How an unknown filmmaker turned a $30,000 short into a box office monster

In 2022, a horror movie with no stars and an unknown director came out of left field and became a genuine monster at the box office. The film was, of course, Parker Finn’s Smile, a nasty slice of demonic thrills that quickly racked up an astonishing $217million worldwide on a budget of just $17m. Two years later, a sequel arrived and made even more on its opening weekend than the first film. Finn now has a bonafide horror franchise on his hands, which is a pretty incredible turn of events considering the first movie started life as a $30,000 short film he funded himself while struggling to find a way to break into Hollywood.

Like many people in the movie business, Finn attended film school—specifically, the Dodge College of Film and Media Arts at Chapman University in California. After graduating with a Master of Arts degree in screenwriting, he did what any film student does—he made his way to Los Angeles. He had dreams of becoming a writer/director and began doing any odd job he could land on movie sets.

While working his way up from the bottom, he began writing scripts for short films and, in 2018, experienced some success with one of his shorts, The Hidebehind. This short – which he admitted to making for little more than the price it cost to buy lunch each day for his small crew – screened at the Portland Horror Film Festival and Panic Fest in 2019 but didn’t lead to any offers to whisk him away to Hollywood glory.

Soon, eight years had passed, and Finn didn’t feel any closer to his big break. By this point, he had amassed a stack of short scripts he could potentially bring to life – and he decided to pull the trigger on one called Laura Hasn’t Slept. It told the story of a young woman who goes to her therapist to talk about a recurring nightmare she’s been having in which a presence takes the form of different people – while constantly smiling at her in a bone-chilling manner.

Finn knew this short needed higher production value than The Hidebehind, so he began scrambling together as much money as he could. He solicited family and friends for cash and opened a few new credit card accounts with no interest to pay for 18 months. Soon, he had $30,000 to work with – not to mention the looming threat of financial ruin if this thing didn’t actually take off. As he told Mick Garris on the Post-Mortem podcast, “That felt like an insane amount of money to me, at the time. I was very nervous about it, but I had already committed to doing it.”

The next step was to find somewhere he and his crew could build a set for a therapist’s office. Luckily, his alma mater, Chapman, was happy to help. The university allotted him five days to build and light the set, then a further two days to shoot the film. He called in every favour he could think of to put together a 20-person crew and hired a pair of actors to play the short’s only two characters. Laura was played by Australian actor Caitlin Stasey, and her therapist, Dr Parsons, was portrayed by The Walking Dead’s Lew Temple.

When the shoot was finished, Finn and his crew entered months of post-production. With their budget already fraying at the edges, they somehow managed to give the short professional-quality sound design, editing, visual effects, and a full score. All the hard work looked like it would pay off, though, when the short was accepted into competition at the iconic South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas. Its world premiere was pencilled in for March 2020 – and then the Covid-19 pandemic hit.

“We found out, like, the week beforehand that it was cancelled because of the onset of the pandemic, which was brutal,” Finn admitted to Garris. “I had a lot of emotional eggs invested in [that] basket.”

Because the festival had been scrapped so close to its start date, though, the decision was made that judging would still take place, even if there were no screenings. Laura Hasn’t Slept won the Special Jury prize, and that victory was reported by a number of leading industry publications. A Vimeo link with a password was made available for those in the industry who wanted to watch the short, but then something crazy happened. The link was somehow leaked to the internet – by whom, a coy Finn wouldn’t say – and he soon heard it was being passed around Hollywood like hotcakes. Thinking fast, Finn edited the Vimeo page to include his e-mail address, and the very next day, his inbox exploded with interested parties.

Finn’s next few weeks became very surreal. While the world struggled with a deadly pandemic, he fielded ten Zoom calls daily from the confines of his cheap, one-bedroom guest house. This bizarre process landed him an agent and manager, and he was off to the races. Interestingly, though, nearly every studio executive that he spoke to asked him if he’d considered developing the short into a feature film.

“I made Laura Hasn’t Slept just to kind of stand-alone,” Finn told ScreenRant in 2022. “I think all good shorts should stand alone and exist in their own right.” However, he did admit that he began pondering the possibilities of the world he’d created while doing post-production on the short. He revealed, “There was something about it that kept lingering with me, and this idea for this larger story started to emerge, and then this totally separate character story was born out of it.”

Finn soon signed a deal with Paramount to make the film, and in May 2021, Something’s Wrong with Rose received an official greenlight from the first draft of its script. It was soon retitled Smile and scheduled for release on Paramount+, the studio’s streaming service. Then, however, the story took another crazy turn.

After Finn put together his first rough cut of the film, it was shown to a test audience of 270 people who had no idea what they were about to watch. Finn was then invited to a meeting the next morning with Paramount Pictures CEO Brian Robbins—and he was certain he was about to find out the studio hated the film.

Amazingly, though, he was told it had received extremely high test scores and that it was being lined up for another screening the following week with Paramount’s marketing and distribution folks. It scored even higher at this screening, and suddenly Smile wasn’t destined to be thrown into the streaming void – it would get a major theatrical release.

Ultimately, Finn turning his “Hail Mary” $30,000 short film into a horror behemoth was as unlikely a story as it gets in Hollywood. It just shows, though, that if you roll the dice on something you’re passionate about, you just might strike gold. Monstrous smiling gold.

Related Topics

This post was originally published on here