A lot of people are talking about Bird Box being similar to A Quiet Place. Now I haven't Bird Box, but this discussion was my excuse to return to the latter. I unearthed this post that I had written on A Quiet Place. This post has been sitting in my drafts for a while now, let's drag it to the light of day...
One of the problems of watching a Horror Movie with friends, for me, has been that whole approach people have these days; of sitting on the edge of your seats, waiting to be scared. It's strange that a horror movie is judged by how many scenes make you jump - I've never heard of people watching a drama-tragedy and saying, "Well it was good, but it didn't make me cry enough." Even comedies are judged by more than the number of laughs they provide. Why then this narrow expectation of a genre that deals with an intense primal emotion? There is more to fear than that. There has to be!
Even so, most popular horror in television and cinema is awfully formulaic. Story, character and emotions are beside the point. What matters is how suddenly that chalky white face shows up on the screen or how the slimy hands grip the heroine from inside the mirror or the blood spatters and violence. The essence of the genre is lost in cheap tricks and manufactured thrills.
Horror can be more than ghosts. Think of Carrie. Late 70s, teenage girl, abused and bullied, gets supernatural powers and wreaks revenge...? Many people would even reject labeling this as horror! But what do you find terrifying - a walking doll? Or how easily we inflict casual pain on fellow humans out of sheer spite? Who can forget that iconic scene from Carrie where the bucket of pig's blood is upturned on a girl's head; who could deny being scared by her disintegration? Carrie is torture, if you give in to the singular demand made by good movies and THINK about it.
A Quiet Place is like that. It demands that you to think; and look beyond the regular and mundane expectations from a horror movie. It's not a study in jump-scares but rather a slow, psychological torture. The movie is set in a post-apocalyptic world where alien monsters with hypersensitive hearing have wiped out the society. They attack at the slightest hint of a man-made sound and the only way to survive is to be totally and utterly silent. It is bang in the middle of this invasion that the movie begins. We meet a family, the only survivors in a deserted town; a couple and their three kids. They try to survive in this place while struggling to establish contact with the outside world.
I'm a generally quiet person, but I can't imagine having to live without sound, without the comfort of my own voice - I realised as I watched this movie that I may not even be able to think properly if I didn't know what I sounded like. A new perspective on the word luxury, and privilege. One of the children in the surviving family in the movie is congenitally deaf and that gives her an excellent chance; the intrinsic formula of the world hasn't changed for her. The family in turn has the advantage of being fluent in sign language and that is one reason they stay connected through the events.
A Quiet Place is certain of its scope - it's not an action movie or an alien invasion kind of sci-fi story. Where did the creatures come from, why is the Abbott family the only ones alive, what happened to the rest of the world - these are questions the movie will not attempt to answer. It has a narrower scope, in that it doesn't deal with politics or the anthropology of an apocalypse; rather uses that plot device to delve into our psychology. The Quiet Place takes you out of your daily comforts and plants you into a world that has unfair demands and constant threats. It's a movie about confronting the odds and facing fear. It's about love ties and loyalties being tested. It's about the value of the smallest things we take for granted - simple things really, like a baby's laugh or a favourite piece of music.
Watching A Quiet Place in the cinemas enhanced the haunting effect the movie had on me. I'd never realised before just how noisy cinema halls are. People whooping, laughing, commenting; the odd mobile phone ringing, and god forbid, popcorn. Have you ever noticed how loud popcorn is? Everyone in the audience was utterly silent as we watched A Quiet Place. The movie was stripped of all noise and suddenly, like the characters and creatures of this world, we were also hypersensitive to noise. And that was the biggest show-stopping surprise the movie had to offer!
Not only did it capture real horror, but it juxtaposed itself against regular thrills by taking away the one thing that the horror genre loves to exploit: sound effects. Horror as we know it now is all about sound. We all know and hate the anxiety-inducing murmur in a suspenseful scene, building up to a bang when a monster appears to scare us. Pennywise the Clown is made tenfold scarier by that raspy voice; I have goosebumps just typing about it. A quick search reveals many web pages about audio tricks used in horror to scare the daylights out of you. And yet, A Quiet Place had nothing. And somehow, that was freakier than any sound effect.
