Director Parker Finn offers up a brand new unforgettable horror movie urban legend in his feature directorial debut, Smile.

The movie stars Sosie Bacon as Dr. Rose Cotter. She works in an emergency psychiatric unit and one day, a new patient comes in. That patient begs Rose to believe her when she explains that she’s being followed by a smiling being threatening to kill her. Rose doesn’t and, ultimately, that patient takes her own life right in front of her. Soon after, Rose starts having visions of a smile entity herself.

It’s that simple; witness someone who’s infected take their own life, and you wind up with the curse yourself. But, if you love yourself some detailed mythology and sets of rules like yours truly, this is the interview for you because Finn offered up a few additional details on how the smile curse works beyond what we see in the movie.

We kicked off our chat by going back to the beginning. Why a smile and did Finn ever consider any other physical representation of evil? Here’s what he said:

“The smile definitely hooked me from the very beginning. I love that inherent contradiction that exists within it. Smiles are obviously designed to be a friendly gesture, something warm, it's what we associate with them, but in reality, I think we also use smiles every day to mask what we're really feeling, and that was definitely something that was a motif that was running through the film, and I wanted to see if I could take that and turn it on [its] head and let the evil in the film wear a smile as a mask to create the promise of a threat or something dangerous, something menacing and see if audiences might get freaked out by that.”

Finn and his team found great success in that pursuit for a number of reasons, a big one being the type of smile they landed on. How exactly did they settle on what we see in the final film? Finn explained:

“It all started while I was writing the script. I was trying different things in the mirror myself, trying to figure out what might work. And then when we're on set, certainly people came in very prepared with what they had been working on, and it was just about kind of standing a few feet away from each other and smiling back and forth until we can dial it in and get it just right. I'm really, really pleased with it, and it was also really important to me that those were practical performance based smiles because I think that adds a level of uncanniness to them.”

Curious about what types of smiles Finn was trying out in the mirror? Me too! Here’s what he said when asked for the two most polar opposite forms of smiles he tested out for the film:

“For me, I wanted something that felt frozen and kind of predatory, like an animal in an interesting way, and to remove any sense of humanity and lifelessness from it. There was the other end of the spectrum that was sort of almost like too bizarre that felt kind of outlandish and goofy. It was about finding the right place in the middle.”

For the sake of this article, I’ve embraced the name “the smile curse,” but I also had to ask Finn if he had ever formally named his evil entity. Here's what he said:

“We had some nicknames during production, but for me, for the purposes of the story, it was always really important that we don't define it, we don't stick it in any kind of box because I think that the unknown is always much scarier than when you pull the veil off of it. And I also love the ambiguity that the film is living in. There’s something really interesting about taking something so internal and psychological, and then something so external and bombastic and kind of braiding them together until they're kind of indistinguishable. And I'm hoping that that will go the extra distance to get under audiences’ skins.”

[Editor's note: The following contains spoilers for Smile.]The smile curse operates in a fairly consistent fashion throughout the film. One infected person is consumed, the entity forces them to take their own life and then the witness becomes cursed. But, what if multiple people witness that death? Could more than one witness carry on the smile curse? Here’s what Finn said about that:

“That's a really fantastic question, and it’s definitely one we were talking about and discussing. I think that the evil in the film is incredibly specific and I think as we start to peel back the layers and learn more of what its intentions are and how it works, I like to think that even by the end of the film, it might still have more surprises in store for us.”

Finn also offered a little insight into how they figured out which smiling being an infected individual sees and when:

“I think the idea was to find ways to make it really surprising and subverting expectations about how and when the smile was going to appear, and to not let it just be one thing, to constantly be evolving and changing. When you realize that it can be a total stranger or it can be somebody that you know or somebody who shouldn't even be able to be in the room with you, it really sort of forces the audience to really put their guards up and not trust anything in the film, which was the hope.”

And finally, the biggest question of the bunch; is the smile curse beatable, or is the fight to stop it hopeless?

“It's a good question. I like to think that this thing, it sort of enjoys toying with its victims and being as elusive and slippery as possible. I like to think there probably is a way to beat it, but I don't know. I mean, it's also quite inescapable.”

Looking for more from Finn on the making of Smile? You can catch our full chat in the video interview at the top of this article!

Smile is now playing in theaters nationwide.