As a Nightmare Fuel page, all spoilers are unmarked!
A series centrered around people undergoing Facial Horror as well as society's reaction to it is bound to have nightmarish results. And fortunately (or unfortunately), it does not disappoint.
- The very concept of SMILE is utterly terrifying. Imagine a drug that is made from spores that can be transmitted from person to person. These spores enter your body and at first you don't think much about it. Then everything goes wrong. You feel your mouth as if it's getting stretched more and more, resulting in a grotesque smile. You suffer in agony for days and days, then suddenly you feel... relaxed. Happy.
- The continued effects of SMILE, as seen in the laboratory segment from Volume 1, are also horrific. At first the two patients reported a headache, but soon that would change. Their faces soon form a deranged smile, getting bigger and bigger, with their eyes seemingly starting to pop out of their eye socket. Soon, one of the patients died, but he probably had a better fate. His friend, on the other hand, survives, losing his hair with his jaw starting to unhinge. In the end, the autopsy report notes their heads have been filled up with spores.
- Shaun Gomez, whose fate is pictured above, and his story are both tragic and scary. He was a victim of spore puffing (for all he knew, some weirdo just threw flour at him), with the resulting Sanity Slippage that would follow utterly break him. And let's not get into the strange man, who made him commit homicide.
- Variant C. Not only does it result in somehow an even more deranged Slasher Smile than anything Variant A could muster, but people infected with the variant also seem to lose eyes as well as gaining heightened senses, bloodthirsty tendencies, inhuman levels of strength and stamina, as well as a bulletproof exterior.
- Then we get to see one of these variants in action... A man has just hiked to the top of a mountain when suddenly hears someone screaming in the distance. Worried for the person, he walks to the source of the sound which seems to be coming from some cabin in the woods. But as he gets closer to the source, the screams transition into mad laughter... As he enters the cabin, looking for the person who is supposed to be in distress, we then cut outside where the mysterious man starts laughing again and then we hear the sounds of the poor hiker choking to death. A few moments later, we then get to see their hiker's face on the camera now declared missing. Only for the disturbing visage of the infected to appear next to him. Then the hiker's face is suddenly mangled, now having hollwed out eye scokets and a open toothless maw. And this is happening while he is making various choking sounds as his neck is unnaturally twisted, and blood is splattered behind him...
- By 1996 the SMILE Outbreak has grown big enough that cities like San Diego turned into what pretty much is a Zombie Apocalypse where anyone hiding would hear the Smilers laughing as they killed and infected more unfortunate victims. This is demonstrated by the video tape of a survivor who had to leave to get food as he ran out of his own food storage. The video cuts out after he gets chased by a laughing Smiler back to his apartment as another survivor sets the apartment complex on fire.
- The ending of Volume 3, while a rare case of an analog horror series having a positive ending, is still rather scary; the survivor looks up to the sky, and sees an assortment of glowing spheres, being the flaming exhausts of hundreds of ballistic missiles that have been sent to immolate the city and exterminate the Variant C infected. He has just enough time to utter the word no repeatedly as the spheres descend, engulfing the camera feed in light and presumably killing him.
- The death of the only Variant B infectee, Sarah Campbell, the variant she has is completely benign and she retains her sanity. The only bad side effects of her variant being that she can't smile anymore and that she can still unintenionally spread the disease. She was quarantined in a lab to be studied for a possible cure. In a disturbing display of intelligence, a wave of presumably Variant C Smilers end up completely overrunning the lab and start killing everyone inside, including any armed guards that could do nothing to stop them due to them being insanely strong, fast, and bulletproof. While we don't know exactly what they did to Sarah, it's very obvious by the aftermath image of her face that it wasn't pretty. To make matters worse, the constant Madness Mantra of "There is no cure" implies that this was a deliberate calculated action that all the strongest Smilers took to ensure the disease would never be cured.THERE IS NO CURE
I KILLED THEM ALL
