[COLUMN] The Quiet Place Films Are Perfect Cinema Viewing | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

It’s great to watch a Quiet Place movie in a packed cinema with a game audience.

Of course, every discussion of the theatrical experience inevitably has to acknowledge that not all theatres are created equally. Many theatre chains are understaffed, making it difficult to provide ushers to police unruly behavior from people on their phones. There is a fairly widespread issue with projectors not being properly maintained, with faded bulbs blurring the image on screen. It can be expensive to go to a theatre at peak times. The theatre isn’t for everyone, and that is okay.

At the same time, those who are lucky enough to find a well-run local cinema with a great staff and a considerate clientele are in for a treat. Increasingly, the theatres thriving in this challenging landscape have embraced diversity and community. It’s not uncommon for local theatres to run book clubs or parent-and-baby screenings, to host repertory seasons and interviews. Not everybody has access to a cinema providing these services, but, where they exist, they are worthwhile.

There has been a lot of debate in recent years about what it takes to get audiences to the theatre. The consensus seems to be that the movie has to be “an event”, with Barbenheimer – the double feature of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer – being cited as a prime example. The argument is that movies must be gigantic spectacles to justify the big screen, which is one reason why blockbuster budgets have become so inflated.

However, this is a somewhat narrow argument for the theatrical space. It focuses on the size of the screen rather than the actual appeal of the theatre. The biggest difference between watching a film in a cinema and watching it at home isn’t how much space the image takes up. After all, it’s possible to sit far enough back in a theatre that the screen is effectively the same size as the huge flatscreen the viewer has at home.

Instead, what makes the cinema a magical space is the sensation of watching the movie in a room full of other people with no interruptions or disruptions. Again, it is worth conceding that this requires other patrons to behave themselves – which seems to be a big ask in any aspect of modern life – which is why it’s important to find a good theatre with a good community. However, when it works, there is nothing quite like it.

People love to share videos of audiences reacting to crowd-pleasing moments in films like Avengers: Endgame or Spider-Man: No Way Home. This may be one explanation for the appeal of reaction videos, allowing viewers to experience a relative stranger’s emotional response to a piece of media. Roger Ebert described cinema as an “empathy machine”, and the effect is heightened by communal experience. It’s not just empathy for the characters on screen, but for the people in the room.

This is why there was such a strong argument that Richard Linklater’s Hit Man deserved a proper theatrical release. Hit Man was a low-budget high-concept comedy co-written by and starring Glen Powell. It doesn’t have the scale or the spectacle to compete with a big budget blockbuster. However, that’s not the point. The film is funny, clever and playful, and it would have been great fun to watch it work its charm on an audience in real time.

After all, there’s a solid argument that movies like comedies and horrors benefit as much from theatrical distribution as big-budget spectacles. While Hollywood has effectively killed off the theatrical comedy, it is worth acknowledging that low- and medium-budget horror movies remain reliable performers. Sure, those movies make money because they are cheap, but audiences are still drawn to them by the promise of thrills and shocks in a dark room.

Of course, good movies are good movies no matter how the audience watches them. The Shining is a great film whether watched in a crowded theatre, at a television set at home or even on a phone on a flight. However, much of the response to films – particularly certain kinds of films like blockbusters, comedies and horrors – is more emotional than intellectual. That emotional experience is often heightened by sitting in a room with a crowd full of people processing the same feelings.

This has always been the magic trick of the Quiet Place franchise. The first film in the series arrived as part of a wave of what might be termed “experiential” horror films, horror movies that effectively weaponized the act of watching a horror movie. Lights Out was about a monster that could only move when it wasn’t seen, which turns the audience’s impulse to look away from the screen into a weapon to be used. Bird Box inverted that, creating a monster that the audience couldn’t look at.

The Quiet Place movies depict an alien invasion of Earth. These creatures appear to be blind, hunting their prey based on sound. As a result, any noise attracts their attention. This is a horror movie where screaming in terror is effectively certain death. For all that these are functionally straight-down-the-middle horror movies, A Quiet Place has an endearing self-aware premise, turning a default response to a horror movie into part of the horror itself.

This is reflected in how the films are made. As one might expect from the premise, there’s a lot of emphasis on the sound mix, pushing for heightened experience over verisimilitude. Certain sounds are turned up in the mix to underscore the threat that they pose. Silence is deployed judiciously to generate contrast. The audience isn’t hearing the world as it actually is, but as the characters might: focusing on any discordant noise as an existential threat.

This carries over to the way that the Quiet Place films are shot. The franchise is notable as a PG-13 horror franchise, one accessible to children. This limits the amount of gore or violence that can be shown on screen. In some ways, it’s remarkable what the series gets away with. The first film opens with the death of a child (Cade Woodward) and climaxes with a mother (Emily Blunt) giving birth. However, because the films prioritize suspense over graphic depictions of brutality, they appeal to younger viewers.

One of the great tricks within these movies is the recurring choice to focus the camera tightly on a single character in the midst of a larger horror or suspense sequence. This allows the movies to have the effect of violence and terror while never actually showing too much. It emphasizes the subjective experience of the horror. It is less about what is actually happening within the world of the film than it is about a given character’s emotional reaction to that nightmare. It places the audience in the character’s headspace.

The franchise’s premise also serves to minimize dialogue. Characters don’t really talk to each out that much, because every syllable is a potential death sentence. As a result, there really isn’t that much exposition in the Quiet Place movies. This forces the films to engage in visual storytelling, which is inherently cinematic. It also invites the audience to focus on the actions and behaviors of the characters rather than to fixate on plot logic and world-building.

It is an approach that plays very well in a theatre. There have been three films in the franchise to date, and I have had the pleasure of seeing all three in a crowded cinema. I saw the first one multiple times to be sure that I hadn’t just been extremely lucky with my first audience. In each case, the effect is dramatic. The audience invests instinctively in the horror on screen. When the film goes quiet, so does the audience, as if worried that any noise they make might alert the monsters in the film.

Of course, the audience doesn’t actually believe the movie can hear them. It is an instinctive response; once or twice I’ve seen a viewer catch themselves, almost embarrassed at how invested they are. Each of the three films involves at least one moment where the human protagonists get uncomfortably close to one of the monsters, and have to remain deathly silent. At each of these screenings, I noticed that quite a few members of the audience had raised their hands to cover their mouths, as if to silence their own breathing.

This is a truly wonderful effect, one heightened by the fact that the cinema audience can’t just pause the movie if it gets too intense or get distracted by something on their phone. It’s not an intellectual reaction to the film, but something emotional. It’s not necessarily something that I would notice had I been watching the movie alone or in the comfort of my own house. That’s not to suggest that I am immune to such a response, simply that I can’t witness my own experience of it from outside myself.

To be clear, this effect can carry over into home viewing. I’ve had the pleasure of watching A Quiet Place with my extended family on a trip home. It works just as well in a crowd of six or seven people. It’s quite something to glance away from the screen for a moment and watch my mother carefully reach for a bag of crisps like she is Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) stealing the NOC list in Mission: Impossible. However, the effect is undoubtedly amplified by the size of the audience.

It is fascinating because it is so direct. The Quiet Place films are not really “meta” horrors like the Scream franchise. They don’t really wink at the audience. They don’t draw attention to their artifice. They don’t punctuate their tense sequences with self-aware jokes to make sure that the audience isn’t taking it too seriously. They trust the audience to respond to the premise and the execution on their own terms. It’s remarkably effective.

There is something oddly appropriate in this. This essay has been a bit more personal than most of my writing, but then again it is an article about the appeal of subjectivity in an experiential art form. One reason that I’ll likely always associate the Quiet Place franchise with the theatrical experience is because I was literally on my way to the press screening of A Quiet Place: Part Two when Ireland closed its cinemas in response to the pandemic in March 2020.

While other studios responded by sending films directly to streaming, Paramount very wisely understood that this was a theatrical franchise. These movies were designed to play well in cinemas with a crowd. I wouldn’t get to see A Quiet Place: Part Two for over a year, waiting until cinemas reopened. As a film critic, the Quiet Place franchise perfectly straddles that very strange and unusual period.

The Quiet Place films are a strange celebration of the appeal of sitting in a darkened room with complete strangers, trying not to scream.