I spent most of today writing – or trying to write – new Irregular Webcomic! scripts. So there’s not very much to say about that.
In the past week I’ve watched a couple of interesting movies on Netflix with a common theme: they’re both horror films in which people need to stay silent in order to avoid attracting monsters that are blind and hunt by sound. The films are A Quiet Place (2018) and The Silence (2019). I recommend them both. They have a lot in common, but a few interesting differences. The following discussion will have some minor details on the premise and set-up of each film, but nothing I would consider a plot spoiler. (But if you’re very sensitive to spoilers and think you might want to watch these films, then you may want to skip the rest of today’s post.)
It’s interesting that both films feature a stable nuclear family with mum, dad, a boy, and a girl, and that in both films the girl is older and more mature, and also deaf, thus justifying the family learning sign language – which is used extensively in both films so that the characters can communicate without speaking (and thus without making potentially fatal noise). Also coincidentally, both films have a running time of exactly 90 minutes.
But it’s what’s different that makes comparing the films fun. The monster designs are very different, apart form the commonality of being blind but with excellent hearing. One film has large, scary, ground-based alien things that basically kill you as soon as they touch you, while the other has small flying creatures that you have some (small) chance of beating off or distracting, thus leaving injured people.
One film is claustrophobic and tense, while the other is more open and a bit lighter. Reviews indicate the tenser film received praise, while the lighter one was criticised – but honestly I enjoyed the lighter one more. I’m not sure I can say why exactly. Maybe I was just trying to relax and looking for something easy to watch. I did enjoy both of them though.
New content today: