Tragic pop stars Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston inspired the horrific portrayal of celebrity suffering in “Smile 2”

Director Parker Finn told EW that he also consulted the media about Britney Spears while crafting his horror sequel, which examines public complicity in the downfall of stars.

For as long as Hollywood has been in the business of producing entertainment, it has also produced a series of meta-commentaries that examined how the public’s toxic obsession can overshadow even the industry’s brightest stars. From fictional tales like Sunset Avenue, Birdmanand this year The substance to reality-based documentaries about ill-fated icons like Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston, investigating the why all of this has long functioned as a self-reflective exercise on screen. And yet, you’ve never seen a topical probe like Smile 2which plunges a horrible, sharp blade straight into the flesh of its own audience – and scares them to no end, too.

“I wanted to raise the question, did we do this to Skye? Smile 2did we do this to her?” explains director Parker Finn to Weekly entertainment from star Naomi Scott, Skye Riley, a pop music megastar fighting demons (literal evil entities and dark secrets lurking in her past) while the audience stands by and watches with their iPhones on and recording.

For answers, there’s no better place to look than the recent past. Setting the stage for his ultra-famous theme, Finn says he wanted to take the story in a completely unexpected direction for the sequel. The first film starred Sosie Bacon as a therapist caught up in a sinister curse, which causes a mysterious entity to inhabit its victims, torturing them until they die by suicide. Naturally, whoever witnesses the suicide becomes the entity’s next host.

Although he admits he never expected to continue his work intentionally “self-reliant” Smile In addition to the 2022 original (a huge hit with $217 million in global ticket sales on a minuscule $17 million budget), once he heard the studio was interested in expanding the story, he pushed his curiosity to the limit.

“When I started thinking about ideas, from the beginning, any of the ideas that started coming up in the first month that I thought about it, I threw them away. obvious; It’s highly anticipated,” he recalls. “I wanted to push for something where people would say, ‘I can’t believe this is where Smile he was.'”

Finn found inspiration in his intense research into tragic tales of pop stars, especially members of the “27 Club”, a group of notable figures who died at age 27, including Winehouse, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain and others.

“Certainly Amy Winehouse was on my mind. Britney Spears, of course. We did a little nod in the film; they mention that Skye is 27, which felt appropriate for the character,” Finn says of Whinehouse, whose highly publicized Problems with substance abuse and authoritarian associates preceded her untimely death in 2011. “Certainly, these tragic stories, I was watching everything I could: documentaries, interviews, essays, articles, even Whitney Houston; there were a lot of women I was looking at who be destroyed by this process, I didn’t want to point to anyone in particular; I just wanted to take that, collect and filter this unique character.”

Skye navigates toward sobriety and a planned comeback tour, a year after she was seriously injured in a car accident that killed her actor husband (played by Ray Nicholson). Her bigger problems, however, stem from her own actions (she’s an emotional, self-destructive wreck) as well as the increasing pressure to maintain her composure under the spotlight from her momager, played by an ace Rosemarie DeWitt with subtle, devilish intensity. And then there are the fans – the intrusive, obsessive, overbearing fans, whose grasping hands send a shiver down Skye’s spine, but whose vital dollars fuel her mother’s relentless greed.

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Smile 2 comes to a jaw-dropping conclusion that brings together all those ugly parts plaguing Skye’s life for the whole world to see and serves as the “exploration of the downfall of this pop star who is unable to overcome the things that have been forced upon her,” Finn says. But while all eyes may be on Skye, Finn’s film doesn’t let us off the hook – both for Skye’s sake and for the aforementioned celebrities, whose destinies played out on stages both real and metaphorical.

As great as the film’s production (and its ending) is, Finn sees a simple question at its center: “‘Are we complicit in this?'”

Smile 2 It’s in theaters Friday.

Read the original article in Entertainment Weekly.