Smile (2022) and the Villainisation of Mental Health in Horror Movies
By Skyler Bradley
Taboo subjects like mental health rarely reside in the limelight, so could there be a connection between its exploitation and vilification throughout the horror genre?
Smile (2022) [Image Source: IMDB]
Competing in cinemas with the final film in the cult classic series Halloween, conveniently titled ‘Halloween Ends’,
Smile is far from a typical masked-murderer slasher-thriller – its selling point is its originality.
A curse is bestowed upon a string of individuals who witness the suicide of the person before them in this chain. In simple terms, the curse feeds on the witness’s trauma – taking inspiration from the symptoms of PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) as the witness begins to hallucinate eerie smiles on the faces of people around them.
Yet, the irony of the psychiatrist protagonist is that this film fails in its portrayal of mental health.
Sufferers of extreme mental illness may relate to the parallels found in Smile: if not with the protagonist’s paranoid delusions, then with the judgemental reactions she faces to said delusions.
Driven to the point of insanity, the hallucinations worsen and inevitably lead to the character’s gruesome disassociated suicide.
Before reaching this morbid end, the protagonist exhausts her options to break the chain (including contemplating murder) but eventually decides to completely isolate herself.
A problematic aspect of this depiction is the insinuation that isolating oneself can prevent further damage from occurring – that the person suffering must deal with their spiralling mental health alone.
Ending on a continuing chain with no resolution found, Smile is another film which vilifies mental health issues… adding to the list of horror movies presenting deranged characters as scary monsters.
It must be noted that mental illnesses that lead an individual to commit criminal acts are scary in themselves. Although, it is the lack of accurate representations of these illnesses which misinforms audiences on the subject.
The 2016 thriller/horror Split hosted similar inaccuracies. With its extremely exaggerated-for-cinema depiction of DID (dissociative identity disorder), it managed to demonise and mock sufferers of this illness.
Featuring a violent kidnapper protagonist with 23 personalities, Split is a comical attempt at accurately portraying DID, a far stretch from simplified Jekyll and Hyde personas.
Mental illness is the perfect justification for a horror movie’s unpredictability. It is utterly exploited for its natural madness, and the audience eats it up every time.
The split was a commercial success, profiting $278 million worldwide. Smile is now a box office success, profiting $109.3 million – making it Paramount’s sixth #1 movie of 2022.
The backlash from Split showing someone with extreme mental health issues as a violent perpetrator (when most mentally ill people are likely to be victims themself) has not prevented Smile’s problematic success.
The 2020 Twitter tag #GetSplitOffNetflix is home to hundreds of critiques on the dangerous stereotypes the movie projects. Some tweets mention personal accounts of DID sufferers and the discrimination they faced due to viewers using the main character as an accurate representation of the mental illness.
Split (2016) [Image Source: Variety]
Mental illness is the perfect justification for a horror movie’s unpredictability. It is utterly exploited for its natural madness, and the audience eats it up every time.
Split was a commercial success, profiting $278 million worldwide. Smile is now a box office success, profiting $109.3 million – making it Paramount’s sixth #1 movie of 2022.
The backlash from Split showing someone with extreme mental health issues as a violent perpetrator (when most mentally ill people are likely to be victims themself) has not prevented Smile’s problematic success.
The 2020 Twitter tag #GetSplitOffNetflix is home to hundreds of critiques on the dangerous stereotypes the movie projects. Some tweets mention personal accounts of DID sufferers and the discrimination they faced due to viewers using the main character as an accurate representation of the mental illness.
The real danger is not found in the antagonistic characters depicted throughout these films, but in the ultimately detrimental stereotyped notion that mentally ill people are a risk to others.
Until mental illnesses are represented accurately on-screen without the distortion of theatrical plot twists, horror movie scriptwriters should brainstorm better ways to incite fear than dehumanising those with psychiatric disorders.
