What is the scariest part in A Quiet Place?

Q: What is the weakness in A Quiet Place?

By the sequels end, we know of two specific weaknesses. First, the monsters are vulnerable to high-frequency sounds that make their outer layer pervious to gunfire and other weapons. Second, the monsters cant swim.

For die-hards, no horror movie can be too scary. But for you, a wimp, the wrong one can leave you miserable. Never fear, scaredies, because Slate’s Scaredy Scale is here to help. We’ve put together a highly scientific and mostly spoiler-free system for rating new horror movies, comparing them with classics along a 10-point scale. And because not everyone is scared by the same things—some viewers can’t stand jump scares, while others are haunted by more psychological terrors or simply can’t stomach arterial spurts—it breaks down each movie’s scares across three criteria: suspense, spookiness, and gore.

Table of Contents Show

How scary is the Quiet Place?
Is A quiet place part 2 scary?
What is the weakness in A Quiet Place?
Does A Quiet Place have a lot of jumpscares?

This time, we’re scaredy-scaling A Quiet Place Part II, the sequel to writer, director, and star John Krasinski’s 2018 hit. (If you haven’t seen that one either, we’ll give you a sense of where it ranks along the way.) In Part II, what’s left of the first movie’s family continues their fight against the sound-seeking aliens who ravaged most of humanity before the first movie began.

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Paramount Pictures and Getty Images Plus.

Suspense is what drives the Quiet Place movies, the excruciating pause between when one of the characters accidentally makes a noise—getting stuck on a stray wire from a chain-link fence, say, that releases with a deafening twang—and the moment when we found out whether that noise will bring the aliens a-rampagin’. As a sequel, Part II is dealing with a world that’s more known, which tends to slacken the tension a bit. But the opening sequence, which flashes back to the day the aliens arrived, unleashes chaos on a scale that distinguishes it from the claustrophobic first movie, and even knowing which of the characters are bound to survive doesn’t lessen the anxiety.

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Paramount Pictures and Getty Images Plus.

The Quiet Places are a pretty bloodless affair, with the exception of Krasinski’s thing for mangled feet. In the first, Emily Blunt steps on a nail that goes clean through the top of her foot, and in the second, a character stumbles into a bear trap that closes right on their ankle. There’s plenty of blood, but nothing too explicit unless you’ve got a thing about penetrative injuries. There are also several shots of desiccated, virtually mummified bodies (at one point, a whole Metro North car’s-worth), but they look more like something out of a middle-school haunted house than anything that will haunt your nightmares.

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Paramount Pictures and Getty Images Plus.

A series in which Krasinski’s character writes “WHAT IS THE WEAKNESS?” on a dry-erase board isn’t trying to keep its audience in the dark, and this time there’s even less to discover. The first Quiet Place took its time introducing its post-apocalyptic environment and left us to puzzle out some of the details ourselves, especially since the family members often communicate with each other nonverbally. But the second is more of a straightforward action movie, with Millicent Simmonds taking on the role of an incipient action heroine. The reminders of what life used to be before the world went to hell might send the briefest of chills down your spine, but that’s it.

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Following is a transcript of the video.

Narrator: How do you make a horror film that avoids sound? Let's take a look at the opening of "A Quiet Place" to see how John Krasinski both establishes a world and puts on a master class in tension building with one near-perfect 10-minute sequence.

With just one title card and four corresponding shots, Krasinski achieves the first role of an opening: establishing the world. And how "A Quiet Place" achieves this is through minimal visual exposition. Although they might seem pretty random, the five opening images actually tell you all there is to know about the world. The title card hints at a major event that has occurred before the film, and the next three consecutive shots affirm and establish a post-apocalyptic world.

In fact, these minimal visual expositions are everywhere, from a child's drawing that hints at the creatures' extraterrestrial origins to a newspaper that explicitly states what the danger is. Choosing to leave more out than in lends the film a sense of mystery while offering the bare minimum of information to follow the plot.

The second role of an opening is identifying the visual language. Every film has a unique style and tone in which it tells a story. In the case of "A Quiet Place," that languages is "show, don't tell." This technique is most evident in the opening sequence mentioned prior. The title card establishes a specific time frame, and the next three consecutive shots establish that law and order have collapsed. People have abandoned their homes, and society is in ruin. Finally, a wall of missing people signifies that danger is still lurking in the corners.

Contrary to popular belief, "A Quiet Place" does not take inspiration from the classic silent films, but rather modern visual films. While silent films that physically lack sound rely on exaggerated visuals, emotions, and movements to keep the audience's attention, visual films ignore the present sound to rely on simple, yet precise shots and edits to visually convey information. Krasinski refers to two main sources of inspiration, the Coen brothers' "No Country for Old Men" and Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood." The latter also features a 14-minute opening sequence with no spoken dialogue that can also be entirely understood without any sound.

Take a closer look at their respective screenplays, and the similarities are even more obvious. Visual films rely on these long and specific scene descriptions that visualize almost everything, from the props to the movement of the characters, the tempo of the edits, and even the direction of the camera.

This unique "show, don't tell" approach can be identified everywhere. Instead of having to explain the daughter's disability, all we need is a single close-up. Want to establish that making a sound can be dangerous? This is all you need to show.

This is also the reason why the film relies so heavily on reaction shots, more specifically, characters reacting to one another. While a line that clearly expresses a character's emotion might be more convenient, sometimes a gaze or a change in expression can be enough to deliver it more convincingly. In fact, the opening is chock-full of these reaction shots, which establish the relationship between the characters and convey a range of emotions, like affection, sadness, fear, and, ultimately, dread.

Which brings us to the final and most important rule of an opening: engaging the audience. In a horror film like "A Quiet Place," that's usually achieved by scaring the audience. Except this film has a crucial limitation in that department. Sound. Take any scene from a horror film... and watch it without sound. And it will most likely never feel as scary. To get around this limitation, Krasinski chooses tension over an outright scare. Sometimes it's as simple as showing who we need to worry about right from the first image.

After visually associating sound with danger, Krasinski delivers three key moments that gradually build in tension, and they are all achieved in the most brilliant way: by not showing themselves, whether it's the sister jumping in out of nowhere to catch a falling toy at the last second or the family gripped in fear by something the boy is holding that we can't see. Krasinski cleverly uses the film's "show, don't tell" approach to deliver a unique sort of tension. Of the entire 10 minutes, almost a minute and a half is dedicated to this sort of tension building up until the final moment.

The boy, whom the audience already knows will be the source of trouble, is shot only from a distance or partially hidden until that dreadful noise begins offscreen. For even heavier impact, the reveal happens twice: once through the ears of the parents and then through the perspective of the mute sister, who visually confirms the present danger. And as the film kills off the most innocent and powerless of the bunch, the audience is once again reminded of the gravity of the danger and the fact that anyone can die at any moment.

The reason why the opening to "A Quiet Place" is so brilliant is that it allows the film to go anywhere, establishing its unique world, rules, characters, and their struggles and traumas all in under 10 minutes. Because the role of an opening is not to open just the film, but to open its story to unlimited possibilities for its audience to enjoy.

How scary is the Quiet Place?

The film has some instances of blood and injury with one brief image being quite gory. Mainly the film can be VERY intense as the characters are constantly under threat from the monsters and the film gets very scary at times and the tone is quite downbeat and dark and can be emotional at times.

Is A quiet place part 2 scary?

Parents need to know that A Quiet Place Part II is the sequel to 2018's hit horror/monster movie A Quiet Place. Violence is fairly gory and graphic, though most of it is directed at monsters (heads exploding, etc.). A child's leg is caught in a bear trap, with a bloody wound; he screams in pain.

What is the weakness in A Quiet Place?

By the sequel's end, we know of two specific weaknesses. First, the monsters are vulnerable to high-frequency sounds that make their outer layer pervious to gunfire and other weapons. Second, the monsters can't swim.

Does A Quiet Place have a lot of jumpscares?

See below for the exact times and descriptions of the 14 jump scares in A Quiet Place, which has a jump scare rating of 4.0. Jump Scare Rating: A Quiet Place makes good use of the quiet/loud dynamic to deliver some effective scares.