A Quiet Place: Scaredy-Cats Taking Back the Horror Movie

 

    Raise your hand if growing up you were “that friend” who couldn’t stomach scary movies.

    Don’t worry, this is a safe space. I hated scary movies for as long as I could remember.

    In my youth I didn’t find the sensation of clenching your toes for 80 minutes straight particularly appealing, so I just let horror movies exist in their lane. Their lane, approximately 39 and a half feet away from mine. Of course, fast forward fifteen years and one Media Arts Studies degree later, and I can't really maintain that distance.

The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1920)

    And that's not an entirely bad thing. My scholarly dives into the genre have taken me to some interesting places with horror. The Shining stands out as one example of a film I never thought I’d love growing up, but here I am. But unfortunately, that's not the experience I have with every scary movie.

    This summer, I finally viewed a certain film, a milestone within horror culture that has amassed a loyal following over the decades, and it left me feeling sick to my stomach. The movie itself wasn’t itself particularly graphic, but the presentation of the film felt remarkably invasive and repulsive. The film seemed to exist for no other purpose than to make its viewer nauseous. I could actually feel my brain deploying some counter-measure against what I was seeing--to make me respond less to the torture of this girl who was screaming so violently it looked like her eyes were actively trying to pop out of her skill.

    I'm just saying, Judy Garland would never do this to me.

    Only a few weeks after, I had an entirely different experience watching A Quiet Place.

    A Quiet Place is a 2018 horror film directed by John Krasinski. The film stars Krasinski and his off-screen wife, Emily Blunt, and follows the mother and father (Lee and Evelyn) as they try to lead their children (Regan and Marcus) through a post-apocalyptic earth dominated by alien monsters. The monsters are blind but have ultra-sensitive hearing with no known weakness. Make a single sound and they will kill you. Having already lost their youngest child to the monsters, Lee and Evelyn spend their silent hours wondering if they will be able to keep their children alive.  

    

    The film was an undisputed success critically and financially. The film grossed $340 M worldwide on a budget of roughly $20 M and scored a 96 on RottenTomatoes with critic Josephine Livingstone calling it “a movie about the sound of fear, but it gives us a great deal more to listen to.” Famed horror author, Stephen King, called the film "an extraordinary piece of work." Both The National Review and the American Film Institute singled out the film as one of the top ten movies of 2018. As of this writing, the first sequel is collecting dust in the Paramount vaults after being booted from its April 2020 release date following the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, a third film set in this same universe directed by Jeff Nichols was announced back in October. [EDIT: Just kidding. Turns out we're getting Michael Sarnoski instead.]

    Part of this movie's success lies in how it crafts a very fun playground. I missed this one in theaters, but I knew that part of the "Quiet Place" appeal was the sort of interactiveness of the experience, the way that it challenged its audiences to watch it without making any noise alongside the characters. So, a large part of this movie's success is its intricate understanding of how scares work. But what part of what I'm going to argue here is that it's tight-knit relationship with horror runs a lot deeper than the first-person-shooter experience it creates. This is a film that understands on an almost spiritual level what it means to be truly scared.

    This is all funny given that ... Krasinski himself has claimed he was never into scary movies. In his words,

“I never was a big horror guy because I was just too scared. That’s the truth. Then these producers called me one day and said: ‘Would you ever act in a horror movie?’ I said: ‘I don’t know, I’m kind of a scaredy cat, but if it’s a cool idea maybe.’ And they said: ‘Well, the idea is that this family can’t make any noise and you have to figure out why.’ And I thought: ‘That’s as good a one-liner as you can get.’”

    There’s a lot about A Quiet Place that makes it "scary." Evelyn stifling a scream as she’s about to give birth just as the monsters creep through the hallway, knowing that even a whimper would be deadly—that’s scary.

    But the reasons why this film is such a standout within its genre run a lot deeper than that. There are subterranean creative decisions at work here that make even horror neophytes wonder why it took them so long to get into the game. A brilliant horror film such as this could have only come from someone who "doesn't know" how to make a horror movie.

Why Do People Like Scaring Themselves Anyway?

 Over the years, the genre has accumulated a lot of thorny elements that make this class of film hard to swallow for non-natives. You know these well: the graphic images of mutilated human bodies, the sheer volume of mutilated bodies, the way female “scream queens” in particular are tortured within these films, the dumb teenagers doing dumb things.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

    Maybe you’ve observed many of these horror hallmarks and wondered, “Why would anyone subject themselves to something so . . . yucky?” Let’s talk about that.

    Recent studies show that participants in voluntary scare experiences (like watching a horror movie or visiting a haunted house) exhibit higher brain activity during the episode followed by a dip in brain activity after the fact. Horror movies with their jump scares and chase sequences essentially give your brain a workout, and so the exhale that comes in their wake feels more gratifying for it.

    But one must also consider how the audience or consumer is interacting with this voluntary scare experience on a symbolic, metaphorical level. Horror is a genre within a larger artistic body of work capable of revealing deep questions about the human experience.

    And because horror movies market themselves on appealing to very base instincts, people tend to underestimate how cerebral these onscreen situations can be. Even your drive-in B-movies about dumb teenagers running from some carnivorous Jell-O monster can speak to the anxieties the rising generation feels about growing up in a world where the adults in power might not believe them if they were being menaced by some malicious entity of unknown origin.

    Horror as a genre forces us to explore what fears we hold on a societal level. And it’s important to note that the fear is never as straightforward as just being chased through the house with a knife. There’s the literal fear displayed onscreen that gets your blood pumping, then there’s the subtextual fear the film is depicting through code and symbolism that makes you so invested in the situation.

Poltergeist (1982)

    The movie can be direct with what subject or institution it’s dissecting, as seen in films like Get Out (with systemic racism) or last year’s The Invisible Man (with abusive relationships), or it can fall more abstract, as seen with a film like The Wolf Man and its fears on the subconscious. All art employs metaphor and symbolism to explore human desires, but horror specifically exposes in the viewer their unspoken anxieties. Writer Lindsay Romain describes the genre in an piece for this very film, 

“Good horror feels like recognition; like someone is decoding things for us. When you are prone to suffering, there is an element of salvation in horror. It speaks to the nasty thing inside of us and tells us we’re not alone. It asks questions and opens the wounds because it knows that’s what we need to heal. We leave feeling changed in some fundamental way."

The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

   What this commonly entails is some kind of reckoning with the decadence and depravity that is inherent in both the individual and all of humanity. Horror tends to work backward from the conclusion that polite society is merely dressing over a diseased collective unconscious, and that this dressing is never that far from falling away.

   One of the most influential movies of the genre, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, codified many of the tropes and ideologies that horror films use today. One sequence (possibly the most referenced scene within all of film studies) has Norman Bates spy on Marion Crane through a peephole where he watches her undress. In that moment, we take on his perspective and see Marion undressing through the hole in the wall. The thing he sees is the thing we see: we have become Norman Bates, the predator, the bad guy.

Psycho (1960)

    We are indulging in this voyeuristic, sinful behavior with Norman and so become complicit in it--aren’t most of us here at the movie just to watch screaming ladies get some stabby-stabbies anyway? By forcing us to identify with the guy peeping on Marion, the film is exposing our own appetites for evil: We are all Norman Bates.

    See, horror films are not musicals. They’re not interested in giving shape to the dreams you wish you could dream. Neither are they westerns that want your American spirit to reflect on the muscle and grit that formed this great nation.

    Horror wants you looking for the monsters after the credits roll. Horror tells you that your tv randomly turning itself on in the middle of the night isn’t just a benign happenstance, but rather the latent evil and chaos of the universe stirring just behind the curtain of social equilibrium, reminding you that it’s there and that with only the slightest shift it can break through the membrane to drag you screaming into the hellish oblivion from which we are all spawned.

The Ring (2002)

         Horror films are so repulsive because that shock factor motivates the viewer to begin the investigative process. By rattling the audience’s sense of security, horror compels viewers to question society, institutions, and even their own subconscious. Horror is disturbing by nature, but it is a little erroneous to decry the whole genre as the hall of desecration. (Want to ease in to the world of horror? Check out my recommendations for horror novices.)

         This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t question the lengths horror goes to make its point. The media we intake leaves imprints on our worldviews and even our brain chemistry, and that’s certainly true of horror films with their depictions of violence and obsession with evil. But there is a baby somewhere in that bathwater. (Granted, it could be the devil’s baby ...)

         So then, what questions is A Quiet Place forcing us to ask? I think Emily Blunt’s Evelyn says it best.

 The Questions "A Quiet Place" Forces us to Ask

    One aspect of the film that was really leveraged during the marketing of this film was the personal investment of Krasinski. In his words, 

“We'd just had our second daughter when I read the original script, so I was obviously cracked open emotionally and feeling all these fears that new parents go through, which is 'how do we keep our children safe and alive?' I connected more personally to the plight of the family than to the fact that it was a scary movie.”

    This narrative is ratified by Krasinski not only playing the father himself, but also in casting his offscreen wife, Emily Blunt, in the role of the mother. (No, Millicent Simmons and Noah Jupe are, tragically, not their actual kids.)

    Most horror films paint in broad strokes. They create scares based on our fears about social conformity, sexual awakening, scientific advancement, and so on. A Quiet Place is much more focused than that. The worst fear that A Quiet Place forces you to confront is that because of your insufficiency as a parent, your kids will not survive this world--the monsters will take them from you right before your eyes and you won’t be able to do a thing about it, not even scream.

    Perhaps this is the reason why the children, Regan and Marcus, are almost always the ones in danger. The parents aren’t really tested by the monsters in the same way that the kids are, nor are they in danger as often.

    Lee never encounters the monsters without one or both of his dependents in tow. Meanwhile, Evelyn is stalked by the creatures twice, once as she’s about to give birth and again when she hides her newborn in the flooding basement, but both instances place Evelyn in her motherly duties where the focus is just as much on safely delivering or protecting her child as it is on her own safety. We’re not scared of mom or dad dying as much as we are of mom and dad watching another one of their kids snatched right in front of them.

    As a result, this film has a lot more in common thematically with a film like The Impossible or Finding Nemo than a film like The Shining or Rosemary’s Baby. The latter two films are also designed around familial relationships, but they pervert the sanctuary connoted by the family structure. Much of what makes Jack’s descent into murderous madness so unsettling in The Shining is the understanding that the father/husband is supposed to protect his wife and child from monsters. The idea of your father becoming the monster is, well, horrific. The fear of being chased through the halls with an axe pales by comparison.

    But A Quiet Place doesn’t flip the script like that. Lee and Evelyn do exactly what you expect parents to do. That’s one line the film isn’t interested in crossing. A Quiet Place insists that the world can end and fathers and mothers will still do everything they can for their children. The film uses horror-movie vocabulary to display the very real fears around keeping your kids alive in a world that feels like it is overflowing with monsters.

How Does the Movie Do it?

The Spiral Staircase (1946)

         Any genre has its own list of hallmarks and signifiers, and trying to list all of the characteristics for even one genre is nearly impossible. What’s more, no one film in any genre plays by all of the rules of said genre. It then stands to reason that just because a genre has rules, that doesn’t mean that a film is beholden to all of them. The collage a film makes with the features of its genre are much of what gives said film personality.

Alien (1979)

   Let’s take stock of some of the features of the horror film. A recurring predator-prey scenario, jump scares, subdued color palette, an emphasis on isolation and claustrophobia, etc. The gang's all here in Krasinski's movie.

    The film uses a lot of horror iconography to explore the fear of not being able to protect your kids, but a lot of what makes the film special is visible in what it doesn't borrow from the genre.

    For one thing, the central characters aren’t a gaggle of horny teenagers. You as the audience aren’t caught in the crossfires of not wanting to see humans gutted but also not wanting these dopes to pass on their genes. There’s no ambiguity with the Abbots—they need to make it home safely.

    The closest thing we get to a scream queen is Emily Blunt’s character, but Evelyn is never sexualized. Any fragility she does exhibit is 100% justified by her pregnancy, yet on two separate occasions she singlehandedly evades the monsters with nothing but her wits and determination, and both times she saves not only herself but her child. Even in her most vulnerable circumstance she still demonstrates resourcefulness and resilience equal to that of her husband.

    Moreover, for how frightening the movie gets, it’s quite bloodless in practice. When characters die, they’re just sort of body-slammed into the hereafter. In-universe the actual slaughter has to be fairly messy, but the film denies spectators the masochistic pleasure of seeing human bodies made into ground beef. When a film plays the horror game but skips the carnage, what you’re left with is the emotional weight of the killing, the empathic sting that comes with the loss of human life.

         And because the film chooses not to play with dialogue or sound, so much of the storytelling ends up relying on visuals--particularly closeups. And what this results in is a lot of the storytelling being conveyed through tight shots of the characters' faces and eyes, fortifying the experience with a very humanized element that doesn't compart with how horror usually behaves.

    There’s often a certain futility to the endings in scary movies that can leave viewers with a bad taste in their mouth. The monster always comes back at the last moment and pulls our main character into the darkness, or they finally kill the zombie only to see a mass of undead hands tearing away at the bedroom door. Horror films by design leave the audience feeling rattled because they play off our anxiety that not all is alright in paradise. If you want your audience to feel uncomfortable with the status quo, then there isn’t much incentive to give your audience closure.

    And when the good guys do get to go home, it's often through some kind of pyrrhic victory. There are generally heavy casualties on the good guy's side. And more, there's usually some kind of emotional toll, a worldview that has been shattered. Even if they survive the horrors of the story, they've seen too much and can't just go back to the way they were. Our protagonist gets rescued at the end of Island of Lost Souls, and the mad scientist even gets killed by his own creations, but he's learned something about human hubris and the intersection between man's dominion over nature versus their own appetites.

    A Quiet Place finds a loophole though: the film preserves the genre’s tradition of not removing the threat, but it still ends on a high note. The Abbots have their eyes opened by the end of this, yes, but their revelation is a comforting one.

    When Regan discovers her hearing aid emits a frequency that the monsters find agonizing, Evelyn takes advantage of the monster’s moment of weakness and blasts it in the head with a shotgun. But at least two others, alerted by the sound of the gunshot, rocket on a murder path to the house. The danger is on their doorstep, but the Abbots have finally figured out the monsters’ weakness. They load the guns, ready to meet the threat head-on. There’s a chance they might come out of this okay.

    A Quiet Place knows better than to tell audiences that the monsters are gone now and the kids are finally safe--that’s not how horror works and that’s certainly not how parenting works--but it does console them with the truth that they can be active participants in this fight. If you’re a scaredy-cat like me, this is one of the biggest draws of A Quiet Place. It has all the frights and philosophy of a horror movie without leaving you feeling like you need to take a shower after to scrub the Norman Bates off your psyche.

Scream (1996)

    See, horror is a very popular demographic with older teenagers and young adults--an age bracket wedged right between the characters represented in this movie. The default attitude for most of horror is a sort of adolescent snarkiness. These parades of futility just make a lot of sense for a demographic that is starting to reckon with the system's faults and imagining that maybe there is just no fixing it.

    And this makes A Quiet Place and its angle very unique. It's actively looking for a better world, even when it seems that it just isn't there. When we see that Evelyn is expecting a baby, it honestly makes you want to start bashing your head in. We're over a year out from the apocalypse, and the death of their kid, so we know that they consciously decided to bring a baby into this world knowing that the world is really hostile to things that don't have a mute button. But this is also what helps make the film stand out among other films of the genre. 

    Again, horror is a genre that almost always originates from a place of cynicism, if not outright nihilism. The fact that these movies almost always center on a bunch of lowlifes who seem biologically wired to make terrible decisions is because horror reflects the base impulses of humanity--what the genre would say it the most honest representation of the human spirit.

    A Quiet Place plays it different. Its core is one of ... not necessarily idealism, but definitely hope. It recognizes that the world is rife with frightening things, but it imagines a way forward for those who must navigate it.

     Through horror’s long history of exposing human fears, the genre has developed a recognizable code for transmitting meaning. Force your audience to identify with the bad guy like in Psycho. Violate sanctioned boundaries like The Shining did with fatherhood. And so on. But sometimes it’s a lot simpler than that. In another interview Krasinski shared,

“I thought if I could connect to that and really nail down the family side of it, then all the scares would come because you don’t want to worry about this family.”

    The movie ignores many codes or traditions of scary movies, but still manages to make a scary movie by intimately tethering your emotions to the characters. A Quiet Place shows genuine curiosity about which elements of the horror genre are essential to the horror experience. And the conclusion seems to be that even in a genre so married to paranoia and nihilism, there’s actually a lot of room for feelings.

The Liability of Emotion

The Evil Dead (1981)

    An extension of the genre denying the audience closure is convincing the audience that the world is overwhelmingly bleak and unforgiving, and if you hope to survive it, you'd best keep your feelings to yourself.

    Compare the approach of A Quiet Place to a movie like Brian de Palma’s 1976 horror film, Carrie. [Spoilers in this and the next paragraph] The final scene of this film has Sue, the sole survivor of Carrie’s massacre at the prom, laying flowers at the charred remains of Carrie’s house. Sue is the only person who sees Carrie’s story as one of tragedy and Carrie herself as a victim. The musical score is serene, the tone is meditative. For a time the audience just absorbs the sadness of the moment, and it is this sense of security that makes it all the more alarming when Carrie’s undead hand bursts from beneath the grave and grabs Sue.

Carrie (1976)

    Many consider this to be the film’s most potent scare, and it kicks so hard precisely because the filmmaking lures the viewer into a false sense of security and strikes while their emotions are exposed. “Don’t you get it? There are no tender scenes in horror movies. This isn’t Full House for Krueger’s sake.” The film is effectively punishing the human heart, both to Sue who dared to feel compassion for Carrie and to the audience who thought this was going out on any note but sheer terror. Conditioning your audience to not expose their emotions seems rather paranoid, but when your genre exists to engender suspicion and distrust, it makes sense.

    A Quiet Place uses similar film language in the scene where Lee is killed saving his kids. As the monster starts tearing apart the truck that Regan and Marcus are hiding in, Lee struggles to get to his feet, grabbing the monster’s attention by dropping the axe. All the while a slow piano score is drizzling the audience with sentiment. A frightening possibility occurs to us--he's not actually going to ... is he? Then as he and Regan make eye contact for the last time, Lee signs to her that he has always loved her. We accept what's about to happen just when Lee unleashes a scream, and the monster charges murderously toward him as the kids roll off to safety and the tears roll down our face.

    The film signals to the audience that this is a moment where they are about to feel things, but unlike Carrie or most horror films, the movie doesn’t punish the audience for having a heart. The culmination of the scene isn’t a jump-scare sneak attack, but a display of pure parental love. Turns out there can be tender scenes in horror movies.

    This insistence to give the audience a break, to wallow in sentiment, is perhaps why some critics call the film “tame horror” or claim it’s “almost a good horror film.” Returning to Romain's piece, she says,

"A Quiet Place, a solid attempt with all the right pieces, never really gets there. It’s about the horrors of parenting, yes, but lacks the galvanizing uniqueness of something like The Babadook or the shattering reality of The Road or Night of the Living Dead .”

    I sometimes hear this sentiment expressed among horror enthusiasts who don't care for the film. Again, A Quiet Place refuses to cross a lot of lines that your average horror film would barely even notice. Some say that by not going "too far," maybe A Quiet Place doesn’t go far enough. I see it differently.

    A Quiet Place recognizes that taking charge over the safety and nurturance of another human being is frightening enough. It understands that one need not always ingratiate abhorrent or repulsive content to learn about monsters. It understands that the thing we actually fear most is connection, or rather the loss of connection, and that it's only in facing off against that monster that we attain true enlightenment.

    Storytellers are beginning to understand that terror and pathos don’t have to be at opposite ends of the spectrum. Put them together and they actually enliven one another.

Horror for You and Me

Oddly enough, these movies have the same director

         Innovation is necessary for any genre to continue. Film styles don’t last long sitting stationary, and in order to achieve the needed liberation, it is often necessary to enlist an outsider’s perspective. This is true of all genres, not just horror. Playing with genre can also turn out very badly, and has, but innovation has to come from somewhere. Even someone who didn’t grow up watching horror movies can make a fantastic horror movie.

         Within this particular genre, A Quiet Place’s contribution is as admirable as it is novel. If the consequence of watching, say, too many musicals is never accepting that life isn’t all love songs and rainbows, what’s the worst-case scenario for indulging too much in horror? What’s the logical conclusion for a media diet that displays a steady stream of human carnage (often in gory detail), that conditions viewers to check their empathy at the door, and that propels a worldview of disordered evil? Why then might it be significant for a horror film to accentuate empathy and optimism rather than punishing it?

         Now before we go I want to make one thing clear to all you horror enthusiasts out there.

    I know that whenever a scary movie starts making headlines, there is inevitably dialogue from critics about said film being not just regular horror but "elevated horror." I saw a lot of that while researching for this film. I also saw a lot of longtime horror fans who were understandably frustrated by this term which implies that standard horror is somehow lesser.

 As someone who’s spent the last four years trying to convince the masses that, yes actually, there were “smart musicals" long before La La Land, I don’t want to patronize the genre’s fanbase or undercut its value. Horror, like any other genre, is subject to profundity or toxicity, excellence or ineptitude.

         My relationship with horror echoes John Krasinski’s, who shared,

“What I learned most from watching all these horror movies was how ignorant I was to not have seen them . . . I’m late to the horror party, but man, am I happy to be here.”

         I don't think Krasinski set out to "redeem" horror or anything. I think he just told a personal story using the language of cinematic terror, and the result was a film that felt fresh for people who were familiar with the genre and accessible for people who weren't. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from this movie, it’s that really cool things can happen when someone who “just doesn’t do horror” is willing to give scares a try, when they share that, yes, I have things that terrify me too.

    --The Professor