Horror finds its emblem in the hideous smile. In movies, a character’s slow, toothy grin often means they are about to expose their truest selves. It signifies a move into a darker realm—a space that is unhinged, monstrous, and senseless. We’re even starting to make movies that focus entirely on evil smiles to send ourselves deeper into paroxysms of terror. Here are four smiles that have haunted me, onscreen and off.
1. Alice in Wonderland (TV Movie, 1985)
The one thing people don’t tell you about getting older is that the flotsam of your childhood dreams and nightmares floats closer and closer to the surface. As a child, Carol Channing’s smile as the White Queen in Alice in Wonderland slid inside me like a splinter and made its home.
The White Queen first appears to Alice in the enchanted forest. Styled in a white dress that shapes her body into a chess piece, she swirls around the girl like a cloud. In a velvety rasp, she confesses to Alice that she’s a seer, of sorts; she knows she’s going to prick her finger on her own brooch soon. She begins to scream in anticipation and fumbles with the clasp; sure enough, a droplet of blood beads on her white glove. She assures Alice that she’s feeling “beeeeetter,” and yet something very weird is happening. Her face splits into a wide, toothy grin. Her eyes glaze. “Beeeeeeetter,” she bleats. Before our eyes, the Queen has become a sheep.
Channing’s wild leer—the committed wrongness of it, in a movie where reality is already upended—became an obsession for me. My mom knew this too. For many nights after we first watched the Alice movie, she tucked me into bed and retreated to the door. Her lips pulled back and she bared her teeth: “My dauuuuughter,” she bleated. I shrieked until she ran back to tickle me to sleep. It was the first of many times in my life where a thrill of terror felt interchangeable with safety and even an expression of love.
2. The Mask (1994)
The Mask may have been marketed as a New-Jack-Swing-revivalist comedy for children, but its roots run deep in horror. It’s based on a Dark Horse comic book series where the Mask character is a misogynistic, bloodthirsty proto-incel who kills anyone who inconveniences his mild-mannered alter ego, Stanley Ipkiss. The feature film was initially conceived in the same vein; instead, we got Cuban Pete.
Watching The Mask now, you can feel the echoes of its grim DNA. Take the scene where the Mask meets his would-be paramour Tina Carlyle (Cameron Diaz) alone in a city park late at night. Having ditched his yellow zoot suit for a French beret, the Mask leers at Diaz and unleashes a stream of horny double entendres: “I will spread your pâté, I will reveal my croissant, hon hon hon”. When she knees him in the groin and attempts to flee, he races ahead to block her path, pushing her down to a bench, his grinning maw inches from hers. Remember that the Mask is just an amplified version of Stanley—both of them want to do this to women all the time.
As a child, I howled at this. Now my mind casts back to a fragmented night in college when a man kept me from leaving his dorm room. There are his fingers with guitar calluses pressing my arms into the wall; there are the paper cups of Jack Daniels spilling on the bedside table; there is his huge smile, booze breath—his attempt to neutralize things, he was just joking. I dig my nails into his fingers and he lets me go. As I stride down the hall, I feel the heat of his grin pressing against my back.
3. Jennifer’s Body (2009)
There are several moments in Jennifer’s Body where the cheerleader-turned-man-eating succubus Jen Check (Megan Fox) smiles at her best friend Needy Lesnicki (Amanda Seyfried). Her first smile is sultry, coaxing Needy out to a bar and away from her dutiful boyfriend. Later, the bar catches fire and Jen is violently attacked and left for dead by the bland Killers-lite band Low Shoulder after a botched devil’s sacrifice. She survives, and she feeds.
Later, she sneaks up on Needy in a moonlit kitchen and greets her with a slow, feral grin clotted with blood and black sludge. Needy’s reaction mirrors the audience’s at this point; Jen’s smile is creepy and also maddeningly hot. She looks like a cat dropping a dead mouse at its owner’s feet. Look at what I have done, she is saying to Needy. Do you love me? Are you proud? Needy is appalled and captivated, her longing for Jen beginning to thrum as desperately as her fear.
Jennifer’s Body does a great job of honouring the confounding mixture of envy, pain, and desire that binds teen girls together. For Jen and Needy, their bond is strengthened by a shared instinct for survival in a world populated by men who are either predatory or dullards. By the end of the film, this relationship has been battered to shreds, and yet it remains animated by both a vengeful fury and an undying love.
There is a meme out there that goes like: did you ever have an intense homoerotic years-long friendship in your early to mid-teens that culminated in a dramatic friend breakup or are you straight? I had a girl who I loved in high school and who frightened me deeply. Drunk on stolen wine in the suburbs, we borrowed her brother’s tuques and stole away to the park at 2am in minus 2 weather. I goofed around on the monkey bars and hung upside down until she screamed with laughter. I fell to the sand and she ran and kissed me with her warm lips; both laughing, hands carelessly creeping under our jackets, our teeth clacking together. Everything else in our friendship has faded to nothing except this.
4. Inland Empire (2006)
There’s a reason we’re all haunted by the Lynchian smile. The twisted grins of BOB and Laura Palmer and Bobby Peru and the monster behind the dumpster in Mulholland Drive; these are the moments in Lynch’s films that stay with me and scramble my brain for weeks afterwards. Much like Carol Channing’s White Queen, the fixed smiles of Lynch’s characters serve to upend the audience, propelling us into realms of the surreal and nightmarish, a deeply uncomfortable hallucinatory state where everything is hilarious and hideously awful all at once.
As the fading actress Nikki Grace in Inland Empire, Laura Dern embodies the slippery mutability of a Lynchian protagonist—is she a doting wife, a sex worker, a battered jailbird? Is she “Susan”, the cliched, drawling siren in a cursed film? Is she all of this or is she nothing?
In the film’s penultimate moment, Dern creeps out of the darkness of a forest and runs along the border of the shot. She’s dressed in black and her face and legs are white as bone, overexposed in the spotlight Lynch shines on her. Her mouth is painted clown red. Before we realize what is happening, she’s running headlong at the camera, her face contorted in a grimacing laugh or a scream. In a movie that is confounding, infuriating, deeply sad and ugly, Dern’s twisted expression feels like the only rational response to the psychic and physical thrashing she’s enduring along with the viewer, and it communicates her character’s agony at being unknown. Like Twin Peak’s BOB, Nikki/Susan knows the best way to burn into the audience’s memory is to rush headlong at the camera, eyes and jaws fixed, daring us to look away.
Dern’s unravelling grin also feels like an expression of resilience, pulled taut. As we fumble through an increasingly hostile world, one that seeks to cook us to death, drown us, and strip us of our rights and dignity, it may feel better, even if just for a moment, to grimace maniacally in the face of it all rather than capitulate to despair. Faced with the utter wrongness of everything, we rush forward from the darkness of the enchanted forest, stretch our lips and bare our teeth. We smile back.
Horror finds its emblem in the hideous smile. In movies, a character’s slow, toothy grin often means they are about to expose their truest selves. It signifies a move into a darker realm—a space that is unhinged, monstrous, and senseless. We’re even starting to make movies that focus entirely on evil smiles to send ourselves deeper into paroxysms of terror. Here are four smiles that have haunted me, onscreen and off.
1. Alice in Wonderland (TV Movie, 1985)
The one thing people don’t tell you about getting older is that the flotsam of your childhood dreams and nightmares floats closer and closer to the surface. As a child, Carol Channing’s smile as the White Queen in Alice in Wonderland slid inside me like a splinter and made its home.
The White Queen first appears to Alice in the enchanted forest. Styled in a white dress that shapes her body into a chess piece, she swirls around the girl like a cloud. In a velvety rasp, she confesses to Alice that she’s a seer, of sorts; she knows she’s going to prick her finger on her own brooch soon. She begins to scream in anticipation and fumbles with the clasp; sure enough, a droplet of blood beads on her white glove. She assures Alice that she’s feeling “beeeeetter,” and yet something very weird is happening. Her face splits into a wide, toothy grin. Her eyes glaze. “Beeeeeeetter,” she bleats. Before our eyes, the Queen has become a sheep.
Channing’s wild leer—the committed wrongness of it, in a movie where reality is already upended—became an obsession for me. My mom knew this too. For many nights after we first watched the Alice movie, she tucked me into bed and retreated to the door. Her lips pulled back and she bared her teeth: “My dauuuuughter,” she bleated. I shrieked until she ran back to tickle me to sleep. It was the first of many times in my life where a thrill of terror felt interchangeable with safety and even an expression of love.
2. The Mask (1994)
The Mask may have been marketed as a New-Jack-Swing-revivalist comedy for children, but its roots run deep in horror. It’s based on a Dark Horse comic book series where the Mask character is a misogynistic, bloodthirsty proto-incel who kills anyone who inconveniences his mild-mannered alter ego, Stanley Ipkiss. The feature film was initially conceived in the same vein; instead, we got Cuban Pete.
Watching The Mask now, you can feel the echoes of its grim DNA. Take the scene where the Mask meets his would-be paramour Tina Carlyle (Cameron Diaz) alone in a city park late at night. Having ditched his yellow zoot suit for a French beret, the Mask leers at Diaz and unleashes a stream of horny double entendres: “I will spread your pâté, I will reveal my croissant, hon hon hon”. When she knees him in the groin and attempts to flee, he races ahead to block her path, pushing her down to a bench, his grinning maw inches from hers. Remember that the Mask is just an amplified version of Stanley—both of them want to do this to women all the time.
As a child, I howled at this. Now my mind casts back to a fragmented night in college when a man kept me from leaving his dorm room. There are his fingers with guitar calluses pressing my arms into the wall; there are the paper cups of Jack Daniels spilling on the bedside table; there is his huge smile, booze breath—his attempt to neutralize things, he was just joking. I dig my nails into his fingers and he lets me go. As I stride down the hall, I feel the heat of his grin pressing against my back.
3. Jennifer’s Body (2009)
There are several moments in Jennifer’s Body where the cheerleader-turned-man-eating succubus Jen Check (Megan Fox) smiles at her best friend Needy Lesnicki (Amanda Seyfried). Her first smile is sultry, coaxing Needy out to a bar and away from her dutiful boyfriend. Later, the bar catches fire and Jen is violently attacked and left for dead by the bland Killers-lite band Low Shoulder after a botched devil’s sacrifice. She survives, and she feeds.
Later, she sneaks up on Needy in a moonlit kitchen and greets her with a slow, feral grin clotted with blood and black sludge. Needy’s reaction mirrors the audience’s at this point; Jen’s smile is creepy and also maddeningly hot. She looks like a cat dropping a dead mouse at its owner’s feet. Look at what I have done, she is saying to Needy. Do you love me? Are you proud? Needy is appalled and captivated, her longing for Jen beginning to thrum as desperately as her fear.
Jennifer’s Body does a great job of honouring the confounding mixture of envy, pain, and desire that binds teen girls together. For Jen and Needy, their bond is strengthened by a shared instinct for survival in a world populated by men who are either predatory or dullards. By the end of the film, this relationship has been battered to shreds, and yet it remains animated by both a vengeful fury and an undying love.
There is a meme out there that goes like: did you ever have an intense homoerotic years-long friendship in your early to mid-teens that culminated in a dramatic friend breakup or are you straight? I had a girl who I loved in high school and who frightened me deeply. Drunk on stolen wine in the suburbs, we borrowed her brother’s tuques and stole away to the park at 2am in minus 2 weather. I goofed around on the monkey bars and hung upside down until she screamed with laughter. I fell to the sand and she ran and kissed me with her warm lips; both laughing, hands carelessly creeping under our jackets, our teeth clacking together. Everything else in our friendship has faded to nothing except this.
4. Inland Empire (2006)
There’s a reason we’re all haunted by the Lynchian smile. The twisted grins of BOB and Laura Palmer and Bobby Peru and the monster behind the dumpster in Mulholland Drive; these are the moments in Lynch’s films that stay with me and scramble my brain for weeks afterwards. Much like Carol Channing’s White Queen, the fixed smiles of Lynch’s characters serve to upend the audience, propelling us into realms of the surreal and nightmarish, a deeply uncomfortable hallucinatory state where everything is hilarious and hideously awful all at once.
As the fading actress Nikki Grace in Inland Empire, Laura Dern embodies the slippery mutability of a Lynchian protagonist—is she a doting wife, a sex worker, a battered jailbird? Is she “Susan”, the cliched, drawling siren in a cursed film? Is she all of this or is she nothing?
In the film’s penultimate moment, Dern creeps out of the darkness of a forest and runs along the border of the shot. She’s dressed in black and her face and legs are white as bone, overexposed in the spotlight Lynch shines on her. Her mouth is painted clown red. Before we realize what is happening, she’s running headlong at the camera, her face contorted in a grimacing laugh or a scream. In a movie that is confounding, infuriating, deeply sad and ugly, Dern’s twisted expression feels like the only rational response to the psychic and physical thrashing she’s enduring along with the viewer, and it communicates her character’s agony at being unknown. Like Twin Peak’s BOB, Nikki/Susan knows the best way to burn into the audience’s memory is to rush headlong at the camera, eyes and jaws fixed, daring us to look away.
Dern’s unravelling grin also feels like an expression of resilience, pulled taut. As we fumble through an increasingly hostile world, one that seeks to cook us to death, drown us, and strip us of our rights and dignity, it may feel better, even if just for a moment, to grimace maniacally in the face of it all rather than capitulate to despair. Faced with the utter wrongness of everything, we rush forward from the darkness of the enchanted forest, stretch our lips and bare our teeth. We smile back.