The Smile Entity, also known as the Monstrosity, is the titular main antagonist of the Smile Franchise.
It represents the central villain in the films and torments the main protagonists throughout the entire movie. It is not yet known what exactly the entity is and where it comes from, but due to its abilities and powers, it could be called a demon.
It is portrayed primarily by Marti Matulis, but throughout the film was also portrayed by Sara Kapner, Robin Weigert, Gillian Zinser, Dora Kiss, Jack Sochet, Kal Penn, Kyle Gallner and Kevin Keppy respectively. Trevor Newlin portrayed it in the second film, but throughout the film it was also portrayed by Dylan Gelula, Ray Nicholson, Rosemarie DeWitt, Miles Gutierrez-Riley, Ivan Cárlo and Mila Falkof.
Appearance[]
The entity's true form in Smile 2
The smile entity is a non-corporeal being that cannot be seen by anyone except the victim it is currently possessing. It is capable of changing its appearance at a whim, often using real people as the basis for the "masks" it wears when it appears in various hallucinations. It has a grotesque “true" form that it only reveals when its victim is about to die.
In the first film, it is shown to be a large bipedal mostly a humanoid creature with elongated limbs, multiple mouths nestled within one another, and skin similar to flayed flesh. It keeps these features in the second film, however it is no longer bipedal, has a less human looking body, and is much larger; staggering to at least five meters tall, this time the entity has multiplied huge jaws all across it's head and it's elongated neck, some of which are just small pairs of teeth.
This might possibly allude to the idea that the entity becomes stronger and larger as it consumes more victims. This was mostly disproven when Parker stated that the entity's "true form" would never be the same from victim to victim.
History[]
It is currently unknown where the entity came from or what it even is. Since it’s unknown if it’s a demon, an alien or something else, it could have originated from a number of places including Hell, another dimension, an alternative universe, another planet, an alien world or somewhere else entirely. Eventually the entity found its way into its very first victim and discovered its appetite for human trauma. It then started hopping in and out of different people, all the while making them hallucinate terrifying and morbid things to make them afraid and stressed so it could feed and keep itself alive before eventually possessing and killing them. It has been repeating the same process ever since.
Laura Hasn't Slept[]
At a therapist's office, Laura Weaver explains how she has been having the same dream every time since last week. It’s just that it starts differently. In her dream, she might be at work, in her apartment, on the train, etc. Wherever she is, Laura explains how she gets this terrible nervous feeling in her stomach. She knows something is wrong, but she can’t remember what it is. Then, a man appears, and Laura explains how it is the same man in every dream. He is smiling at her, but it is not a friendly smile. Moreover, Laura mentions how there is also something the matter with the man’s eyes. She sighs as she rubs her own eyes, before proceeding to state how she has never been this scared of anything in her life, like she is with this man.
As the session continues, the therapist tasks Laura if she thinks there’s a reason why this man continues to appear to her. Laura tearfully says that this man’s motive for essentially haunting her is that he wants to show her his true face. In other words, the one he has behind the face he is currently wearing. She admits that it sounds crazy, but that ultimately, she is really scared that if she sees the man’s true face, she will die.
The therapist then asks her point blank why she is here then. To which Laura explains that she is here to put an end to these horrible nightmares that she keeps on having. However, the therapist reiterates that is not what he is really asking her, and asks her again why she is here with him.
Her therapist then asks Laura how she happened to get to this office to discuss her dreams with him. Followed by taunting her when he asks her if she still thinks he is her therapist. He doesn’t stop and continues to go on by asking Laura if they had even met before. She is initially confused until it suddenly dawns on her after he asks her if she is certain that she is not dreaming right now.
Suddenly, things get darker in the room, some cracking sounds can be heard, as the shelves full of books begin to fall. Laura breathes deeply as she stares at who she thought was her therapist.
However, said therapist’s lips begin to quiver, as he begins to smile menacingly. He taunts her by telling her how she seemed awfully tired. Laura closes her eyes, but even sitting down, the man continues to smile, even after his eyes roll to the back of his eye. Till only the white husks remains. She yells out to him to stay away from her, and it is then she notices the door to his office.
The man keeps yelling out her name from behind and starts to stand up. But the sound of what seems to be bones cracking are heard loud and clear by Laura. Despite her fears, she turns around, and the man tells her how there’s something he wants to show her. He slowly begins to pull at his face, and she turns back around. She slaps her face a couple of times as she tells herself that none of this is real.
Undeterred, the man continues to yell out to Laura to look at him. Each time he yells out her name, his voice gets lower and raspier. She doesn’t listen to him, and instead covers her eyes with her hands. Laura yells out once more that he isn’t real, and the rooms get even darker and eerily quiet. She eventually takes her hands away from her face, and looks around the room. She hears some footsteps around her. She walks around till eventually, the man pops up, showing her his true face. She wails and much like the man before her, Laura pulls at her face, causing her eyes to bleed.
Smile[]
At a psychiatric ward, stressed and overworked psychiatrist Rose Cotter meets with Laura Weaver, who had several days earlier witnessed her art history professor commit suicide. Laura claims that an entity taking the form of smiling people, as well as stalking and telling her she is going to die. Not long after Laura begins screaming hysterically and has a seizure. After Rose calls for help, she sees Laura standing up and grinning. With a shard of a broken plant pot, Laura cuts open her neck, killing herself.
The entity continues to taunt Rose, which makes her seem unhinged and dangerous to people around her, including her fiancé Trevor and sister Holly. At her nephew's birthday party, Rose sees a party attendant grinning at her and curses, then falls onto a glass table, ending the party in chaos.
Upon learning Laura's professor was grinning at her before his death, Rose visits his widow Victoria and learns he was affected after witnessing a woman die by suicide. Rose asks her ex-boyfriend Joel, a police detective, to go through police records. They find several cases where someone witnessed a suicide, then a few days later committing suicide in front of someone else, who continued the pattern.
Rose visits Holly, attempting to patch things up, but only makes it worse. The entity takes the form of Holly as she leaves, terrifying her in the process. Joel then calls her after discovering all the witnesses committed suicide within a week. The exception was Robert Talley, who instead murdered someone, and the key witness to the murder continued the suicide chain. Rose and Joel visit Talley in jail, where he claims the only way to escape the curse of this entity is to kill someone in front of a witness, and do it in a brutal fashion to cause major psychological trauma, of which the entity 'feeds' off.
At home, Rose is confronted at home by the entity in Madeline's form, seemingly coming to check on how Rose is feeling and conducting a therapy session at her house. But when the real Madeline calls, the Entity reveals itself telling Rose it is "almost time". Rose impulsively drives to her hospital with a knife and hallucinates murdering Carl Renken in front of Dr. Morgan Desai to pass on the curse.
Rose eventually drives to her abandoned family home to attempt to deprive the entity of witnesses. Rose then confronts it in the form of her dead mother. Rose sets the entity on fire and leaves as the house burns down. Rose then drives to Joel's apartment and he comforts her. Suddenly, she realizes everything that happened from the moment she entered the old house was a hallucination. The entity confronts the now despairing Rose, and reveals itself as a skinless creature with mouths nested within its mouth. This overwhelms Rose, and it forces itself inside her body. Later, when Joel finds Rose by tracking her phone, a smiling Rose sets herself on fire, thus passing the curse to Joel.
Smile 2[]
Six days after witnessing Rose Cotter's suicide, ex-police officer Joel attempts to pass The Monstrosity's curse onto two criminals at their hideout. After gruesomely killing one of them, a shootout occurs where Joel accidentally kills the second criminal, who was his intended witness. Unfortunately, Lewis Fregoli, a drug dealer, sees the event, thus transferring the curse onto him. Fleeing from the hideout, Joel is fatally severed in half by an oncoming pickup truck.
At Lewis' home, Skye Riley, a Grammy-winning pop star, watches him succumb to the curse when he brutally smashes his face in with a weight plate. A traumatized Skye flees without notifying the police.
Following her encounter with Lewis’ death, Skye begins experiencing frequent physical and auditory hallucinations caused by the curse, including people smiling at her and distorted voices. At a charity fundraising event hosted by music executive Darius Bravo, the curse further manifests. Skye, feeling pressured to attend by her mother and manager, Elizabeth, experiences a hallucination with the teleprompter that causes her to go on an erratic tirade about fame. During her rant, she sees her deceased boyfriend Paul smiling at her and batters him, only to realize it was an elderly audience member.
Haunted and desperate, Skye reaches out to an unknown number texting her about the danger. This leads her to Morris, a former nurse tracking the entity since it killed his brother. He explains how the curse transfers to anyone who witnesses the death of someone affected by it and theorizes that the entity is a parasite that dies without a host. Morris suggests a plan to kill and resuscitate Skye to rid her of the curse, but she panics and flees when recognized.
In her apartment, The Monstrosity appears as her backup dancers, causing Skye to suffer a concussion in her terror. Skye’s trauma deepens as she recalls that her boyfriend Paul’s death was due to a drug-fueled argument, where she intentionally crashed the car that killed him. Awakening at a wellness retreat, she quarrels with Elizabeth over her erratic behavior, but the entity seizes the opportunity to possess her during another hallucination, driving her to stab her mother with a mirror shard.
In a last attempt to escape the curse, Skye turns to Morris again and arranges to meet him at an abandoned Pizza Hut. The plan involves stopping her heart in a freezer for eight minutes to starve The Monstrosity of a host. But as Morris prepares for the procedure and leaves the room to supposedly retrieve something, the entity reveals itself as a younger version of Skye, attacking her within her hallucination. Skye attempts to stop her heart, but realizes that all along, she had been hallucinating, and nothing beyond Skye in the dressing room happened.
Suddenly, Skye finds herself on stage at her comeback tour’s opening night, where the entity finally reveals its true form — a skinless, semi-humanoid monstrosity with multiple sets of malformed jaws within an enormous, smiling mouth. Entranced by the entity's visage, a terrified Skye surrenders, allowing it to crawl inside her as she collapses.
Possessed by The Monstrosity, Skye rises, smiling eerily, mischievously and cold, and fatally stabs herself in the eye with a microphone, transferring the curse to Darius, Joshua, a still-alive Elizabeth, the dancers, the security guards, and the rest of the horrified, traumatized audience (possibly including those who witnessed it on TV live), continuing the cycle.
Personality[]
Gabriel Muñoz' drawings of the entity.
Being an evil, otherworldly entity, the Monstrosity has no care or regard for the human lives it destroys, jumping from victim to victim after they are eventually killed by its influence. Its motive for this is unclear, however, it could be theorized that it "collects" the souls of its victims. Its notably larger and more unnatural appearance at the end of Smile 2 might imply that the entity grows bigger and stronger with each victim it consumes.
Compared to standard horror demons, The Monstrosity in Smile is particularly sadistic and enjoys toying with its hosts' minds, using their past traumas as a means to torment them mentally and physically. The creature doesn't seem to be in a hurry to kill, with its victims being able to survive for up to a week at most. The hallucinations it induces are capable of being incredibly complex, and the entity itself usually takes the role of an important person in the victim's life before revealing itself by dawning its standard smile.
It also seems to enjoy giving false hope to it's victims in their last moments before finally taking over, as seen with both Rose Cotter and Skye Riley who were each falsely lead to believe that they had defeated the curse.
Powers & Abilities[]
- Mental Entity/Curse Embodiment: While the full extent of The Monstrosity is unknown, it's known for existing inside of the host's mind and seemingly doesn't have a true physical form. The Monstrosity is associated with a curse or is the curse itself, and is able to pass onto others through those who view the host's suicide.
- Telepathy: The Monstrosity is capable of reading the host's mind and knowing their thoughts and past traumas.
- Selective Imperceptibility: The Monstrosity is only visible to the host.
- Trauma Mimicry: The Monstrosity represents trauma and feeds on it to presumably gain power.
- Perception Manipulation/Sense Manipulation: The Monstrosity is capable of altering the host's perception of reality. This is mainly altering the host’s senses to create fake sensory experiences that might be initially presumed real, such as sight (seeing smiling individuals), sound (Skye hearing her Voss water shatter), pain (Skye's leg breaking during her performance), touch (Rose hallucinating that she held her housephone and Skye hallucinating holding the needle), and so forth.
- Mental World Manipulation: The Monstrosity can induce a massive hallucination or dream-like experience to trick the host. For example, it made Rose hallucinate that she drove to see Joel after she believed she killed it, but it's revealed she never left her mom's old house. Additionally, it's speculated and possibly implied that after Skye was attacked by her dancers, everything after that (until the day of the tour when she committed suicide) was in her head.
- Dream Manipulation: As shown with Laura, Rose, and presumably Skye, it can enter and manipulate the dream world to create extremely realistic mental worlds to trick the host.
- Mental World Manipulation: The Monstrosity can induce a massive hallucination or dream-like experience to trick the host. For example, it made Rose hallucinate that she drove to see Joel after she believed she killed it, but it's revealed she never left her mom's old house. Additionally, it's speculated and possibly implied that after Skye was attacked by her dancers, everything after that (until the day of the tour when she committed suicide) was in her head.
- (Illusionary) Shapeshifting: The Monstrosity is capable of changing its form to resemble other individuals, as described by Laura and Morris to "wear people’s faces like masks" and "disguise itself to look like people" respectively. Usually, it takes the form of one individual, but it is able to take the form of multiple individuals at once, as shown with Skye being chased down in her apartment by her smiling backup dancers. It can change its size and manipulate its body parts, besides changing its form to resemble others, such as becoming a larger version of Rose's mom and having its eyes and mouth replaced with bright lights when taking the form of Gemma. Considering The Monstrosity lives within the host's mind and acts as a mental being, its shapeshifting likely acts as an illusion/hallucination rather than a true physiological change. Through the way The Monstrosity torments its host in all three films (appearing only visible to the host and altering their perception of reality), it acts near-identical to dream entities or a "physical" hallucination, as The Monstrosity and the aforementioned concepts are both only visible to the individual and are associated with sensory perception of people, places, and/or objects that aren’t real, but may appear vividly "real" in the individual’s perception.
- Voice Manipulation: The Monstrosity can manipulate its voice, usually disguising it to sound like other people, but also to sound more distorted and echoey.
- Orifice Invasion/Possession: At the end of the week, it enters the mouth of the host and possesses them to kill themselves. It’s implied at the end of the second movie that The Monstrosity is capable of possessing multiple individuals, though it’s not entirely certain. It’s implied that The Monstrosity is capable of temporarily possessing the host before the end of the week, such as when Rose’s cat, Mustache, was killed, when Skye’s dressing room was destroyed, and when Lewis sent a text to Skye to come over to his apartment. All of these events happened without any of the hosts' knowledge, and they don’t remember doing it.
- Soul Collection/Imprisonment: At the end of the second movie during the credits, Skye can be heard crying and yelling, being implied that after The Monstrosity kills the host’s physical body after possessing them to commit suicide, it takes and traps their souls. Though, this is still speculation.
- Fear Inducement/Catatonia Inducement/Paralysis Inducement: When The Monstrosity’s true form is perceived, the host experiences a catatonic-like state where they are unresponsive. When battling against Skye in the freezer, The Monstrosity revealed small parts of its true form by making its eyes bigger and having multiple mouths, which seemingly temporarily paralyzed Skye before she gained the energy to bite down on the creature's thumbs.
- (Illusionary) Supernatural Strength: The Monstrosity is strong enough to rip open its host’s mouth to possess them, and pick up Skye by her neck and throw her across the freezer room. Though considering these events happen in the host’s mind/false perception, it’s likely more illusionary than physical, also because The Monstrosity is presumably an aforementioned mental being.
Victims[]
Successfully Murdered[]
- 17 unnamed people (Possibly more)
- Brazilian man's wife
- Morris' brother (Torn his jaw off with a crowbar)
- Man at the gas station (Stabbed in the chest with secateurs)
- Angela Powell (Eyes gouged out)
- Gabriel Muñoz (Skull beaten with a hammer)
- Laura Weaver (Throat sliced with a vase shard)
- Mustache (Played with Rose's mind and caused her to kill her cat)
- Rose Cotter (Burned alive after doused with cerosine)
- Lewis Fregoli (Face smashed with a dumbbell plate)
- Skye Riley (Microphone impaled through right eye multiple times)
Possibly cursed[]
- 50 thousand (Possibly more) of Skye's fans (Including to those who saw her on TV live) (To be claimed)
- 8 of Skye's backup dancers (To be claimed)
- Several security guards at the tour (To be claimed)
- Elizabeth Riley (To be claimed)
- Joshua (To be claimed)
- Darius Bravo (To be claimed)
Escaped[]
- Man in Brazil
- Robert Talley
- Joel (but later died in a car accident)
Quotes[]
- "Laura... look at me. LOOK AT ME!!!"
- "You're going to die!" (to Rose Cotter)
- "Are you sure you haven't let something inside, Rose?"
- "Almost time, Rose."
- "Because your mind is so inviting." - The Monstrosity to Rose disguised as her mom
- "You can't escape your own mind, Rose!"
- "I’ll stay with you forever."
- "It's because you're a horrible person." (to Skye Riley)
- "Hey, Elizabeth." (sarcastically to Elizabeth Riley who can't see it while it pretends to be Gemma to Skye.)
- "I've tasted what's inside your head!"
- "Look what you're doing to your POOR MOTHER!"
- “Gemma hates you, Skye.”
- "No one cares about you."
- "I‘ve been waiting for you for such a long time."
- "I like wearing your skin."
- "You'll never escape who you truly are on the inside."
- "You're not in control, Skye. I am."
- "Break a leg out there."
Behind the Scenes[]
Appearances[]
Trivia[]
- The entity most likely has a real name which is "Lollipop" because the entity's method of possessing it's victims is going in mouth by mouth just like a lollipop in real life. It's head is also similar to a lollipop (which is round) clearly in the second film. Though it hasn't been confirmed if the entity's true name is "Lollipop" or if it's just referred according to the film members. The Monstrosity is the nickname to refer as a manifestation of trauma and/or the true form of the being.
- All the creepy smiles throughout the film are entirely performance-based without any digital augmentation, as Finn smartly believed that keeping them natural would make them scarier.[1]
- Parker Finn and production designer Lester Cohen took joy in planting smiles throughout the film. The camera lingers on some – like the sign at the model train shop and the pain chart at the hospital – while others are more subtle. For example, the contact photo that shows up when Trevor and Rose first text has a natural, closed-mouth smile then changes to a toothy grin when seen later in the film.[1]
- After discovering that she could save herself from the curse by killing someone else, Rose returns to her apartment. The camera angle reveals a piece of mail that says “Last Chance” beside the doorway. This was an intentional bit of production design to correspond with Rose’s ultimatum.[1]
- The entity that takes people over, hauntingly revealed in the film’s final moments, was lovingly referred to as Lollipop by the cast and crew. This ties into The Chordettes’s “Lollipop” playing over the end credits, creating a tonal whiplash from the downer ending.[1]
- Some theories suggest that the amount of mouths/jaws that the entity has, is the amount of people that it has tormented and killed each time, for example, the 2nd form of the creature has probably had in around 11 people in total, plus Skye Riley as the current victim in that form and previous others and etc. (Despite it being 27 in actual total amount) Now, since it has easily tormented and cursed everyone in the audience from the 2nd film, then it could take on a larger new form to show everyone of how powerful and hopeless they are, and to represent how many people it tormented as a mockery like trophies and even used for fear if shown its true form in that way.
References[]
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