Made of the fright stuff
MAKING a scary movie is a bit like landing a big fish, according to Oscar-winning filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro.
When a movie is trying to instil tension or dread in its viewers, says the maker of The Shape of Water, it has to reel them in – sometimes slowly and surely, sometimes with a little more effort.
But anyone who had ever tried to catch a sizeable sea creature — or give a viewer the heebie-jeebies — will know that there’s a time to release some of that tension.
In scary movies, the two most effective ways are a false alarm – one old favourite is a cat leaping out of nowhere to startle a character onscreen – or an actual alarm, when that thing a viewer has been afraid of all along finally happens.
Now, if decade after decade of big-screen thrillers and chillers have taught us anything, it’s that there’s one natural reaction to a scary situation – scream until your lungs are ready to burst. It’s as much a tension-breaker for the audience as it is for the imperilled characters onscreen.
But imagine yourself in a scenario where you’re constantly on edge or confronted by the most horrific of circumstances … and you can’t make a sound.
It’s frightening, sure. But maybe even worse than that, it’s frustrating.
And that’s what gives the new horror-thriller A Quiet Place, which opened in cinemas on Thursday, such incredible impact.
Directed and co-written by actor John Krasinski, who plays one of the adult leads opposite real-life wife Emily Blunt, A Quiet Place is a monster movie with a truly diabolical twist – the hostile, hungry creatures making a meal of the human race use acute hearing to hunt their prey. Make a noise above a hushed whisper and they’re onto you quick-smart. For the characters played by Krasinski and Blunt, and their children (played by talented young actors Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe), this has meant some serious adjustment to everyday life. Some ways are obvious – the family tends to communicate in sign language rather than speech — but Krasinski, perhaps best-known for playing on the US remake of The Office, has really thought through every aspect of this scenario, illustrating it in ways large and small that give the audience an immediate sense of how it must feel to live this way.
Forget plates and cutlery when eating dinner, for instance, because even that tiny amount of sound could put you on the menu for a ravenous monster.
But then A Quiet Place ups the ante even further.
Blunt’s character is heavily pregnant and due to give birth any second now. And while I have zero experience in delivery rooms, it’s my understanding that the volume can sometimes get raised.
Not to mention the fact that once a baby arrives, a gentle ‘Shhh…’ usually isn’t enough to dissuade them from crying.
On top of all that, though, Krasinski sets up one of the most dread-inducing moments of the past decade or so.
It’s one of the best examples of suspense maestro Alfred Hitchcock’s technique of having the audience be aware of a threat while the characters onscreen are not.
It’s something Del Toro echoes in his thoughts on getting the viewers worked up: “You need to have the audience know what’s going on, but the characters are unaware.”
Seeing A Quiet Place in a crowded cinema a week or so ago, the tension was tangible as one of the characters unwittingly inched closer and closer to something awful.
And what was worse, this character couldn’t even scream. Luckily, all of us in the cinema were happy to do so for them. And I’ll bet you do likewise if you choose to visit. A Quiet Place.