A.J. Briones’ Short Horror Film The Smiling Man Is Terrifying On So Many Levels
Fresh off its film festival tour comes The Smiling Man, a frightening new award-winning short film written and directed by visual effects artist A.J. Briones. Briones is most recognized for his work on films such as Avatar, Star Wars: Episode VII and Iron Man 2. THE SMILING MAN for me was an exercise in tension building and whether we could use that to great effect to scare the crap out of audiences.” Blumhouse has quoted Briones as saying. “I wanted to tell a story purely with visuals, so I wrote it without any dialogue. I like to work in allegory with all my films, and THE SMILING MAN is about a woman’s introduction into the world of men, and how unfair and downright predatory it can be. It’s not meant to be overt, but those ideas are visually coded into the film. That said, it’s been really neat speaking to people at festivals who came away from watching it with
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