Bloody Smile 2 trailer finally explains movie’s mysterious marketing – and promises a bigger scale for sequel to the hit horror

The Smile 2 trailer is here, and it promises an even more unhinged marketing campaign than the first movie.

The original was praised for its viral advertising back in 2022, with the 'Smile curse' (a creepy grin that indicates possession) being spotted in the backdrop of everything from sports games to news broadcasts. Just last week it was teased that the sequel was following in a similar manner with the release of a music video from an artist called Skye Riley.

Now the full trailer for the follow-up has been released and we have a better idea of just what's going on. Smile 2 stars Aladdin's Naomi Scott as an international pop star. However, her life of fame and fortune soon comes to a crashing halt when she watches her friend Lewis (Lukas Gage) become possessed with the Smile curse and kill himself with a free weight, passing it on to her. Elsewhere in the trailer we see Skye freaking out as she keeps hallucinating people smiling at her, including a terrifying little girl. Watch the full trailer below.

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The links to the first film, which stars Sosie Bacon as a therapist who starts being plagued by spine-chilling visions after she witnesses the violent suicide of her patient, are not quite clear yet. In that, Bacon's lead discovers she's adopted a curse which is passed on to those who see someone kill themselves while, you guessed it, smiling in a very unsettling way.

The movie ended in a terrifying sequence where Bacon's Rose Cotter tried to confront the Smile demon and end the curse for good. However, she failed, killing herself while her ex-partner Joel (Kyle Gallner) looked on, passing the curse to him. We see him in the new trailer very briefly before he's run over by a car, leaving a bloody print in the snow.

Smile was a hit release for Paramount in 2022, making $217 million worldwide on a budget of just $17 million. The sequel will be hoping to do the same, and if this now bigger than ever marketing campaign is anything to go by, it just might do that.

Smile 2 is released on October 18, 2024. For more scares, here are all the upcoming horror movies on the way this year, as well as our round up of all the best horror movies of all time.

I’m the Deputy Entertainment Editor here at GamesRadar+, covering TV and film for the Total Film and SFX sections online. I previously worked as a Senior Showbiz Reporter and SEO TV reporter at Express Online for three years. I've also written for The Resident magazines and Amateur Photographer, before specializing in entertainment.