10 Horror Movie Mysteries That Should NEVER Have Been Answered

A precursor to 2022's Smile, director Parker Finn's Laura Hasn't Slept takes the entire concept of its successor and distils it down to a single-room setup.

Laura (Catilin Stasey) is in therapy because, for a while now, she's been haunted by a mysterious smiling man who makes her hallucinate and seems to have taken over her dreams. She's teetering near the edge, sleep deprived and petrified, and isn't sure what will happen if he catches her. So long as she doesn't fall asleep, he can't get to her, and it's a race against the clock to get the help she needs before something bad happens. But there's something strange about her therapist that Laura just can't put her finger on...

Pretty chilling, right?

And it would stay that way, if the tension wasn't cut around the halfway mark, when it's revealed Laura is, as we might have suspected, dreaming. The film should have held things off until the very last second, making everything stranger and more unsettling but not unexplainable, until a small slip tells Laura (and us) she is definitely asleep. Instead, it ends on a screamer, circa internet videos 2006, with a full reveal of the creature and no sense of doubt or creepiness left in store. Thankfully, Smile has a lot more tact.