'Smile' Director Finn Parker Still Loves Jump Scares - And Doesn't Care If You Don't

It sometimes feels like horror is at a crossroads, as some fans seem intent on further dividing the genre into arbitrary categories. As arthouse horror films like "The Witch" and "Hereditary" have grown in popularity in recent years, fans and directors alike have tried to create new terms of discussion to differentiate the movies from intellectual and metaphorical horror of their supposedly lowbrow counterparts. The phrase "high horror" may catch the eye of serious fans (John Carpenter, for one, cares about the term no less), but in some circles it's become a category unto itself.

Ask a high horror enthusiast what their favorite metaphor is, and you'll often get the same answer: trauma. Who could forget the viral montage of Jamie Lee Curtis telling anyone who would listen that "Halloween Ends" was actually about traumatic experiences? That's not a bad analysis, but it's not uncommon to hear horror fans express a desire to see movies take themselves less seriously again.

Enter: "Smile". When it hit theaters in late September, Parker Finn's feature debut thrilled audiences and critics alike, topping the box office for two consecutive weekends, earning over $210 million (against a budget of $17 million). Many praised the fact that the film was unapologetically goofy, gory, and unafraid to delight audiences with tried-and-true genre tropes. This seemed like proof that there was still a market for horror movies that look like horror movies.

There is only one problem with this theory: "Smiling" is actually about trauma.

The film follows a doctor in a psychiatric hospital (Sosie Bacon) who watches a patient commit suicide and soon finds himself haunted by an invisible being who occupies the bodies of those around him. He keeps popping up in unexpected places, identifying himself with the scariest smile you've ever seen. Everyone who sees it ends up brutally killing themselves and passing the curse on whoever saw them. Without giving anything away, the characters realize that the key to safety could be found by recalling the traumatic experiences of their childhood.

In a new interview with IndieWire, Finn opened up about the success he's found splitting the difference between highbrow and lowbrow horror. From his point of view, metaphors are great, but they are only half the battle.

"I like horror as a metaphor," Finn told IndieWire. "But I think as a viewer, I get frustrated when it only goes so far as metaphor and doesn't commit to becoming something that's designed to scare you."

One of Finn's favorite methods of doing this is also through another one of horror's most polarizing tropes: jump scare. Many have dismissed jump scares as a lazy way to surprise audiences without actually scaring them off, and consider their absence in high horror films to be one of the subgenre's selling points. But Finn still loves it when a bad guy jumps out of a bush when you least expect it. For him, it's just another way to create viscerally chilling experiences that separate horror from other genres.

“Some people will never like a jump scare, but I like a good jump scare,” he said. "I wanted to infuse the film with some scary leaps that felt deserved and were designed in a way to keep an audience on their toes, kind of ramp up and change the way it scares you."

As Finn moves forward in his career as a horror director (he starts tossing around with sequel ideas, but hasn't come up with anything that would top "Smile"), he hopes to continue to exist in that middle ground between character-driven drama and what makes audiences scream.

"I wanted to make a movie that was really craft-driven, that created a pretty unique experience, that was also a character-driven story exploring the human condition," he said. "But was also going to have the audience jumping out of their seats and screaming a lot."

"Smile" is now streaming on Paramount+.

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