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This article looks at three recent, highly successful horror films A Quiet Place (Krasinski: 2018), Bird Box (Bier: 2018) and The Silence (Leonetti: 2019), all of which centre their respective plots around the horror of life in the twenty-first century and its intersection with ideas around deafness and/or blindness. It should be noted that whilst all the narratives contain characters that are shown as being either blind or deaf, it is actually the actions of not seeing, not hearing and not making-a-sound that are of prime importance to the various films’ outcomes.
Broadly speaking, all three movies fit into the category of Smart Horror, where narrative takes precedence over, though does not preclude, jump scares or graphic gore. The three films fit alongside other recent movies such as Hush (Flanagan: 2016) and Don’t Breathe (Alvarez: 2016), which feature blind and deaf central characters and represent these ways of being as equally a curse (a “disability”) and a blessing (a “gift”). Indeed, as with many other films showing blindness or deafness, they can be seen to fit into the rather simplistic and demeaning normative adage that both will inevitably cause heightened acuity in the other senses to “make up” for the deficiency. This, however, does not recognize difference and equality but replaces it with the category of “special” and/or “gifted”, which labels the deaf or blind person as being “safe” but still separate from normative society.[1] What is particular about A Quiet Place, Bird Box and The Silence is that they do not show individually motivated threats or household invasion, such as in Hush or Don’t Breathe, but an all-consuming plague and existential threat to humanity itself and it is only through being or mimicking deafness or blindness that a few might survive this barrage of excess.
The horror manifested by the plague is usually of mysterious origin, being from outer-space or a pre-historic cavern, and seems to be everywhere at once, but it is worth looking more closely at each film to see how blindness or deafness works within each and what it might say about the source and meaning of horror in each story.
Bird Box is set in the present day and shows a world succumbing to a mysterious invasion that is completely based on or around seeing. It began with unexplained mass suicides in Siberia — which resonates with The Thing (Carpenter: 1982) and an unearthed contagion that produces mass hysteria — and quickly spread across the globe. It is never specified exactly what the cause is other than that it’s possibly from beyond our world and that even a glimpse of these alien entities will cause the viewer to go insane — here there is a reference to Event Horizon (Anderson: 1997) and a Hell dimension where sensory excess causes people to gouge their own eyes out. The only way to survive this visual plague is to constantly wear a blindfold, effectively making oneself blind. The story follows Majorie (Sandra Bullock) who leaves the city to try to find a safe haven for herself and two children she has with her. This she eventually does when she comes across a school for the blind that is far away from built-up areas and has created something of a sanctuary for the “unsighted” away from the world, though in the book from which the film is taken the sanctuary is peopled by those who have gouged their eyes out. The screen adaptations of John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951) also use the idea of a sanctuary in a world of the blind, though in the first film adaption of the same name by Peter Sekely in 1963, the sanctuary is overrun and abused by the sighted and, in the more recent mini-series by Nick Copus, is shown as corrupt from within. What is interesting in the film is that the unseen, but all-seeing, plague is more strongly associated with populated areas — Marjorie leaves the city to find safety — and is a kind of sensory overload, as though the victims are receiving too much sensation or information through their eyes for their brains to cope with, hence driving them insane.
A Quiet Place shows an indeterminate post-apocalyptic future where civilization has already collapsed and the cities have been abandoned. All this has happened due to the sudden invasion of a huge amount of deadly, flying creatures from another world — it is never revealed where the creatures might be from — who have amazingly sensitive hearing with which to pinpoint their victims. The film follows the Abbott family, whose eldest daughter, Regan (Millicent Simmonds), is deaf and which somehow makes them uniquely prepared for the situation they are in.[2] In fact, not only does the ability to use sign language keep them alive, but the cochlear implant that the father makes for his daughter turns out to be a weapon against the creatures. Although the set-up is slightly different from Bird Box, there is also the idea of sensory overload here as the creatures themselves can be seen to materialize or coalesce from the sensory excess of the twenty-first century and hence the need to abandon cities, as the focus of such excess, and retreat to places of extreme quiet. Even the dramatic effects that sonic feedback have on the monsters, discovered by accident, can be seen to be a kind of anti-sensory device, where the excess that created them also nullifies them.
Something similar occurs in The Silence, which is again set in the present, and where the Andrews family have a daughter, Ally (Kiernan Shipka), who has been deaf for the previous three years, when everything suddenly changes. Some researchers break into an underground cavern and release swarms of voracious, flesh-eating prehistoric flying reptiles, called Vesps, that have super sensitive hearing. The Vesps are attracted to noise and immediately head to the nearest cities to feed, prompting the Andrews to leave for quieter surroundings in the countryside.
As in A Quiet Place, the ability to communicate without speaking is central to the family surviving and, after a run-in with a cult that wants the girl for themselves, the use of silent communication allows the Andrews to reach a refuge and plan for a future where, maybe, everyone learns to live quietly. The film combines the two earlier ones, seeing the creatures released by twenty-first-century technology but not so easily dispelled, requiring sanctuary away from the sensory excess of the modern world to plan some kind of possible future.
In this way, it is possible to read all these creatures as a manifestation of our lifestyles in the twenty-first century and the kinds of sensory overload that can be provided via visual, aural and even smart technology. All the films show humanity being literally consumed by this over-stimulation that will drive them either mad or tear them apart. Horror here, then, is invisible, a psychologically affective environment born of cognitive dissonance, which is the uncontrollable and uncontainable essence of life in the twenty-first century: not the extremes of politics, religion, greed, or even climate, but the “noise” created by, in, and around them.
In this sense the films go against the premise of other such recent Smart Horror narratives such as The Ritual (Bruckner: 2017), Get Out (Peele: 2017) and The Apostle (Evans: 2018), where leaving the city is the most dangerous thing you can do, and usually because there is a loss of communication and/or signal which separates the protagonists from civilization and the present.[3] In Bird Box, A Quiet Place and The Silence these are the very things that bring about death and destruction: the modern world will literally kill you. Within this then, anything that separates individuals from social normativity is a vital means of survival; perceived disability, social exclusion and otherness then become the markers of those that can survive the horrors of twenty-first century, an evolutionary adaptation that can negate the sensorial and cognitive overload or a world that is just too much.
Simon Bacon, editor of Horror: A Companion
[1] See Terri Thrower, ‘Overcoming the Need to “Overcome”: Challenging Disability Narratives in “The Miracle”,’ in Marja Evelyn Mogk, ed., Different Bodies: Essays on Disability in Film and Television (Jefferson: McFarland & Co.: 2013), pp 205–18. (Go Back)
[2] Though it should be mentioned they lose their youngest son to the creatures. (Go Back)
[3] Interestingly, It Follows (Mitchell: 2014) occurs on the suburban area between the city and the countryside where urban decay is seeing the rural slowly reclaiming the land, or the city slowly regressing back to it. (Go Back)
