Wanna Know How I Got These Scars?
The demonic slasher smile in history, horror and the age of AI
In my absence I have been working on an extended project of original research, which I am now excited to start sharing with you. Over a series of articles I aim to explain my theories about why Western masking traditions and the Western face is so different from other cultures. Using horror masks as the focus, we will explore together the metaphysics of the European face and mask, skin and pain, horror, the sublime, identity and the self - starting with Greek serenity and culminating in digital AI horror. I truly believe that this is a new contribution to the way we think about the face and the function of horror as a genre. I sincerely hope you enjoy.
Why do we smile in photographs? The answer doesn’t appear to be a simple one. Smiling is one of the most basic expressions humans learn to perform, received in common wisdom as ‘smiling takes 17 muscles, while frowning takes 43’. Despite this apparent simplicity, which is debatable, smiling is an immensely ambiguous and subtle posture, connected to submission, aggression, mimesis, happiness, sickness, madness and countless other signals. The meaning of the smile has also changed over time, and varies from culture to culture. In Europe, to smile could at one point indicate drunkenness or revolutionary fervour, happiness or demonic possession. The precise shape of the eyebrows, the skin around the eyes and the position of the face all matter to the interpreted meaning, as does the social context, the cue, and how appropriate the smile or laugh is compared to its source.
Following on from my last piece about the ‘skin-as-mask’ within European history and metaphysics, the argument below examines one specific type of facial expression - the smile, the uncanny smile. I want to show how smiles appear through European art, what they meant, and how they map onto my core thesis (southern serene + northern grotesque →moralising Christianity → Renaissance/Enlightenment control → Gothic & Romantic break → modern internalisation, finally the digital and AI disembodiment). We’ll see how smiles reinforce the idea that skin is a mask, through an examination of demonic possession, madness/mental illness and the explosion of AI ‘horror smiles’. Finally this all comes together through today’s horror media, with a closer look at the 2022 film Smile, amongst others.
What Is the ‘Uncanny Smile’?
What are we doing when we smile? First we must contract the major muscle of the cheek, the zygomaticus major, plus a whole host of other muscles to create those tiny alterations for a toothy grin, a smirk, the raised eyebrows of placation or acknowledgement or the crucial Duchenne smile - to smile with the eyes, by crinkling the orbicularis oculi muscle. Then we must decide whether this smile will fade or carry on into a laugh, if we’re the only ones smiling, whether the smile is inappropriate or not. How long should we smile for? All these split second and usually instinctual decisions matter.
Chimpanzees and other apes can grin, which makes primatologists believe the root ability lies deep in the hominid past. Chimp smiles adorn birthday cards and graphic design, although for them smiling is a signal of fear, unhappiness, aggression. Those who work in chimpanzee sanctuaries know that human smiles appear to them as highly threatening. Bonobos as ever, are slightly different, but even they will cover their top teeth when extending a cheesy grin. So smiling could have meant something different for our ancient kin than it does for us? In general today smiling is seen as a cue of openness, happiness. For children it indicates spontaneous amusement or joy, for adults it is dependent: service workers might be expected to smile constantly, between colleagues and neighbours it says “I’m friendly”. It is a mimetic signal, a biological technology that attempts to extract an affect from another person, even to oneself! Smiling when you’re unhappy can help ‘fake it till you to make it’. If the smile appears genuine, then the other person is expected to respond in some way.
Herein lies the problem. The so-called Duchenne smile is widely recognised to be an honest signal, since a smile alone can be inauthentic, whereas a smile plus eye-creasing points to a real internal sensation. What is offered to the world on the outside (skin-as-mask) should match the deeper sentiment (interior self). Where a mismatch occurs, it can provoke other feelings in the observer. Layered over this is any juxtaposition between the smile and the context. Someone standing smiling at the scene of a car accident would instantly appear suspicious and wrong to us. An uncanny smile then is a facial expression that signals interior displacement - a sense that the face is no longer governed by the self that should inhabit it.
So what do we unconsciously look for?
Asymmetry or an over-extension (too wide, too still)
Context mistake (smiling at pain, death, violence, taboo)
Affect mismatch (the expression contradicts the situation)
Skin-level performance (the smile appears ‘unnatural’, uninhabited)
Since smiles are supposed to be a fleeting gesture, a fixed smile with an incorrect affect, especially during in an inappropriate moment, would be a major social cue for danger to everyone who sees it. Following our previous look at The Uncanny, unheimlich, this kind of smile perfectly encapsulates the definition of ‘familiar yet suddenly alien’. Dolls, toys, puppets, ventriloquist dummies, clowns and other simple mimetic devices for children can take on this alien quality. What were once cheerful static smiles suddenly become leering and mocking, discomforting or even horrifying. Worse are the same smiles but on a living being, combined with a fixed stare, which activates a primal sense that you are the target, and this malevolent smiler is in a state beyond normal social behaviour. They seem almost, possessed…?
Did Uncanny Smiles Exist Before Modern Psychology?
Classical South: Controlled Serenity and Dionysian Excess
If one searches for the earliest examples of smiles in art within antiquity, its unlikely that you’ll miss the famous ‘archaic smile’. This sculptural motif was possibly inherited from Egypt into early Greece, making its appearance in the kouroi/korai (see my previous writing on Greek art for more details). Most scholars today accept the interpretation that the smile, posture and first stirrings of naturalism in these figures represent inner serenity and calm radiance, kalokagathos or the noble ‘smiling ones’. Internal harmony reflecting the cosmos. Lacking a mismatch between the internal and external, the archaic smile doesn’t qualify as uncanny.
The inverse of serene is frenzied, and Dionysus would be all too happy to oblige. His followers, and the mytho-maddening world he inhabited, sanction divine intrusion, chaos, the ripping and tearing of limbs, uninhibited laughter, intoxication and ego death. Much as a sacrificial hart was pulled apart while alive, Dionysian death-and-resurrection is a shredding of the material body until just the bloody meat remains. Masks and carvings of Bromios, Bassareus, the great liberator Eleutherios, with their insane open mouths and amoral mirth, have a primeval fear quality to them. Yet they too lack the internal displacement needed for the psychological to dominate.
By contrast, there is a near-absence of smiling faces in the pre-Christian material culture of northern Europe. The carved wooden idols and stone heads appear mask-like and closed, they are expressive only within narrow symbolic limits. Smiling mouths do finally appear with Christianisation, and they do so almost exclusively on demons and fools. Perhaps we can say, in the North smiling is not a culturally meaningful expression within art until Christian teaching introduces the moral split between body and soul.
Christianity. Possession. Moralisation.
There has been extensive scholarship on illuminated manuscripts and medieval sculpture, yet its almost impossible to point to the precise emergence of the smile as a facial expression. The first curved mouths appear only sporadically and almost exclusively in Christian contexts. They belong to fantastic beasts, animals, demons, hybrids and marginal figures, marking the smile from its first appearance in the North as a sign of liminality and inversion - supporting my previous argument that masks in northern Europe function similarly. Let us look at two crucial Christian-era ideas.
The Smiling Demon
The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth. - Ecclesiastes 7:4
Christian Rome was a total revolution in human life, including the redefinition of laughter and smiling as suspicious, perhaps heretical. In Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose, the pagan virtues of comedy as described by Aristotle become the unspeakable corruption around which the monastic murder mystery hinges. Eco chose well, for early Christianity adopted a severe and uncompromising stance against humour, joking, laughing, smiling and entertaining follies of all kinds. To pick on just one, Clement of Alexandria (150-215 AD) was emphatic in his banishment of laughter and almost every expression of happiness from the face of man (a subtle twitch of the mouth reflecting inner harmony was graciously permitted):
For speech is the fruit of the mind. If, then, wags are to be ejected from our society, we ourselves must by no manner of means be allowed to stir up laughter … Smiling even requires to be made the subject of discipline. If it is at what is disgraceful, we ought to blush rather than smile
-Paedagogus, ChV, On Laughter
Alongside this prohibition was placed the equally grave problem of Satan’s appearance as an ‘angel of light’ (2 Corinthians 11:14-15). The Devil was first and foremost a Great Deceiver. Truth and falsehood could potentially be signified on one’s countenance. Depictions of Lucifer would take many centuries to arrive, and artists/evangelists found in pagan Greek imagery a perfect source of ammunition - gaping, leering dramatic masks; grinning Dionysus, Gorgons and leafy satyr-monsters from evil forested wellsprings. Monks and bishops realised after much experience that the northern barbarian tribes responded well to these symbols. Through remnants like the Carolingian Utrecht Psalter (c. 830 AD); the Insular Irish Book of Kells (c. 800 AD); stone carvings like the Northumbrian Easby Cross (c .800 AD) and Muiredach’s High Cross in Monasterboice (c. 900 AD), we see the twisting of older art forms to represent the perverted joy of demons and beasts.
Around the turn of the millennium, medieval societies in Europe relaxed their stance on humour and turned it against the devil instead. The grotesque, grinning gargoyle type artworks on churches and religious iconography had a dual purpose: to point to the false mask of Satan, arriving with comedy; to make Satan look ridiculous, in hopes he will slink off home after being roundly mocked. In line with the later medieval imagination which so prized inversion, humour and the ‘smiling face’ moved between the diabolical and the carnival-esque, coming to settle on the general position of morally suspicious. Fools, drunkards, jesters, demons, animals, hybrids, marginalia, momento mori, unnatural faces and whatever those things in Bosch paintings are called - the circulation of deviant faces had an interior/exterior divide by the time of the Renaissance. The ‘knowing smile’ had joined the ranks of the bulging-eyed demons, mocking grins and hollow skeletal mirth.
Skin as False Surface
For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness
-Romans 2:14-15
In 2023-2024 the actress Selena Gomez revealed her ‘new face’ to the world, provoking online speculation about what exact cosmetic procedures she had undertaken. Her leaner and more unnaturally still face was studied and analysed by fans and critics, some of whom outright described her as looking like Voldemort from Harry Potter or as succumbing to ‘demon face’ - meaning here an artificial and uncanny expression/posture which triggers in people the fear that her face is not under her own control.
Pauline theology took an ancient problem and modernised it. Demons had been tormenting the bodies and minds of people around the Levant since before the Bronze Age Collapse, but it was Paul and his acolytes who restructured the problem - evil was no longer just out there, now it could settle and take root within the heart. Centuries of intellectual struggle ensued, taken up by early giants such as Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian of Carthage: each trying to work through the problem of corporeality, demons, possession, evil, magic, taint and temptation. Whilst much of this theology is a moral inversion of Greco-Roman paganism (including the spectacular punishments the Romans will undergo in hell, to the glee of Christians in heaven - imagined as a spiritual Colosseum), it leaves a legacy of demonic possession as a dual spirit/body problem. Demons arrive as a ‘winged spirit’, but cause physical harm. They can be removed by spiritual means such as prayer and fasting.
As with so many things we imagine to be medieval, the real ‘science’ of demonology was an Early Modern innovation, spurred on by revolutions in science, jurisprudence and medicine. Curiously Protestant theology did not reject Catholic doctrine on demonic possession, but attempted to ground it in both older and more contemporary forms of knowledge. To quote one scholar:
There was virtually no change in the theological understanding of demonic possession from A.D. 100 to 1700 … The origins of the demons, their organizational structure, their names, and their behavior patterns had been received from the Babylonian, Judaic, and early Christian traditions … The medical doctors, in a growing area of study, attempted to use rational "scientific methods” in order to comprehend the irrational and evil. However, they too were tied to the long-respected theories of Hippocrates, Galen, and Avicenna.
-Theology and the body in demonic possession; France, England, and Puritan America, 1550-1700 (1992) J.S Cooper-Forst
The porous body can be diabolically inhabited, and betrays itself through manifestation, expulsion and interaction: speaking in unnatural tongues; seizures; teeth gnashing and grinding; vomiting bile, coals, black substances, snakes; muscle spasms; inhuman strength; rage, fury and screaming; uncontrollable laughing; refusal of communion, prayer, crucifix, priests; the ability to inflict demonic temptation or possession on others. Sometimes superhuman feats seem satanic but aren’t (St. Christina the Astonishing), other times the presence of a demon may go unnoticed for a long time (Jeanne des Anges). The latter was a constant cause for concern, the diabolus latens and spiritus occultus. Since the devil was the ultimate deceiver, the body could be forced to shelter evil for a long time, leaving observers to build up lists of possible symptoms and to devise means for extracting sincerity from beneath the insincere mask of skin.
Regimes of Smiling and Resistance
Leaving aside the devilish, foolish grins of the medieval period, what actually stands out when the artwork and literature is examined, is how marginal smiling was to their legacy. In fact, right up until the French Revolution smiling was simply not the done thing. Photos from before the mid-20th century seem grim, dour, miserable - noone is smiling! What we could call a contemporary ‘regime of cheerfulness’, or as Barbara Ehrenreich calls it in her book Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World, a ‘cult of toxic cheerfulness’ - this insistence on everyone being upbeat, positive, always smiling. The sociologist Arlie Hochschild spent weeks observing the training of new female flight attendants in the 1980’s, noting that:
The young trainee sitting next to me wrote on her notepad, “Important to smile. Don’t forget smile:’ … The pilot spoke of the smile as the flight attendant’s asset … As the PSA jingle says, “Our smiles are not just painted on.” Our flight attendants’ smiles, the company emphasizes, will be more human than the phony smiles you’re resigned to seeing on people who are paid to smile. There is a smile-like strip of paint on the nose of each PSA plane … For the flight attendant, the smiles are a part of her work, a part that requires her to coordinate self and feeling so that the work seems to be effortless.
-The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (1983) A.R. Hochschild
Whilst this compulsion to maintain a beaming, Barbie-like composure has probably dimmed in recent years, there is nevertheless an expectation in Anglo-American style service and office work that professional public and team comportment be friendly and hospitable. If any one facial expression could sum-up post-WWII culture, it would be the forced grin of advertising, customer service and non-industrial job relations.
However, the rise of the fully digital economy, the political rejection of smiling as performative labour (MeToo, ‘don’t tell me to smile’), and the rupture of COVID does seem to have cracked this facade. Gen-Z’s refusal to present an insincere affect at work, the so-called ‘Gen-Z Stare’, could reflect a generational awareness that they do not receive sufficient monetary and social remuneration to act happy in front of customers. Certainly the turn towards foregrounding burnout culture, mental health management and workplace identity conflict does not require cheerfulness, and could actively undermine it. This does not mean that facial performance has disappeared though. Facial performance is still absolutely critical to the newer forms of labour and interaction, think of video content, personal brands, reaction thumbnails - arenas where authenticity, spontaneity and sincerity are rewarded, and hyper-emotionality is rewarded further still. If the smile used to represent a social obligation, it is arguably now a knowingly fake gesture, the difference being perhaps that younger people make a stronger distinction between the online and the physical.
Horror Codification: Gothic to Digital
In-between the Renaissance and the late 20th century were the great ruptures of the Scientific/Enlightenment period; Romantic and Gothic backlash, 19th century Industrial and urbanisation revolutions and the psychological movements of modernism - all covered in previous articles.
Smiling only became a publicly circulating visage at the dawn of another Revolution, the French. In 1787 the painter Madame Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun hung a self-portrait in the Paris Salon, and it caused a scandal. Her slightly open mouth and visible teeth ran against all public ideas of decency. In his 2014 book, The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris, Colin Jones lays out how dentistry and class antagonisms produced a transient social moment wherein smiling and laughing were liberating, encouraged even. Although I cannot find any explicit research to support it, I would imagine this had the effect of encouraging ever more grim stoicism in England and elsewhere. As the Revolution progressed, the smile turned from optimism to horror, the cow-eyed sans-culottes quickly bearing an abyssal gaping maw in satirical art. Mouths became the subject of morbid fascination in and out of France: heads horribly mutilated and degraded during the Bastille storming; the notoriety of the murder and posthumous degradation of Marie-Thérèse Louise of Savoy; the scientific fascination with how long a person remained conscious after decapitation, with multiple stories of smiling heads as onlookers grabbed them up by the hair. French Gothic fiction - roman noir - contained unpleasant scenes of frightful smiles, such as found in Vathek (1782) and Dolbreuse (1783). The Marquis de Sade invented an archetypal legacy concerning the internal world of young, libertine aristocratic men, smiling sadistically as they inflicted cruelty and humiliation to their victims. Thus the smile became violence-coded, on the mob for their bloodthirstiness and on the individual man as an indicator of suspicious intentions.
As we’ve seen, smiling had also long been linked to carnival, misrule, foolery and drunkenness. The psychological turn of the 19th-20th centuries added madness and internal breakdown to this schema, often popularised through clowning, commedia dell’arte, Punch and Judy, Pulcinella and stories of lunatic asylums. Experiments on the rictus and Duchenne smiles, and on animals, combined with psychiatric work by Jean-Martin Charcot on hysteria, cemented in the public mind a connection between uninhibited laughter and madness. Probably the greatest modern character to come from this mix of ideas is DC Comic’s iconic Joker - Batman’s smiling rival. The Joker’s lineage belongs to 19th century psychiatry and to key fictional works such as Victor Hugo’s 1869 L'Homme qui rit, the 1928 film adaptation of which was a direct influence on DC’s writers. Conrad Veidt’s disturbing smile in the German expressionist drama is surely the godfather to all later horror smilers, such as Mr. Sardonicus, Pennywise (It), Art (Terrifier) and Twisty (American Horror Story). The outward clown makeup and ludicrous grins signifying total internal incoherence, a reduction to primitive drives and amusements, a degeneration of the rational human into something else. Early psychiatry would understand this logic immediately, they invented it.
Truly the explosion of smiles within the visual arts came down to cinema. Cinema alone had the power to represent the human face in an altogether different paradigm, with its unique blend of theatrical intimacy and camera-legerdemain, audiences could be drawn into an actor’s expression and emotion and feel entranced. Perhaps this explains why the smirk and the fixed-eye smile became an instant on-screen shorthand for something internal possessing a character. Both Norman and Marion in Psycho smile, for very different reasons, but to suggest a private psychological state. Demonic possession itself had been resigned to the margins of European culture since the 1700’s, lingering as a metaphor and memorial of more suspicious times. This exile came to a swift end in 1973 when Friedkin and Blatty’s The Exorcist single-handedly reintroduced the diabolical to the modern world. Regan’s evil smile under predatory, mocking eyes, appeared to terrify audiences, who also demanded more. Soon all-knowing smirks, grimaces, demonic laughter and cruel glee crossed the faces of Damien (The Omen), Alex (A Clockwork Orange), Jack (The Shining), Hannibal (Silence of the Lambs), Linda (The Evil Dead), Emily (The Exorcism of Emily Rose), BOB (Twin Peaks), Valak (The Nun), Peter (Hereditary) and more. Each time the smile revealing something happening beneath the skin, on the inside. Ever since horror appeared as a genre, for reasons explained in another article, the ambiguity between the supernatural and the psychological has been blurred. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is an enduring story because it speaks to the modern condition of internal alienation, likewise dramas of diabolical possession walk the line between mental illness, trauma and evil entities. The vocabulary of both psychiatric disorders and demonic infiltration share commonalities since they describe outward manifestations of a pathological interior. In both senses the skin is a mask, and horror recognises the older unnerving smile and plays with it, suspending momentarily the normal belief that the skin and its owner are the same being.
Digital & AI Faces: Possession without an Interior?
The world of animated smiles is far more spectacular than anything worn by a human actor. From the Cheshire Cat (Alice in Wonderland), the Coachman (Pinocchio) and Ursula (Little Mermaid), to the maniacal Happy Tree Friends and The Grinch, cartoon faces are infinitely plastic and malleable. Digital manipulation takes this further: the 1994 music video to Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun became memorable for its huge, unsettling smiles, in 1996 the musician Aphex Twin released the Richard D. James album - the cover bearing his own, very modern looking, Joker-face. This was a starting shot to a wave of early internet smiler-memes and creepypastas, including Trollface, The Biting Pear of Salamanca, Smile-Dog, Zalgo, Jeff the Killer and Suicidemouse.avi.
What many of these had in common was the use of the smile to signify corruption. Mascots and children’s characters in particular came in for a re-working, with Sonic.exe and ‘dark edits’ joining ‘lost episodes’ to create a digital folklore brimming with nostalgia-perversion and ruined-childhoods.
we argue that the digitally networked horror genre ‘creepypasta’ and its networked horror collapses the comfortable dichotomy of subjects acting upon objects by creating narrative spaces in which haunted objects encroach upon the lives of their victimized subjects. Particularly, creepypasta legends such as ‘Candle Cove’ and ‘BEN Drowned’ upset the subject/object relationships of the technological nostalgia that fuels a mutating genre of Internet discourse.
-Haunted objects, networked subjects: The nightmarish nostalgia of creepypasta (2018) Cooley & Milligan
This theme found extraordinary success with digital native horror franchise Five Nights at Freddy’s, followed rapidly by scores of similar mascot-themed jumpscare games. The hidden smile which could be deployed as the mascot caught the player presented them with a dichotomy - what exactly is smiling inside? Many franchise lores incorporated some kind of childhood trauma motif to explain how their animatronic bear/mouse/rabbit/train came to be so evil. Even when the enemy was a digital theme-park villain, the interior needed an explaination
Increasingly though, this need for interiority is breaking down, or certainly changing. Generative AI horror faces have become ubiquitous across any and all platforms which host visual content, many of them iterating towards a pure smile affect. The analog horror genre of lost, tainted and retro data formats may have been the final bridge towards this, such as the Mandela Catalogue which features a number of grotesquely smiling ‘alternates’, or the aptly named SMILE Tapes with their fungus-riddled sardonically grinning victims. Exactly what is going on inside these fictional beings is intentionally at a remove from the final audience, with almost Greek-drama type mask expressions to indicate emotion and intention.
AI faces are a true blank where they lack even a narrative framework to explain their presence. A simple prompt can produce an uncanny, unpleasant face staring out of the screen, their gaze fixed on the viewer rather than elsewhere in the scene. These have become incorporated into games, community stories or straightforward Halloween reels. Their unnatural affect, lack of human oversight and even bodies to connect to their smiles - means we now have empty or hollow faces populating the digital visual landscape. The history of Western faces and masks has rarely, if ever, accepted the animistic tradition of ensouled or haunted facial coverings. But this seems to be the logical endpoint of creating truly empty faces, that people will begin filling them out with something else. The story of Loab, maybe the first AI ‘cryptid’, and Crungus, show that we have become quick to assign liminality to generative AI. This is the idea that AI is summoning or creating a doorway for something else to enter our world, which is a very ‘northern grotesque’ concept. Without entering into the demon debate, we can just observe that many people seem to want AI to be a portal or diabolical technology. Perhaps our deep primate nervous system can never accept empty faces? Maybe vacancy or absence is far more frightening than supernatural entities?
The Smile as Virus, as Algorithm
Our final stop on this journey is the use of smiles as a potent viral technology. As we all know, smiling is a contextual social cue, and often the aim is to have another person mirror ourselves - or we mimic them. Smiling is ‘contagious’ as some say, to resist a grin when others around you are chuckling is to show that you don’t understand what’s happening, or you’re actively not joining in. Therefore its understandable that smiling as both expression and vector crops up again and again in horror and scare stories.
F. M. Crawford's 1911 gothic novel, The Dead Smile, uses a macabre smile which transfers from a corpse onto the living, the involuntary expression used as a symbol of degraded ancestral inheritance. In 2008, a 4chan creepypasta known as smile.jpg centred a cursed file story around a user’s encounter with a picture of a smiling dog. ‘Smile Dog’ would either drive the viewer insane over time, or release his victim in exchange for them forwarding the image. The original creepypasta references chain emails and spammed message boards, keeping the link between smiling and virality. Similarly themed memes and content has continued up to the present, including: the Momo phenomenon, the Roblox SMILE entity, the MLP Infection AU/Pestraobia, the SMILE Tapes and many others. The 2022 film Smile is the best known though, a successful horror franchise which began as a short film project (Laura Hasn’t Slept) by the filmmaker Parker J. Finn. In the first full-length film (Spoilers!) the main character experiences a patient commit suicide in front of her, whilst fixedly smiling. As the story unfolds it transpires the witnessed suicide-smile combination is a mechanism for some malevolent entity to pass between hosts, who suffer paranoid hallucinations of strangers and friends smiling at them in a threatening, uncanny way before convincing them to also take their own life in a dramatic fashion.
Smile isn’t shy about its symbolical and metaphorical allusions and presentation of trauma, mental health and smiling as masking. Perhaps nodding to the 2019 Joker film, where forced smiles are part of the alienating process, Smile’s villain -The Entity - seeks out and torments mentally fragile victims with a history of pain and guilt. The algorithmic process of breakdown→ suicide → smile → new host → hallucinations → breakdown, works well as an updated version of chain mail, social media contagion and viral content. More than any other facial expression, smiling works so well for the digital world since it can focus on the face, freeze the moment and create a mood juxtaposition for the audience. Arguably it is one of the internet’s most popular and meaningful affects or motifs.
Grin and bear it!
In 2018 4chan’s /v/ board saw the first use of what became known as Psycho or Demonic Grin Wojak, aka Le Scary Face. A drawing halfway between Troll Face and Jeff the Killer, with overtones of 18th century comic grotesque and cartoonish bad guy, Psycho Wojak is a perfect tribute to centuries of demons, slashers and monsters. His deployment in order to personify extreme, erratic, risky and insane behaviours is in a long line of Western ‘smiling-as-madness’ images. Some meme variants also mocked the cultural sympathy trope offered to insane characters in cinema and television, only once the reason for their deranged smile is explained. The smile reveals internal madness, but it can also be involuntary or inflicted - do you want to know how I got this?
The duality is I think, why the smile has become so important within digital culture. We have inherited the metaphysics of our skin-as-a-mask, which in turn can slip (to show us the true intention underneath), or it can be reconfigured (to show the world a different face). Smiling is both. Smiling is the demonic glitch, as well as an external curse to be borne.
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