This article contains spoilers.
Last year around this time, audiences were heading to movie theaters to experience the joy of being in the presence of a pop star.
“Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” had just been released, prompting Swifties and the Swift-curious to descend on multiplexes, friendship bracelets adorning their wrists. Weeks later, the Beyhive would don silver cowboy hats for the release of “Renaissance: A Film By Beyoncé.” Attending one of these concert films meant having a great time and reveling in the glory of the women onstage who seemed to be doing the same.
Now being a pop star at the movies looks a lot more terrifying.
Horror centered on pop stars is all the rage these days. In M. Night Shyamalan’s “Trap,” released in August, the concert by the fictional Lady Raven (Saleka) is an elaborate setup to nab a serial killer (Josh Hartnett). This weekend, “Smile 2,” directed by Parker Finn, follows Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), a troubled Grammy winner with a history of addiction who comes to be possessed by a demon that drives her mad with violent hallucinations. To her fans and her team, it looks like she’s on another, possibly drug-induced spiral, but really a monster is goading her into killing herself.
Both these movies are a product of a time when the business of being a pop star is bigger than ever. Events like the Eras and Renaissance tours became zeitgeist-defining moments as well as fodder that filmmakers could mine for inspiration. Shyamalan was even direct about it in an Empire interview. His premise for “Trap”? “What if ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ happened at a Taylor Swift concert?”
But both “Trap” and “Smile 2” prove that beyond the fun of the setup, the life of a pop star is actually thematically ripe for horror. It’s a high-pressure job in which you never know whether you’re meeting a fan or a predator.
“Smile 2” articulates this particularly well early on when Skye is doing a meet-and-greet. She’s recently been infected with what is known as the “Smile entity” after witnessing her drug dealer gruesomely smash his own face in with a dumbbell.
At the event, Skye signs autographs and smiles for photos with people who fawn over her. But then an unnerving man approaches. His hair is long, his skin is bad and his gaze is lecherous. He soon makes a pass at Skye and must be escorted away. After a breather, she returns to her duties, and is approached by a little girl in pigtails. The child doesn’t say anything, just wears the creepy smile of the evil monster that has infected Skye. Who is the real villain here? The gross man? The little girl? Or both? We’re left wondering which is a fan crossing a line or someone more sinister.
The interaction calls to mind recent statements by Chappell Roan, whose album “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess” made the up-and-comer into a bona fide sensation this year.
After she released a series of videos calling out fan harassment in August, she set off a wave of discourse as to whether she was ungrateful for her success. Ardent adoration turned into gleeful criticism. In response, Roan denounced on Instagram what she called “predatory behavior (disguised as ‘superfan’ behavior) that has become normalized because of the way women who are well-known have been treated in the past.” She added, “Please do not assume you know a lot about someone’s life, personality, and boundaries because you are familiar with them or their work online.”
If you boil down Roan’s point to its essence — that people think they are entitled to her affections and her body because she is famous — you see exactly what “Smile 2” is illustrating.
Being a public figure is scary, and for pop stars, it can be even more frightening. Their fans are particularly voracious and are driven by what they believe is a personal connection to the artist’s music. You can see this in Erin Lee Carr’s new Hulu documentary, “Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara.” That film chronicles how the genuine interactions that the indie-rock sister duo Tegan and Sara initially had with their followers became tainted by a malicious catfishing scheme in which someone or multiple people stole their personal information and pretended to be Tegan online. “You get to a certain size and a certain part of your fan base gets so intense they ruin it for everybody else,” Tegan says in the movie.
There’s a kind of violence to pop fame. On the recently released remix of the Charli XCX song “Sympathy Is a Knife,” featuring Ariana Grande, the two voices use imagery that would be right at home in a horror film as they sing, “It’s a knife when you’re finally on top, ’cause logically the next step is they wanna see you fall.”
Both “Smile 2” and “Trap” tap into that fear that comes from the vulnerability of singing and dancing in front of a large group of people. A pop star could be performing for someone whose love and appreciation is unadulterated or for someone who would happily murder you. Or maybe, as in “Smile 2,” the audience is rooting for you to make a misstep. There are flashbacks to paparazzi images of Skye in the throes of a breakdown that are reminiscent of shots of Amy Winehouse and Britney Spears.
“Smile 2” ultimately implicates and victimizes fans in its nasty finale. Despite her efforts to get rid of the entity, Skye eventually succumbs to it, sticking her microphone in her eye before a packed arena. In the logic of these movies, thousands of people are now haunted.
Being a pop star means — sometimes unwillingly — taking part in a kind of mass hysteria, no matter what side of the stage you are on. Perhaps that’s why horror captures it the best.
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