Sound is key to horror movies, and so is silence. The best horror scenes owe their tension to the battle between the two: when someone’s following you, you want to be as quiet as you can, but the quieter you are, the louder that footstep is, or your breath, or that door when it inevitably slams shut. The trailer for A Quiet Place, directed by and co-starring John Krasinski, lulls you with its silence — until it’s not silent anymore.

A Quiet Place follows a family living in a secluded house in the woods, who have to stay perpetually silent in fear of some unknown enemy that’s hyper-sensitive to sound. If they can’t hear you, the trailer helpfully states, they can’t hunt you. There are some really clever ways to mask noise shown in this trailer, from sprinkling fine sand along every pathway to rubbing the varnish off a wood floor so that your feet won’t make little sounds when they stick to it. Everything seems to be going great for this family, who eat off of large lettuce leaves and speak using sign language, until a game of Monopoly alerts whatever is outside their house to their presence.

There are a couple of movies this trailer reminds me of. Obviously it brings to mind the horror conceit of Don’t Breathe: being hunted by someone who can’t see you, but who can track you using sound. It also reminds me of this year’s fantastic It Comes at Night, in which a family lives together in a house in the woods after some apocalyptic event, and hide themselves from some unknown terror that stalks the woods after the sun goes down. There’s safety in silence, but silence is also the easiest thing to break.

A Quiet Place also stars Emily Blunt, Noah Jupe, and Millicent Simmonds, and opens in theaters April 6, 2018.

Gallery – The Scariest Non-Horror Movies:

http://screencrush.com/scariest-movies-that-arent-horror-movies/

 

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