I like scary movies and most scares just shock me and then I move on but sometimes there is a scene in a movie or TV show where someone or something smiles in a weird, creepy way and it freaks me out. It could be a smile that goes too far or that has creepy horrible teeth or any number of reasons. They don’t show up often in horror movies but scenes like that get me every time.
Yeah sure, weird smiles can be creepy. Very creepy. It has more to do with the situation or the look on the face than teeth, for me. Vincent D’onofrio’s smile in Full Metal Jacket is about as scary as a person can get, and Jack Nicholson got some good mileage out of his sneer in, “The Shining.”
The link in your post was light grey in color when I first saw it (meaning it’s a link Firefox recognizes as one I’ve already clicked on), so yeah, that’s the one I meant. I thought about linking to it as well.
There was an episode of Buffy (“Conversations with Dead People”) where Willow is supposedly talking to the ghost of a very sweet girl who died earlier in the season, but she’s not who she says she is. At the end of the conversation, the girl starts to smile and it gets wider, and wider…freaked me out more than anything else I ever saw on that show.
Not TV or a movie, but real life. Last month I went to a restaurant and was greeted at the door by the maitre’d. He gave me a big forced fake “trust me” smile that almost made me run away. Think Tim Curry in Clue. I started looking around for the casket he was going to put my dead body in.
I was going to make a joke about Elizabeth Shortbut in searching for the photo I linked to I unfortunately ran across photos of the real Elizabeth’s er, smile, and it didn’t seem all that funny anymore.
Who can forget Karen Black in " Trilogy of Terror"? That might be cheating, though, since she’s wearing those teeth.
The chauffeurin " Burnt Offerings " was pretty damn menacing, though looking at the picture now I realize his scary factor was more due to context.
I’ll come back with more that aren’t from cheesy '70s movies.
Reverend Henry Kane from Poltergeist 2 had a pretty creepy smile. His gaunt face in the film was supposedly attributed to the fact that the actor was dying of stomach cancer during filming.