Smile 2 star breaks silence on the bleakest ending of 2024

Smile 2 doesn’t end with triumph: it’s a nightmarish, shrieking surrender to a higher power with thousands of witnesses. It’s terrifyingly grisly, and we spoke to Naomi Scott about what it means.

The Mist, Drag Me to Hell, The Wicker Man, Eden Lake, and The Descent; these are five of the best horror movies of all time, and they all have one thing in common: they have some of the most harrowing endings not just in their genre, but all of cinema.

Smile 2’s ending belongs in that echelon, a sobering subset of horror that doesn’t reward you for your fear or relieve you of your tension – it just twists the knife before you stumble into the cold sight of night, leaving you to contend with the memory of what you’ve just seen until it fades (and, inevitably, creeps up on you like a shiver).

Especially because it seems like Skye Riley, the sequel’s embattled popstar, might actually win. She flees the hospital after the entity makes her murder her mom and finds Morris, her mysterious expert on the entity, who has a brilliant but scary idea: if he kills her, the entity will cease to exist as it’ll no longer have a purpose.

It’s okay, though, because he’ll revive her after a few minutes, just enough time to get rid of the monster.

Is everyone cursed at the end of Smile 2?

Paramount Pictures

Here’s a question, though. What if Morris wasn’t real? What if he was just the entity all along, preying on Skye? Speaking to Dexerto, Scott said she didn’t have any theories about Morris. “It’s so interesting when people ask me objective questions in terms of the movie itself. It’s hard for me to see it just purely as someone consuming the story,” she said.

“He’s real to Skye, that’s all that matters to me.”

Regardless, it doesn’t work. Skye tries to use Morris’ serum to inject herself and stop the monster as it tries to attack her, but it quickly becomes clear the whole thing has been a hallucination. She wakes up in Madison Square Garden, lucid enough to see that she didn’t murder her mother, before the entity rips open her mouth and crawls inside.

Skye stands up with a wide-eyed, possessed grin and takes her own life in front of everyone in the arena (more specifically, she plunges her mic into her eye).

Paramount Pictures

Does that mean the whole crowd is cursed, doomed to off themselves in an array of grotesque ways? “I mean, technically, yes… I guess the crowd, in terms of the rules of the entity itself, they would have the Smile Curse,” she said.

Scott definitely has her “own questions and thoughts” about the film’s ending, but as for what could happen in Smile 3, that’s “way above [her] pay grade.”

“I just feel like my ideas wouldn’t be as good as other people’s. Do you know what I mean? I think I would just like to be surprised… and I think that it has to be something completely fresh, and I do feel like it sets it up to be something completely different and something that we haven’t seen.

“But again, it’s not my creative baby to bring forth into the world. So I think I’ll leave that to whoever takes on the baton.”

Parker Finn, the director of both Smile movies, said there are “a lot of really exciting places that [the series] could go from here.”

“I love this idea that potential future iterations of Smile could go bigger and more off the rails and even crazier and more unhinged,” he told The Hollywood Reporter.

“But, for me, what’s important about Smile is that there is a real human, character-driven, intimate nature to the storytelling. So even if the world gets much larger, I’d want to make sure that the stories we’re telling inside of it are still quite impactful on a human level.”

Read more about why Smile 2 has the scariest horror movie ending this year, how one of its stars has topped our list of ‘Scream Kings’, and the scariest horror film of 2024, according to psychologists.

You can also check out our full Terror-Tober schedule for more horror content.