I often find myself being asked some variation of the same question: where is the appeal in horror movies? Comedies make us laugh, dramas can move us to joy or tears, but horrors are specifically designed to elicit fear. In a good horror movie we should feel naked, trapped, and vulnerable—so why would any reasonable person willingly subject themselves to that sort of experience?
Comedian-turned-director John Krasinski has made this question a lot easier to answer. In A Quiet Place we feel terrified for our central characters who must literally tread lightly every second of their lives to stay alive. We feel deeply uncomfortable each time a character audibly breathes or carelessly bumps something, knowing that everything could come crashing to an end because of the tiniest mistake. Even the simple but constant imagery of a nail jutting out of a floorboard serves as a reminder of how fragile our human lives are.
But perhaps this is part of what we find so compelling about the genre. If comedy and drama elevate humans to be heroes of their own stories, horror raises the stakes by exposing us as nothing more than survivors attempting to hold onto our lives and sanity. There is something refreshingly honest about that.
A Quiet Place takes its own unusual spin on this, setting its action in a post-apocalyptic wasteland that has been run over by blind monsters that hunt their prey through sound. The few survivors left must live in silence, adapting every facet of their lives to avoid speaking, crying, laughing, screaming, walking on hard surfaces, clinking cutlery, and the list goes on. With some adjustments, these can be worked around. But when it comes to certain tasks like giving birth, staying silent is easier said than done.
By hinging the film on a premise that cuts out frequent dialogue or needless exposition, Krasinski imposes a number of restrictions on himself—and yet these limitations only serve to spur on his creativity. Most significantly, he experiments with sound design outside of conventional guidelines. Each new setting introduces a new kind of silence that differentiates itself from the rest: a deadly quiet farmhouse, a deserted grocery store, and even the true silence that can only be understood by a deaf person. Each silence carries its own menace in a different way, forcing us to become hypersensitive to every potential threat.
This high-concept premise could have potentially unfolded in a grander scope, but the choice to focus on the life of a family creates a more intimate, genuinely emotional connection to the narrative. The teenage daughter of this family, Regan, is deaf, so it is only fitting that the actress who plays her, Millicent Simmonds, is as well. Regan’s deafness works within the film on multiple levels. Most obviously, her deafness allows for more opportunities to play with sound design, emphasising the terror of not knowing when there is danger lurking just out of sight.
But Regan’s deafness also works symbolically, highlighting the dichotomy between humanity and the monsters. She can see but not hear; the monsters can hear but not see. As such, the gap between the two sides widen, making the monsters seem not only more threatening, but also more foreign.
And lastly, her deafness acts as a brilliantly original plot device at many points throughout the film, recognising both its setbacks and situational benefits. It allows for easy explanation as to why the family is fluent in sign language, it puts Regan in danger more than once, and most importantly, it is significant to her discovery of the monsters’ fatal weakness.
Lee, played by Krasinski, is the stoic protector of the family, willing to give up anything for their survival. He fulfills an important role in keeping them alive, and yet it is Emily Blunt’s role of Evelyn, the mother, who offers hope for a future beyond the current apocalyptic crisis. She doesn’t just want her family to survive – she wants to see them thrive, and to see her children becoming “fully-formed, fully-thinking people” who don’t forget the small joys in life that are part of their humanity. In these moments of lightness we let our guard down and grow to genuinely care for the family. This eventually pays off in the final moments of the film when we see how their persistence, ingenuity, and kindness may potentially pave a way to a better future.
So next time someone asks why horror is such a popular genre, pointing them towards A Quiet Place would be a decent response. While its brilliant technical creativity is absolutely captivating in its own right, the cast and the depth they instill into their characters are what sell this movie. They are intelligent survivors, but they are also compassionate humans determined to make the most of their lives that they fight so hard to keep. It is undeniably a scary movie that is supposed to make us uncomfortable, but that is exactly the point of horror. In our fear we can learn to appreciate not just our lives, but the lives of others as well. In A Quiet Place Krasinski manages to tie all of this together beautifully, creating a horror film that will surely be remembered in years to come.
