Smiley Death Face (Short)
Movie review score
A-
**Seen at the 2020 Women in Horror Film Festival. Also played at 2020 Fantasia Fest.**
“Smiley Death Face” takes the classic scene of a predator harassing its prey over the phone, and exchanges dialogue with emojis. It’s like the opening of “Scream” if Ghostface found inventive ways to torture Drew Barrymore with questions about scary movies using symbols, and neither character spoke. The script by Chris Lewis Carter, and direction by Andrew Patrick Torrez, maximize this premise as far as it can realistically go, and the result is a funny, and suspenseful, seven minutes that speaks to our evolving development of communication, and twisting genre ideas for laughs and purpose. There’s not much more to be said about the film than that.
