Introducing gimmicks to horror movies may not be a revolutionary concept–in fact, it’s practically a trope all its own–but that doesn’t stop the A Quiet Place series from shining in its own, terrifying way. Set in a world beset by noise-hating, practically unkillable alien monsters, the first Quiet Place movie took an up close and personal look at one family’s fight for survival with a baby on the way, which is maybe the absolute worst case scenario for a world where making any noise gets you brutally killed. That, of course, begs the question–how do you up the ante for the sequel while still maintaining the gimmick as it’s been established? How does A Quiet Place Part 2 invent new scares when the series already explored the concept so effectively in the original?
GameSpot spoke with long-time John Krazinski collaborator and A Quiet Place producer Brad Fuller to get the behind-the-scenes perspective on keeping the second movie just as horrifying as the first. “If it felt to an audience that we were going back to all the same beats in the first movie, I think that we would have failed in making this,” he explained. “I think that people respond to when they see this movie is they love the family and they love this family surviving, and it’s incumbent upon us to put that family in new and different situations where we see how they handle them.”
To engineer these moments, Fuller elaborated that they often looked for ways to up the stakes and the tension without necessarily leaning too hard on their alien creatures. “We have to continue figuring situations out. [There are major moments that are] scary and it has nothing to do with the alien, necessarily,” he said. “Stuff like that, where you know the alien’s around, but it causes a different effect, I think, is satisfying to an audience.”
Perhaps more shocking than the new scares themselves is the fact that they’re all done under the umbrella of a PG-13 rating, which has been maintained from Part 1 to Part 2. According to Fuller, this was never a question. Keeping the rating consistent is all part of a larger effort to make the franchise as accessible as possible. “I think we limit the audience’s ability to see our films if we’re rated R,” Fuller said. “I think that there are a lot of people who will say, ‘I don’t like horror movies,’ or they don’t like blood, but we might cajole them into seeing this movie if we limit the blood.”
But of course, limiting the onscreen blood doesn’t necessarily mean cutting back on the scares themselves. Fuller was also keen to emphasize that there is plenty of alien-related horror in Part 2 to go around. This is partly because they had the visual effects budget and confidence this time around to actually show the creatures for extended shots. “We showed the monster a lot in this movie, too. I mean, we show the monster more, and I think that grows out of us building this monster with [Industrial Light & Magic] and being so proud of it,” he said. “The first time you make the movie you don’t know if you can show the monster in the day and have it look real, but now we knew we could, so I think we took advantage of it a little bit more.”
Catch your very own eyeful of the alien monsters–and remember to keep as silent as possible–for A Quiet Place Part 2, in theaters March 20.
