The Power of Sound Design in The Quietest Movies: A Quiet Place 1 and 2

What do you usually hear when the place you’re in goes completely silent? Is it that terribly unpleasant ringing noise your ears produce? Can you hear the army of ants climbing the wall behind you? Are you able to hear even a pin drop from the other corner? Can you hear your own heart beating?

It’s an unsurprising thing to know that many people find complete silence quite bothering. Don’t you hate it when the video or song you’re playing randomly stops due to unknown reasons? This is one heck of a comparison, though. When a pause happens to a video, you’re left with a still image. For a song, it’s just silence. But what’s similar is that looking at still images means you are bound to notice small details, and having complete silence means you get to hear very subtle pinches of sounds if there are any.

Recognize these horror-thriller movies? Seen them or not, you probably have at least heard about one of them. A Quiet Place is a movie from 2018 directed by John Krasinski about a family living in a post-apocalyptic world where blind monsters from an unexplained origin and with an abnormally sensitive ability to hear roam the planet. The movie then got its sequel two years later titled A Quiet Place Part II, also directed by Krasinski. Many theaters were speechless watching the two. Which isn’t shocking because these movies are not kidding with their titles. Overall, they really are pretty darn quiet. Some even say their trailers make more noise.

So, what made them stand out? If we look through the eyes of a casual movie enthusiast, maybe they’re just that scary. They induce an insane amount of anxiety. They have the most intense suspense moments and scenes. They truly radiate the aura of a bone-chilling thriller movie. Although if we listen to what an audio engineer has to say, it’d be an entirely different story.

Both movies have one important thing in common: a dependency on silence. Little known fact, silence isn’t just “nothing”. It’s like a big, empty room. You can put a tiny toy car in that room and be forced to stare at it because you have nothing else to look at. If the room is filled with a bunch of random things, wouldn’t your eyes be a little overwhelmed? It works the same way for auditory elements in movies, and it actually makes the most sense if you think about movie scenes that have no music. Does this mean the scenes show lesser emotions and are harder to understand? Of course not. Far from that, even. A Quiet Place 1 and 2 have unbelievably minimal music from start to end. You’re forced to hear every single thing that happens in most scenes. Such an X mark for audio engineers, huh?

Let’s use a scene from the second movie as an example.

This is a part of the beginning scene of A Quiet Place Part II, showing the events happening before the first movie. Lee (played by Krasinski himself), a main character who is talking to a policeman, is interrupted by a huge monster suddenly running into the frame and blindly ramming the police car. This was undoubtedly intended to be a jumpscare, and one of the reasons for that is the movie’s sudden change in audio mixing. The sound of the police car getting rammed is unexpectedly loud both in the low and high frequencies, which makes it sound deep and bass boosted, while also giving lots of hisses (or white noise, like a static TV). Mind you, this scene is the first time in the second movie where audio levels reach very high decibels. Not only will this scare the audience, but how the monster’s entrance completely turned the vibe of the movie around, it also gives the impression that this monster is the “thing”. They are big and would of course be louder than humans. They don’t whisper, they growl. Let’s call it the usual “stuttering high pitched growl that monsters in any movie always have.” They’re the loudest things in the movie and it lets viewers know very well that they’re just that dangerous in a world where you should never even click your tongue.

Something the movie also tends to do is give snippets of quietude into scenes. More specifically, it really likes to squeeze in tiny bits of silence. Although this is mostly done to make impact sounds punchier. To understand this better, the sound of a man hitting a block of wood would be more powerful if there is a very abrupt drop in volume (usually all the way to 0 decibels) just milliseconds before the block is hit. This technique is commonly done for music producing with lots of bass for an added punch or impact to a drop. The scene above did this so well, many said theaters were shaking just because. It can give the auditory illusion of sounds sounding sharper if they rapidly fluctuate to the roof and floor of volume decibels.

Speaking of quietude, these movies are able to do a stellar job at making viewers feel like they also need to stay quiet. Their way of making this possible is through Regan, a deaf daughter of Lee (played by Millicent Simmonds).

This fearless little girl is a genius choice of character for A Quiet Place. Why? Because for what the movies are known for, it gives audio engineers infinite possibilities to fiddle with sound effects since most scenes she’s in are quiet to put viewers in her position. No sense of hearing. Are you seeing the pattern here? The flat silence in her POV makes viewers anticipate jumpscares because they know it is what the movie likes to do. 

“Any moment now… A monster is going to appear and scare my soul away.”

Now that’s how you make viewers feel unsafe and afraid. Simply an outstanding work of art.