Top 6 Best Movies Like Smile 2 (Ranked & Where to Stream)

Danny and Michael Philippou's breakthrough relies on a brilliantly vicious concept: an embalmed ceramic hand that acts as a conduit for possession, treated by suburban teens as a party drug. Sophie Wilde turns in a ferocious performance as Mia, a grieving teenager whose desperate bid for connection cracks open a channel to the spirit world that refuses to close. The sound design is squelching and aggressive, anchoring supernatural terror in visceral adolescent grief. If you are chasing movies like Smile 2, this film provides an identical brand of suffocating inevitability, where an invisible entity weaponizes unresolved personal trauma into gruesome physical self-destruction.

Cameron and Colin Cairnes construct a brilliant found-footage nightmare styled as a doomed 1977 sweeps-week telecast. David Dastmalchian shines as Jack Delroy, a floundering late-night host whose ambition drives him to stage a live demonic conversation on national television. The production design meticulously mimics period broadcast aesthetics, building pressure inside a single claustrophobic television studio as the occult stunts unravel into sheer blood-soaked pandemonium. For viewers drawn to the staged spectacle and media-induced breakdown in Smile 2, this delivers a similarly scathing critique of show business vanity clashing against an unforgiving demonic force.

Nicolas Winding Refn paints the Los Angeles fashion industry as a cannibalistic abattoir draped in pulsing synthesizers and hyper-saturated neon. Elle Fanning plays Jesse, an innocent teenager whose natural beauty ignites lethal envy among established models and predatory photographers. Refn eschews traditional jump scares in favor of icy, hypnotic surrealism, turning the pursuit of perfection into a literal bloodbath scored to Cliff Martinez's blistering electronic beats. It shares the glossy pop aesthetic and backstage dread that defined Smile 2, showing how the blinding glare of high-profile fame can chew an artist up from the inside out.

Wes Craven revolutionized slasher cinema by attacking the only sanctuary human beings have: sleep. Robert Englund's Freddy Krueger weaponizes the dreamscape against suburban adolescents, bending physics and architecture through boiler-room steam, stretched flesh, and inventive, reality-warping violence. Heather Langenkamp's desperate crusade to stay awake creates an agonizing physical exhaustion that ratchets tension across every waking scene. The psychological agony directly parallels the relentless dread found in movies like Smile 2, where an inescapable entity isolates its target until crushing fatigue completely erases the border separating daylight sanity from fatal hallucination.

David Cronenberg's definitive technohorror vision follows Max Renn, a sleazy cable producer played by James Woods who discovers a snuff pirate signal that induces fatal brain tumors and vivid hallucinations. The film is an assault of tactile, biomechanical imagery—pulsing VHS cassettes, breathing television monitors, and gaping abdominal cavities designed by Rick Baker. Cronenberg interrogates how screen consumption warps our physical bodies and perceptions of reality long before digital media existed. Fans of Smile 2 will appreciate the disorienting subjective viewpoint, where both the protagonist and the audience lose all grip on what is hallucinated and what is lethally real.

Zach Cregger's subversion of genre mechanics begins as a tense Airbnb double-booking thriller in a decaying Detroit suburb before detonating its own premise. Georgina Campbell and Bill Skarsgård establish razor-sharp dynamic tension in the opening act, playing on modern social awkwardness before the narrative plunges into the subterranean passages beneath the basement. Cregger alternates between pitch-black comedy and breathless physical panic, continually shifting perspective to keep viewers off-balance. It matches the white-knuckle escalation that fueled Smile 2, trading in sudden tonal shocks and a protagonist forced to endure an escalating series of terrifying, trap-door scenarios.