The horror genre has seen some of film's greatest experiments. Horror often offers film directors to chance to bend the rules and break the norms of narrative craft. You can have a claustrophobic thriller taking place within a wide, expansive setting (such as Jaws and Alien). You can create a deadly, unknowable monster that changes its identity, rendering it completely anonymous (like in It Follows). Or you can make terror feel personal and intensely intimate with a found-footage film (The Blair Witch Project remains the ultimate movie to utilise that tactic).
Actor-director John Krasinski continues that tradition with A Quiet Place. Starring alongside his wife Emily Blunt, the couple and their on-screen kids seem like a perfectly happy family—albeit a silent one, with the four of them speaking in sign language, tip-toeing around their home, and exhibiting a total fear of loud noises. But, as the first trailer reveals, they're only very quiet because those loud noises get the attention of an unseen, scary-sounding monster that's hunting them.
I don't know why they don't move. I don't know what happens if they sneeze or fart. But I do know that the whole thing looks tense as hell. A Quiet Place comes out on 6 April. Watch the trailer below.
