Killing for a Quiet Life
John Krasinski’s dystopian horror trilogy imagines a biblical plague visited on the din of modernity.
Though I’m a happily terrorised fan of John Krasinski’s dystopian films, A Quiet Place (2018) and A Quiet Place, Part II (2020), a question has been stalking me since their premieres. In these first two films, giant, human-gobbling praying mantises fall to earth and begin annihilating humankind. They cannot see, so they navigate and hunt by sound, their acute hearing provoking them to attack even the faintest sound. But why are they doing this? This remains a maddening mystery. Hunger? Malice? Revenge? The racket of our outdoor concerts and football games, interstate traffic, explosive munitions in Gaza and Ukraine, the mind-frying hum of our electrical grid and data mines? The chilling horror in the first two movies unfolds without explanation.
A familiar trope of alien-invasion and post-apocalyptic freak-outs like Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds is that these interplanetary assaults issue from those who may be escaping hell elsewhere but also see us as a source of protein. They’re not merely hungry; they kill like unstoppable machines of missionary ruthlessness. Indeed, this subgenre’s true star may be the ensuing carnage, a visual-aural orgy of destruction and a playground for set designers and sound technicians. Across the smoky ruins of a species’ near-extinction (ours), it dawns on the scattered survivors that they can’t just bucket-and-mop up civilisation. Mass murder also destroys human infrastructure, which must then be abandoned, but not before we and the characters gaze in disbelief at the street-emptying horror.
