in that hotel,” he recalls. ”Like, one night I was asleep and jumped up out of bed because the room got super cold and I felt somebody slide up against my body. Or I was lying down, and I could feel something just go underneath the bed. ”Another time I thought my phone rang and I picked it up and said hello. And then I heard ‘hello' off in a different part of my room, and there was nobody actually on my phone,” he adds. Oddly enough, Gallner says he never went screaming down to the hotel lobby. ”I know it sounds crazy, but it

Veronica Mars and Smallville stalwart Kyle Gallner certainly had the grin wiped off his face when starring in Parker Finn’s chilling psychological horror film, Smile . Words Gill Pringle ”A ll horror films can be gruelling, although Sosie did the hardest work,”

Kyle Gallner tells STACK , referring to his Smile co-star Sosie Bacon, the daughter of Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick. Bacon plays therapist Dr. Rose Cotter, who, after witnessing the bizarre suicide of a patient, goes through increasingly disturbing and daunting experiences, leading her to believe that she's experiencing something supernatural. ”Sosie was put through the

never felt hostile. It felt more like whatever was there just wanted to be noticed. I was so tired and beat from filming every day that I would walk into my hotel room at night and just be like, 'I need to sleep, please just leave me alone tonight’. And then nothing would happen, or it would stop." A lifelong horror fan, Smile director Parker Finn believes one of the prerequisites of the genre is characters worth caring about. ”The scariest movies are the ones that work first as dramatic stories, so my goal was to create a great lead character – because if you’re invested in her, you’ll be invested in her plight,” he explains. ”Then you can start layering in shocking moments that strike at the core of what the audience is afraid of, and find ways to pull the rug out from under them and subvert their expectations in terrifying ways.”

wringer on this movie, and she worked her butt off. I kind of just popped in and out and had fun hanging out with her,” says Gallner, who plays a sceptical police detective and Dr. Cotter’s former boyfriend. While Bacon received acclaim for her supporting roles in TV series Mare of Easttown and 13 Reasons Why , Smile represents the biggest role of her career to date. ”Truthfully, I wasn’t fully aware of how much this part would wear on me when I began the movie,” she says. ”It’s physically demanding, because your body doesn’t understand the difference between acting and real life. But honestly, I don’t know that anything can prepare you for an experience like Smile .”

Sosie Bacon and Kyle Gallner

Bacon describes the movie as an intense psychological horror film told through the eyes of a character that you can’t help but root for. ”I play a woman who’s been coping with a lot of pain in her life, and after witnessing a violent incident at work, she’s forced to confront a supernatural threat that fixates on her. It’s visually striking and it will absolutely freak you out!” Cinematic terror is something of a family business for Bacon, her father having appeared in several iconic genre films including Stir of Echoes , Flatliners , and Friday the 13th . ”My dad is a big

• Smile is out on Dec 14

18 DECEMBER 2022

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