[Editorial] What Makes You Smile: How Parker Finn Took An Award-Winning Short to Full-Length Nightmare

What makes you smile? asks the sinister trailer for Parker Finn’s full-length adaptation of his award-winning short film Laura Hasn’t Slept (2020).

And it’s the ‘you’, the personal element of horror that Finn used to explore all the story premise had to offer. “I began in a place of character,” Finn said, speaking recently to Ghouls Magazine. “I wasn’t interested in repeating myself. I wanted to challenge myself with a new story.” And Smile, a film about a seemingly virulent mental terror that manifests in a deranged smile before victims take their own lives, is all about what makes us smile--that is, what, to us, is an unending nightmare? 

“I always look inwards at the things that frighten me first,” Finn says of writing horror and specifically blowing out the scope of his short film to a full-length feature. Inspiration included Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining (1980), the effective way Kubrick utilized head games to trick the audience into going mad alongside Jack. Another was Todd Haynes’ Safe (1995) which placed the audience in Juliane Moore’s increasingly terrifying perspective. “I was interested in exploring the horror in the things we carry around inside us every day. I wanted to meditate on what it felt like to have your mind turn against you. I wanted to couple it with the fear of not being believed by those who are closest to you.” It’s a feeling many of us can relate to, and perhaps one borne, consciously or not, out of the isolation, paranoia, and competing streams of information of the past several years. 

But it wasn’t just psychosis and isolation films that inspired Finn. Japanese horror films like Ringu (1998) and Cure (1997) both played a role in combining detective elements with horror and a contagious evil that is passed on from one victim to the next. Finn describes the effectiveness of these films in the randomness of the affliction, like stepping in gum you can’t scrape off: “Being one person on this planet of billions of people and being the one person who happens to step in this supreme force of evil is so frightening.” The terror of bumping into the wrong person on the street, taking the wrong shortcut home, simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s a lasting source of terror for good reason Finn says, “We have a fear of the unknown, the other, these things that can come in and take over our lives.”

It’s clear Finn’s ambitions for this film stretch far beyond the confines of a short film and successful as it was (it was awarded the Special Jury Recognition Prize in SXSW’s Midnight Short category), there’s so much more to the prospect of a nightmare you find yourself unable to wake up from, and one no one else seems to believe you’re having. Those who were lucky enough to catch Laura Hasn’t Slept on its festival circuit are in for just as much surprise and just as many scares as the rest of us. Find out what makes you smile on September 30. 

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