Earlier this year, Smile introduced the world to a curse that seems unbeatable; a demon
that passes on through trauma and can create hallucinations that are so real, you begin
to question literally everything around you.
So what do you do when your senses start to be used as weapons against you?
You turn to this episode, that's what.
I have a solution.
Here's how you beat the unbeatable demon of Smile.
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Today we're talking about Smile, the 2022 horror film that was an absolutely massive hit.
Critics loved it, audiences loved it, and the accountants really loved it, you know,
because it made $216 million off a $17 million budget.
Not too shabby.
One reason for that massive success, the curse that drives the action forward is unbeatable.
You see, the story follows Dr. Rose Cotter, a psychiatrist who was traumatized after witnessing
one of her patients slice off her face while wearing a big old, creepy grin.
That alone would be horrible enough, but things get way worse once Rose starts seeing people
with that same creepy smile all around her.
Eventually she realized that she's been cursed by this evil entity that isn't really given
a name in the movies.
It's not even clear what this thing's supposed to be.
Ghost?
Monster?
Demon?
It's unclear. So I'm just going to keep it as, like, curse slash demon for now.
Regardless, the curse starts giving Rose vivid and terrifying hallucinations, which
causes her to push away from all her loved ones.
Eventually she learns that the curse is passing along through trauma, and that the only way
to get rid of it is to pass it along by causing someone else trauma.
Otherwise, you're just stuck waiting for it to eventually claim your life.
A ticking clock that the movie tells us maxes out at around four days.
It's a terrifying premise that makes for a fantastic film.
But you all know me at this point, loyal theorists, I’m not just going to sit back and let the
jump scares wash over me as I munch my popcorn and drink out of my gallon sized jug of Diet Coke.
While I was in the theater my theorist cogs started to turn wondering what Rose or anyone
infected with this thing could do to beat it.
Surely there's got to be a strategy here that we can work out to either break the Smile
demon's curse, or just play into its rules in a way that makes everyone happy in the end.
So I looked online to see if anyone had one.
And no, actually.
Not really.
No one came up with anything.
Or, let me correct myself,
no one came up with anything that kept us alive and also didn't kill a bunch of other people.
So today I wanted to see if we could possibly beat this unbeatable challenge.
Is it possible to create a strategy that will put a smile on everyone's face?
And not in the creepy, cursed way.
Strap in, friends.
We're about to find out.
Let's start with the most suggested method and the one that we actually see Rose try
in the movie: Complete Isolation.
You can't pass on the demon through trauma if there's no one to pass it on to.
Right?
Well, it might work in theory.
In Horror Movie Theory…rwrw.
Way too many syllables.
But in practice.
No, no, no, not so much.
Isolating yourself completely is something that's way easier said than done.
In the movie we watch as Rose tries to isolate herself in her mother's abandoned house.
While there she confronts the childhood trauma that's haunted her throughout her entire life.
She processes it and she basically defeats the demon.
Isolation for the win, am I right?
Wrong.
What at first seemed like a victory for Rose was actually just an incredibly elaborate hallucination.
Rose never beat the Smile demon.
In fact, she lured the demon's next victim to this isolated area, and then passed it
along to him.
But okay, what if Rose were stronger or she was able to see through the hallucinations?
Could it have worked in that case?
Well, no again.
Assuming you're not a billionaire, you're going to need to go to work to pay for stuff.
And while you could work from home, you got to have something to eat, which means getting
everything delivered to your door, a.k.a.
delivery people.
Or it means going to the grocery store, a.k.a.
being surrounded by some of the most aggressive people on the planet.
Okay, so I suppose you could do it if you were able to avoid the hallucinations and
you worked from home and had everything delivered by a remote drone.
But even then, even if those huge conditions were all in place, there's still a massive
problem with this solution.
This plan has to be permanent.
There would be no breaks to your isolation.
Every day for the rest of your life would be spent alone without anyone or anything
to talk to other than the demon tormenting you.
And even without the supernatural element here, social isolation to this degree would
be really bad for your brain.
Studies have shown that socially isolated people are more likely to suffer cognitive
decline, memory loss, dementia.
Impaired concentration, depression, anxiety.
All in all, the isolation strategy requires an insane number of difficult qualifiers to
work perfectly and would still ultimately lead you to a hard life full of mental anguish
forever alone.
In the end, I wouldn't necessarily classify that as beating the Smile curse.
So let's keep looking, shall we?
One other solution I saw proposed by the channel Wolfman's Got Nards.
Incredible channel name, by the way, was based on the idea of controlling who you pass your
trauma onto.
Remember, there's more than one way to pass on the Smile demon to the next victim.
If you brutally kill someone in front of another person, the trauma of seeing that passes the
curse on to the witness.
This is what the character Robert Talley did in the movie to escape the Smile demon himself.
And it worked.
The demon passed on and never came back.
There's just one teeny, tiny, itsy bitsy problem with that.
Robert Talley is now in prison.
Also, he killed someone.
That's not a great look.
But, you know, for now, we're just going to focus on the prison part.
What the Wolfman’s Nards suggested was exploiting this loophole in a systematic way; taking
you, your curse and two of your closest, most expendable friends to a remote location.
Step one: Brutally off the first of your two travel mates.
That should pass the curse on to your second friend, who's probably like, “Woah, this
was not the dessert party that I was expecting.”
Which leads us to step number two: Bump that one off as well.
The curse dies with him and so does the only witness to your crime.
I got to say, not only does the Wolfman have Nards, he's also got himself a pretty solid
solution here.
Assuming you're thorough in cleaning up and leaving no trace of your crime, you should
be in the clear.
And the demon is defeated once and for all.
You survived.
You don't have to live a life in isolation and you're not in prison.
Technically, you've completed the assignment.
There's just, you know, two little problems there: The dead bodies that you left in your wake.
Sure, you found a solution, but was it the best solution?
It's kind of like beating a video game without getting all the achievements.
Is there a true ending here?
Is there a way to do a pacifist run?
Survive, stay out of prison and kill zero people?
We gotta at least try, right?
Okay, so what else do we know about this curse?
Well, the Smile demon doesn't seem to be able to manifest itself in any physical way.
Any time we see it manipulate something in the real world, it's quickly revealed to be
a hallucination happening inside the mind of the current victim.
For example, here: while taking the form of Rose's sister, Holly, it knocks on the car
window, but it isn't actually there.
Or here when it makes Rose believe that she's gotten a call from her home security company.
But the phone disappears from her hand when a real call comes through.
At first, the solution here seems like it should be to set up totems, kind of like in
Inception; things that can help you realize what is and isn't real.
In that movie, the main character used a spinning top to determine if he was in a dream or not.
So could we potentially set up something like this to help with Rose?
Well, no, probably not.
Like I just said, we see that the Smile demon’s able to completely hijack someone's senses
to create incredibly realistic fantasies.
It's even able to completely change Rose's perception of the gift that she's preparing
for her nephew.
Though she thinks she's wrapping up a toy train.
It's actually a dead cat.
If the Smile demon is able to make her think her bloody and furry cat is a toy train, I
kinda doubt that there would be any way to find an item, sound or visual cue that would
ground Rose back to reality.
Rose's senses are always going to betray her.
The hallucinations are just too strong.
So what if we could just remove the hallucinations?
That then would largely remove the curse as power, as its only mode of attack is by mentally
breaking you down.
Like I said before, it doesn't have physical power.
It only has mental power.
There's just one problem.
Hallucinations are incredibly complex and still poorly understood by science.
The current working theory is that they're based on the brain failing to properly select
which stimuli to focus on and which to ignore.
For instance, an auditory hallucination, which are the most common types.
They might be caused by the brain doing a bit of self-talk, but then accidentally thinking
that those words were said aloud.
And what makes hallucinations especially tricky is that they're spread out across the brain.
Because they're actively tricking your senses, they activate all over the brain depending
on what type of hallucination you're talking about.
Auditory hallucinations are associated with activation of the middle and superior temporal
cortex; areas involved in processing speech.
Somatic hallucinations, basically phantom sensations inside your body.
Those are associated with the parts of the brain that are usually processing the sense
of touch.
So really, to fight the curse’s hold over your brain, you're going to have to fight
on the battleground of your brain and you're going to be fighting multiple fronts all at
the same time.
Making things even more complicated are the neurotransmitters involved.
At this point I'm sure you know that neurotransmitters are the chemical messengers in the brain that
allow nerve impulses to travel between cells.
Right?
The one you always hear about is dopamine, that's the reward chemical.
You do something good or rewarding and your brain suddenly gets flooded with dopamine
as a big old pat on the back, or pat on the cerebellum.
Hallucinations in your brain, though they're not as simple as that 1 to 1 relationship,
researchers believe that they involve no less than five separate neurotransmitters.
And it's not like the levels are too high or too low.
They require levels to neither be too high nor too low.
Striking a tricky balance.
So knowing all of this, is there a way to fight off the hallucinations in a healthy,
responsible way?
Yes.
If you look at Rose's symptoms after she gets infected by the curse, her condition is shockingly
similar to the psychotic disorder of schizophrenia, which is characterized first and foremost
by hallucinations.
In fact, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, for short:
persistent supernatural hallucinations, coupled with a significant disturbance in work performance
and interpersonal functioning, are some of the top criteria for diagnosing someone with
schizophrenia and Rose in the movie is basically speed running her way to that very diagnosis.
Fortunately, this means that help may be out there to treat the symptoms that she's experiencing.
Antipsychotic medications like Clozapine are specifically prescribed to relieve hallucinations
for people suffering from schizophrenia.
They can help calm down and clear confusion in a person with acute psychosis within a
matter of days or even hours, exactly the sort of treatment time that we need for a
fast acting hallucination based curse.
Now, that is a huge win.
We're getting the treatment we need to silence the mechanisms that the curse is using to
attack us.
But pharmacological solutions aren't going to be enough here.
Whether you're talking about schizophrenia or the smile curse.
You see, individuals suffering from extreme hallucinations tend to be less likely to take
their medication.
This happens for multiple reasons.
They may deny their illness.
They may have paranoia about the medication.
They might not think they need it anymore.
And the numbers here are telling, depending on the report you read, anywhere between 37%
and 74% of patients will stop their medication prematurely, and that is going to greatly
increase the risk of relapse.
So to avoid the risk, Rose would also need to be receiving some form of psychotherapy.
The incidence of schizophrenia relapse among patients receiving therapy compared to those
without is roughly 18% versus 60%.
That is a massive difference.
Now, to be fair, this isn't a full out solution.
The demon won't be destroyed in her brain or anything.
It'll just be silenced.
It won't have a means of attacking anymore.
It's a thing that will need to be maintained, lived with, rather than defeated, which honestly
is pretty darn fitting for the movie.
Sure, on paper Smile’s about a demonic curse that passes from person to person.
Fine.
But what it's really about is mental health and cycles of trauma.
I mean, the literal premise is putting on a fake smile when just under the surface you're
in mental anguish.
It doesn't get much more clear cut than that.
All of the other solutions that I talked about today; isolating yourself, trying to hurt
others, they're all unhealthy ways of dealing with mental illness.
But asking for help, taking medication, learning to live with mental illness and trauma.
They're the obvious answers that so many people sadly avoid because of how much stigma comes
attached to mental health issues.
And while Smile ends on a negative note, these real world situations don't have to.
Rose refused to acknowledge what was happening to her until it was much too late, and when
she did turn to others to help, no one around her believed her.
Let that be the lesson today.
Be open and willing to listen with an open mind when someone cries out for help and don't
always trust the smile on the outside.
We can be seriously hurting inside.
By helping each other, then and only then can we truly defeat the demon.
But hey, that's just a theory.
A FILM THEORY!
aaaaaaaaaaaaand cut.
And hey, speaking of beating horror movies, if you want the definitive way to defeat Michael
Myers from the Halloween franchise once and for all, that video is available on the left.
Or, if you'd prefer, learn how to defeat the nightmare demon Freddy Krueger via the video
on the right.
And if you like these sorts of episodes, make sure you click subscribe because we pop into
them every once in a while, they’re some of my faves.
See you all next week.