Slasher Smile / Live-Action Films

♫Give yourself over to absolute terror!♫

Examples of Slasher Smile in live-action films.

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• Just about every villain played by Willem Dafoe, with Speed 2: Cruise Control and Spider-Man standing out. Honest Trailers even comments "Echhh. His face looks a lot better with the mask on." Todd in the Shadows also noted that one of the many flaws in Body of Evidence is having Dafoe starring in an erotic thriller, when that smile is one hell of a Fetish Retardant.
• Jim Carrey has done this trope in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas! to demonstrate how remarkable his rubber face really is when it comes to expressions. According to one account, it's basically how he got the latter role: "He took his face and he Grinched it."
• In Addams Family Values, Wednesday smiles thrice. The first was The Un-Smile after being forced to watch a Disney flick. The second was when she caused a riot at the Thanksgiving play and burns everything to the ground. The third is the very last shot of the movie where she pranks Joel to the point where he's screaming bloody murder (oddly, she had just said that the best way for a woman to murder her husband is to scare him to death).
• Several particularly disturbing examples abound in the movie The Babadook. The protagonist, Amelia, sees charcoal-drawn images of herself in a supposed children's book...her eyes are hollow black orbs and she has a huge psychotic grin as she murders her dog, her son and herself. Later, she promises her son that she will keep them "safe". Unfortunately at the time she is pointing a kitchen knife at him and grinning like a complete lunatic. But that's just the warm-up. Moments later, she watches the TV half-asleep and listens to a grisly news report discussing a woman murdering her young son with a knife. In the background, barely visible, a Slasher Smile wearing woman is staring from a window... and it's Amelia herself. Oh, Crap!.
• Mitsuko from the Battle Royale movie before killing Megumi. The girl at the beginning of the film (the battle's first female winner) has a seriously creepy one too.
• Natalie Portman unleashes a blood-curdling one◊ in Black Swan while portraying her doppelganger in the bath scene.
• Alex from A Clockwork Orange, whenever he gets deep into the old ultraviolence. (forms at around 1:10)
• Day of the Outlaw: Tex and Pace, the two most psychotic members of Bruhn's band of outlaws, sport these much of the time, but especially whenever they raise the prospect of raping the townswomen.
• Mary Shaw from Dead Silence has got looks that kill. No, Really.
• Donnie Darko, every single time he sees his giant bunny-friend Frank. It's a little creepy, to say the least. No teeth in this one, though.
• The Elf: Sometimes, the elf doll gives off a smile of perfect wooden whites inside of black lips.
  • Elves (2017): Whenever the elf doll starts communicating to its victims by making them think it's talking to them through someone else, that person's face smiles in an unnaturally big way◊.
• Event Horizon: The ending portion of the Blood Orgy shows us the incredibly unnerving sight of captain Kilpack creepily uttering "Libera te tutemet ex inferis..." while completely covered from head-to-toe in blood and gore, holding his own gouged-out eyes in the bloodstained palms of his hands and facing at the camera with a nightmarish grin.
• Galaxy Quest also makes use of this trope when Sariss, disguised as Fred, arrives on the command deck to kill off the heroes. It's a very well-played Oh, Crap! moment.
• In Ghostbusters (1984), this, together with a horrifying demon voice, lets Dr. Venkman (and us) know "There is no Dana, only Zuul."
• Highlander: The Kurgan sports one several times throughout the film. The most epic one being in the church meeting with Connor, when he pieces together from Connor's mortified reaction that the girl he raped in 1542 after he took Ramirez's head was actually Connor's wife, and takes some sick glee in the fact that she never told Connor about it^note Being the sick bastard he is, he suggests it was because she actually liked the violation, but more likely is she feared her husband would go after the Kurgan and be killed if he ever found out what happened to her, or just she was too traumatized to ever speak about it..
• Insidious 2: While talking to Carl, Josh smiles a disturbing one due to being possessed by Parker, an insane serial killer. It quickly drops when Carl figures out what's going on.
• It (2017): Pennywise sports a wicked, evil grin that flashes some sharp front teeth most of the time and gets taken to horrific proportions when all the teeth come out.
• All of the various live-action incarnations of The Joker, naturally. Special mention to Jack Nicholson's version from Batman, who has his face permanently distorted into one, and Heath Ledger's take from The Dark Knight, who sports a large Glasgow Grin. Special mention should go the former, where even as his pre-transformation self he manages an absolutely terrifying rictus smile after he kills Bruce Wayne's parents and is about to do the same to the boy.
  • Interestingly subverted with Joaquin Phoenix's version from Joker. When he's shown smiling/laughing, it's either very subdued, or as a result of the medical condition that causes him to laugh uncontrollably; when he does kill someone, he's actually completely serious. It's not until the end that he actually starts to adopt one.
• The Indoraptor from Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. Technically for a dinosaur, it has the mind of a serial killer, during the scene where one of the antagonists Weatley tranquilizes it to collect one of its teeth. the Indoraptor wakes up (it's not tranq'ed) and smiles before biting off Weatley's arm and killing him.
• Rhonda flashes one to the camera as she holds up the giant safety pin at the end of Killer Workout.
• The film version of The Man Who Laughs has Conrad Veidt with one of these permanently etched into his face. Considering his best-known role up to that point was a sleepwalking serial killer, the character in this film turned out to be a good deal more sympathetic than one would expect. His smile was the result of a surgical disfiguration. He was actually a pretty nice guy.
• MonsterVerse:
  • Kong: Skull Island:
    • In the opening where WWII pilots Lieutenant Hank Marlow and Gunpei Ikari have just crashed on Skull Island, Gunpei is grinning in bloodlust when he gets close to impaling Hank in their fight before Kong shows up.
    • When the bombs are being dropped on Skull Island, Captain Cole, who is one of the more traumatized Vietnam War vets in the film though not villainous like Packard, is grinning as he watches the explosions reflect in his shades.
    • Near the end of the film, Packard, in stark contrast to his remorseful men, has an utterly demented smirk on his face when he tries to burn Kong alive.
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters: King Ghidorah. His three heads all take at least one turn grinning with glee at Ghidorah doing something particularly evil before the film ends. The most prominent one is the middle head (Ichi), who smirks knowingly just before the heads ready their gravity beams to incinerate a bunch of soldiers For the Evulz in Antarctica, and he also has the widest grin of all the heads when they're trying to attack the people-filled Airborne Aircraft Carrier unprovoked in Mexico.
• Mr. Sardonicus took liberal inspiration from the aforementioned The Man Who Laughs with the carved smile, but the character was much less of a sweet guy than Gwynplaine. It was up to the audience to decide whether he was a villain or an Anti-Villain — this being a William Castle film, they were polled, and a different ending would be screened based on whether they thought he should be treated mercifully. They killed him every time, and the mercy ending is probably lost for eternity, assuming it ever existed at all.
• National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation has Clark Griswald become somewhat unhinged come the end of the movie as his idea of a "perfect Christmas" gradually disappears; his smile, however, stays.
• Pirates of the Caribbean
  • Barbossa frequently has one, adequate for how much overacting is involved.
  • Pintel employs it while discovering the hidden Elizabeth. 'Hello, poppet.'
  • Tia Dalma has some cases, including one promotional picture◊ for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.
• In Psycho, Norman Bates gets off an epic one at the end while he's in a holding cell.
• The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Dr. Frank N Furter has one of these right before he kills Eddie with a pick axe.
• The "Here's Johnny!" scene from The Shining. (Alternate Version.) In fact it's Jack's default expression even before he goes literally Ax-Crazy, giving the impression that he's putting up a Mask of Sanity or at least pretending to be more cheerful than he is.
• The short horror film Smile revolves around body-snatching beings with hideous grinning faces. It's well worth a watch.
• Paramount's Smile (2022) has an Entity which causes its victims to see people sporting horrifying smiles before driving them to suicide with an evil grin on their faces.
• Ernst Stavro Blofeld briefly gives a creepy grin as he subjects James Bond to Cold-Blooded Torture in Spectre, and later on, when he takes Bond Girl Madeleine Swann hostage and threatens to have her killed by blowing up the old MI6 building in an effort to humiliate Bond.
• In Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd just after the Pirelli sequence, Sweeney directs one at the Beadle. Scary doesn't even cut it. It's enough to make Jack the Ripper wet his pants. Although, like Donnie above he doesn't bare his teeth, so may overlap with Psychotic Smirk.
• In the Tony Jaa movie Tom-Yum-Goong, or The Protector, one of the many opponents that Tony faces is a Capoeira fighter, who has just attacked a Buddhist temple full of innocent people, set the place ablaze, and then attacks Tony as soon as he arrives to help. What qualifies "Mr. Fake Eddie Gordo" for this trope is the fact that while he fights Tony, he laughs, taunts Tony, and openly toys with him using feints and false moves.
• At the end of the third segment of the 1975 made-for-TV movie Trilogy of Terror the eponymous "Amelia" crouches down low in an animalistic manner, hiding in the corner with a carving knife. She stabs at the floor with the weapon, grinning ferally and revealing the horrific teeth of the Zuni doll.
• The ever lovable late comedian John Candy had this expression on his face in Uncle Buck during the scene where he comes to the bedroom of Tia's "boyfriend" Bug to rescue Tia by drilling a hole through the doorknob, he's also holding a drill and smoking a cigar. Although generally throughout the movie Buck comes out as kind of kooky such as when he asks Tia "How would you like to spend the next several nights wondering if your crazy out of work bum uncle will shave your head while you sleep?" and where he's talking to Tia's boyfriend about burying the hatchet.
  Bug: Ever hear of a tuneup? Ah-hee-hee-hee-hee!
  Buck: Ah-hee-hee-hee-hee! Ever hear of a ritual killing? Ah-hee-hee-hee-hee!
  Bug: ...I don't get it...
  Buck: You gnaw on her face in public like that again and you'll be one. Ah-hee-hee-hee-hee!
• The Mouth of Sauron has an almost perpetual one before the Battle of the Black Gate in The Lord of the Rings. It's especially creepy because it's the only thing that is visible on his face. This is in contrast to his book counterpart, who is just as completely insane but much more subtle.