My Own Little World

I don’t see many horror films. Part of this is due to films like Hereditary that scare the living daylights out of me, as I, like many normal people, don’t often choose to scare myself. A larger portion of my aversion to the genre, perhaps, is the reputation mainstream horror films have these days. Especially when looking at Blumhouse-produced films, they are plain garbage. The characters make the worst possible decisions every time they have a choice presented to them simply to drive them into a terrible situation that will somehow kill them mercilessly with blood and gore everywhere, and often the scares used are cheap gimmickry and fake jump scares that do nothing but relieve the audience and bore them into their seats. Seeing Unfriended: Dark Web yielded almost that exact response from me. I was either laughing or scoffing at this movie for all of its eighty-eight minutes because of how ridiculously stupid its characters are. It made me furious yet enthused because Dark W...

If A Quiet Place has taught me anything, it is the importance of good sound design. This is a highly effective horror film for a lot of reasons, but the way it uses sound to its advantage creates such a tense atmosphere that I won’t be forgetting soon. It is almost entirely silent with few portions of spoken dialogue. The production team tried to make very little noise so that every on-camera sound could be amplified in post-production, and it paid off. Because the suddenly loud noises are so loud and because we know that the creatures in the film are only attracted by these kinds of sudden noises, every time those sounds occur the tension instantly goes up. It is a perfect setup for a lot of good jump scares, but it also lends itself to the character development. One of the children of the family focused on is deaf, and when the film is from her perspective all the on-set sound goes away, giving us some very suspenseful and even emotional moments. In fact, A Quiet Place ...