Horror films include a diverse range of communication methods: anything from writing in blood, ghostly TV static, speaking in tongues, intense stares into the soul, opening puzzle boxes, reading from cursed books, dreaming, saying a name five times in a mirror, channeling spirits from beyond, passing around video tapes. The list could go on. There are also more typical methods, of course: screaming, crying, cackling. Among this list of strange and unusual ways to communicate, however, is a noticeable absence. A Quiet Place, directed by John Krasinski, may be the only horror film I’ve seen that so prominently features American Sign Language.
To encourage you to go see this movie, I’ve tried to avoid spoilers, though I do make vague mention of the end. The film starts mid-action, in the near future, the world already unrecognizable. Any remaining humans in this world cower in fear of violent and indestructible (gorgeously-designed) creatures, who appear to have already killed much of the population. The creatures are attracted to sound, which appears to cause them pain. In fact, their heads are comprised of teeth and an oversized, armor-encased ear. Whatever makes a sound is instantly destroyed. The tagline for the film is “silence is survival.”
John Krasinski
The film follows one family—a husband and wife and their children—that has found a way to survive, reliant largely on their ingenuity on the family farm but also on their fluency in American Sign Language, which they, presumably, had always used to communicate with daughter Regan, who is hearing impaired and uses a cochlear implant, or a surgical hearing aid, with limited success. Despite her father’s repeated attempts to improve this device, Regan’s impairment barely registers as one.
In most interviews about the film, John Krasinski reaffirms his insistence on having a deaf actress play the part of Regan, and Millicent Simmonds is masterful at conveying her character’s experience of this new world, which isn’t all that new for her. The importance of this casting decision cannot be understated. In a Now This video, Simmonds says that she hopes the film will “inspire directors and other screenwriters to include more deaf talent and be more creative in the way [they] use deaf talent.”[i] In an interview on The Wrap, Krasinski describes how Simmonds became “a guide through this entire story…through the world of what it’s like to experience the world without hearing.”[ii] Not only does the film showcase a character with disabilities in a position of equality, it also seeks to understand this experience from an authority such as Simmonds rather than crafting an ableist view of hearing impairment. The sound has been structured to reproduce these experiences. As Mekado Murphy describes, “They worked to create what they called ‘sound envelopes,’ putting audiences in a character’s shoes to hear what they hear and how they might hear it.” Simmonds has several versions of these “sound envelopes,” depending on her use of hearing devices.[iii]
Emily Blunt
In a world where sound is lethal, those who don’t rely on sound to survive have a natural advantage, a stark reconfiguration of the stigmatization and condescension those with disabilities often face. Disability has become ability. Of course, Regan can still make noise—and, dangerously, may be unable to tell if she’s making noise—but she does not rely on spoken communication to express herself to others. Her family also reaps this benefit. ASL, a language that relatively few people without impairments learn, offers safety and the possibility to renormalize life and preserve relationships, turning a language associated with abnormality into the center of the new norm. ASL is not special treatment to make sure that one individual feels included, as it is often seen to be; it’s now for everyone. Hearing and speaking are no longer of any use for communication.
Millicent Simmonds and Krasinski
Regan’s father has a workshop in the basement—strangely a workshop he doesn’t let her enter—where he attempts to find other survivors via Morse code and radios (always careful to use headphones, of course). His attempts to allow her to hear seem misguided in this world, a holdover from an ableist world in which disability needs to be “fixed.” There are certainly sentimental, perhaps well-intentioned, reasons for these continued attempts, which I will not go into, but Regan herself seems to hold out little hope for success. Repeated attempts and failures, instead, make her feel worse.
While every single member of the cast has a heroic moment during the film, Regan’s moment is deeply seated in her hearing impairment and her father’s past and present responses to it, responses that she adapts and repurposes in this new world of silence. Her act of heroism is one that only someone with her abilities and understanding of the world could perform. That’s as close to a spoiler as I can get. Trust me, the ending is good.
Not all critics have agreed that the use of ASL throughout the film is innovative, inclusive, or positive. Richard Brody dismisses the validity and depth of ASL as a cinematic language when he suggests, “The near-wordless soundtrack is a directorial choice on Krasinski’s part—as silent as its characters may be, ‘A Quiet Place’ could easily have been transformed into a voluble movie, in which the characters’ thoughts and experiences would be delivered on the soundtrack, as interior monologues, even if they’re compelled not to express them aloud to each other. But Krasinski… chose to keep his characters blank and undefined, their memories and musings out of bounds.”[iv] For many reasons, I disagree with his claim that audible thoughts would have been more engaging or nuanced, the most relevant of which is that this prioritizing of verbal language is completely out of keeping with the atmosphere of the world Krasinski has created. It also suggests that those whose primary method of communication in our own world are incapable of sufficiently or uniquely expressing themselves, a limited and ablest view, to say the least.
Finally, the film fits into a current trend in horror film and literature: the use of the disabled experience in moments of more traditional horror (Hush and Don’t Breathe, most recently). A Quiet Place’s plot has similarities to the plot of Josh Malerman’s novel, Bird Box, due to be adapted by Netflix into a film at the end of the year. Instead of engaging with hearing impairment, the novel depicts a world in which visual impairment becomes a way to survive: unexplained creatures walk the earth, violently killing anyone who sees them. If you look, you die—not the same as, you make noise, you die, but with the same reprioritization of sensory abilities.[v] Both play with the line thought to separate those with and without disabilities. In A Quiet Place, the creatures are oblivious to the freedom ASL offers, excluded from it completely. It’s also worth mentioning that the creatures have their own disability: they are blind. In both film and novel, ableism is dismantled as dangerous, whether that danger is embodied by foreign (alien?) creatures or by an exclusion or dismissal of what could save us all.
A Quiet Place is out on Blu-ray, DVD, and streaming:
Notes
[ii] Verhoeven, Beatrice. “‘A Quiet Place’: John Krasinski Says Cast Learned Sign Language for Silent Thriller (Exclusive Video).” The Wrap. April 7, 2018.
[iii] Murphy, Mekado. “Making the Sound of Silence in ‘A Quiet Place.’” New York Times. April 5, 2018.
[iv] Brody, Richard. “The Silently Regressive Politics of ‘A Quiet Place.’” The New Yorker. April 10, 2018.
[v] Kremmel, Laura. “Blind Survival: Disability and Horror in Bird Box.” Studies in Gothic Fiction. Forthcoming.
Laura Kremmel is Assistant Professor of English in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department at South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. She has written previously for Horror Homeroom on disability in Don’t Breathe, American Mary and the Gothic heroine, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House,and Crimson Peak. You can check out her work here.
