Intrusive thoughts are unwanted, troubling ideas, urges or images that suddenly intrude on your mind. They are common for people in general. Have you ever stood on a bridge and had the sudden, out of nowhere urge to jump?
But these are especially tough for anyone with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) or post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
The thing to understand about them is that they are ego dystonic - they don’t match up with the person’s values, and that makes them distressing.
That experience, of unwanted, disturbing thoughts, which might be of violently harming others, including loved ones, is like a horror movie. In fact, it’s precisely like the SMILE horror movies.
These movies are predicated on a simple formula. A character becomes haunted by frightening images and starts acting strange, gradually ruining their lives, until they become desperate to break the curse.
The power of the smile haunting seems to be largely from how someone reacts to what they see. Watching the films, it’s hard not to wonder, what would happen if they could ignore the disturbing images?
If the heroines of these films could differentiate between what is real and what is the intrusive imagery, the haunting would lose its power.
And that is part of how mental health therapy works for intrusive thoughts. People who have OCD for example, will ruminate on the intrusive thoughts. They will worry that maybe the thoughts are indicative that something is wrong with them. They worry they might actually violently hurt someone.
Through therapy, they might learn to not fear these thoughts, but to sit with them, identify them for what they are, and in doing so, take away their power. If you let that horrifying feeling wash over you, it will eventually pass. And next time, it will be less powerful. Until it has no more power.
In SMILE and most recently SMILE 2, if the protagonists could do the same, the movies would be over.
But it’s hard to do. Intrusive thoughts are scary. It is human nature to fear they might reveal some real dark desire we have. Towards the end of SMILE 2, the pop star heroine, played by Naomi Scott, tells her best friend to abandon her. She’s afraid she’ll get hurt just by being in her orbit.
The end of both movies, without going into spoilers, is truly horrific for how it connects to these ideas. What happens if you give the intrusive thoughts credence? What if you treat them as real? What will be your fate if you do?
In real life, not in a movie - it will end badly. And THAT is why these movies are so much deeper than a throwaway horror film.
A lot of the critical reaction to these films treats them like a clever parlor trick. Slick, well directed, but basically just a good gimmick for horror movies. That critical response misses this additional subtext. These are movies that could be shown as an example of the experience of intrusive thoughts. An experience everyone has, and people with OCD or PTSD or similar mental health challenges has to a potent degree. These films will stand the test of time for their deeper meaning, for this reason.
See you at SMILE 3.
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