Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but it’s been a big year for franchises in the entertainment world. The top 12 movies at the global box office so far have been sequels, and Moana 2 and Gladiator II will quickly climb the leaderboard when they hit theaters later this month.
A Quiet Place: Day One isn’t among the most lucrative of those sequels: The prequel, which came out in late June, ranks 15th on the worldwide earnings list and 12th in the U.S. But few franchises have had as transformative a year as A Quiet Place, which has graduated to a different tier in terms of potential staying power. When the year began, there were two pieces of A Quiet Place content: A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place Part II. That total doubled in 2024, as the series expanded in a manner that made it clear A Quiet Place’s ceiling wouldn’t top out at “trilogy.”
With Day One, the movies made the leap from a single series, focused on a single family, to a more open-ended saga with a winning, replicable formula (featuring reasonable budgets). Day One enjoyed a record opening for the franchise, and though its total earnings (and review scores) wound up slightly below those of its predecessors, it was profitable enough—and sufficiently warmly received—to make the mostly stand-alone spinoff a success. And with the release of last month’s A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead, a video game for Windows, PlayStation, and Xbox—which garnered decent reviews despite the challenge of translating silent sneaking into exciting gameplay—A Quiet Place morphed from a film franchise into a multimedia one. A Quiet Place has now become a brand, to the extent that it seems to have spawned a subgenre of A Quiet Place (and Bird Box) knockoffs, including this year’s flicks Arcadian, Elevation, and Never Let Go.
From the sound (so to speak) of it, there’s much more A Quiet Place content coming. A Quiet Place Part III was announced in 2022, and though its planned 2025 debut was delayed, it’s certain to surface at some point. (Perhaps the postponement will be a blessing if it helps the series stave off A Quiet Place oversaturation.) This summer, Day One director/writer Michael Sarnoski all but promised a sequel to the prequel in the trades, responding to a question from Variety about whether we’d see another installment with an encouraging, “Absolutely. I bet you will.” And earlier this month, A Quiet Place cocreators Scott Beck and Bryan Woods identified two frontiers that A Quiet Place could conquer next: the non-U.S. portion of its fictional world and the small screen. “The one thing that we think hasn’t been tapped into yet is kind of the international lens of the events,” Beck said as Wood nodded along. “And that’d be exciting, whether it’s through a film or maybe a TV series.”
As Beck enthused, “There’s so many stories you could tell.” Suddenly it seems as if the franchise might have legs as long as the spindly ones attached to the … wait, what are the aliens from A Quiet Place called, again? Death Angels? Listeners?
I’m not totally sure, and I’d like to keep it that way. By all means, keep making more A Quiet Place. But I have one request for the franchise’s stewards: Never tell me more about the monsters.
To this point, the makers of A Quiet Place have severely restricted the story’s scope. The franchise may have hit the big time, but it hasn’t embraced blockbuster hallmarks such as bloated running times or post-credits scenes. None of the movies has lasted much more than 90 minutes, and all three—along with The Road Ahead—are set in the state of New York. The franchise’s narrow focus even extends to its character tropes: Alex Taylor, the protagonist of The Road Ahead, is pregnant and asthmatic, which makes her something of a hybrid of the first film’s Evelyn Abbott (played by Emily Blunt), who’s nearing her due date, and Day One’s Samira (played by Lupita Nyong’o), who has terminal cancer and is nearing her end.
The franchise’s messaging discipline is most notable when it comes to the Demogorgon-esque adversaries our heroes have to escape, commonly called “Death Angels” because of a newspaper headline from the first film (though the crew of Day One called them “the creature” or “Happy,” a nickname bestowed on them by design company ILM). It’s telling that they lack an official name because A Quiet Place has been incredibly cagey about these menacing monsters. We know that they’re blind, that their hearing and powers of echolocation are extremely acute, and that they’re agile, speedy, and strong enough to be all but unstoppable by humans hand to hand (or hand to whatever one calls the monsters’ appendages). We also know that they have two main vulnerabilities: They can’t swim (or distinguish sounds masked by ambient noise like rain or running water), and they’re susceptible to a specific frequency of feedback, which causes them to unfold their armored exteriors and expose their fleshy faces.
Beyond that, they’re essentially enigmas. Virtually all of the lore about the creatures of A Quiet Place comes from an interview that director, writer, and 2024 Sexiest Man Alive John Krasinski gave on an Empire podcast in 2018, shortly after the first film’s release. The movies and game indicate that the creatures came from outer space but hardly hint at where they originated, how they reached Earth, or how their bodies function.
According to Krasinski, the aliens are “an evolutionarily perfect machine”—recalling Ash’s description of the Xenomorph from Alien as a “perfect organism”—who come from a lightless, high-gravity world whose harsh conditions shaped them into “predators” and “parasites” that “can’t be held back.” Although their native planet was somehow destroyed, they hitched a ride on its fragments, which eventually reached Earth as asteroids and turned the vicious survivors into our species’ problem.
Even assuming that Krasinski’s backstory for the creatures is canon—which is unclear, considering how little of it appears in the primary texts—there’s a lot about the monsters that’s still unspecified (and quite possibly inexplicable). How did they survive the vacuum of space for the eons it must have taken to travel an interstellar distance, not to mention the fiery entry to Earth’s atmosphere? We know they can’t swim, due to their density, but do they drink or utilize water in some way? They clearly communicate with each other on a primitive level, but how intelligent are they? Do they have goals or a society, or are they simply surviving on instinct?
I understand the desire for answers to such questions. It’s fun for fans to gather evidence and speculate. The truth is, though, that we don’t need to know exactly what makes these monsters tick. In fact, it’s probably best that they remain mysterious.
Look, I love lore when a sci-fi or fantasy franchise is suited to it. In horror, however, less lore is more. History has taught us that there’s nothing as unnerving as the unknown.
Remember the Smoke Monster from Lost, which captivated viewers precisely because it initially left so much to the imagination? Smokey was never more fascinating than in the series premiere, when we couldn’t even see it. “That thing in the woods, maybe it’s a monster, maybe it’s a pissed-off giraffe. I don’t know!” a frustrated Hurley declared later in Season 1, speaking for all of us when he exclaimed, “I want some friggin’ answers!” Eventually, some answers arrived, but the payoff couldn’t compare to the nebulous legend Lost watchers had built up in their minds.
For a mystery box series as prolific as Lost or The X-Files, it’s hard to drip-feed fans forever: After hundreds of episodes (and hours), you’ve gotta give spectators something, lest they feel like you’ve strung them along. But a mostly movie-based franchise like A Quiet Place could keep dispensing details stingily for years. And it probably should, judging by the track record of horror series that pulled back the curtain too far.
Take Predator, a spiritual antecedent of A Quiet Place. The classic first film has a simple premise: The Predator is the hunter, and the humans are its prey. As far as we know (or care to know), the Predator’s motivations aren’t that deep: It’s pursuing (and terrorizing) its quarry solely for the thrill of the chase. The franchise’s low point, per Metacritic or IMDb user ratings, is 2018’s The Predator, which sought to explain why the Predators hunt humans. (It has to do with DNA splicing and climate change.) At best, this info is extraneous; at worst, it arguably undercuts the earlier films.
One could, perhaps, say the same about 2017’s Alien: Covenant, which went all in on the exposition that the original Alien doled out so sparingly. It’s no coincidence that both the Predator and Alien franchises found their footing again thanks to back-to-basics installments Prey and Alien: Romulus, respectively, which dialed down the lore in favor of action and character. (Well, mostly: Romulus couldn’t resist a plotline about “black goo,” Alien’s confusing equivalent to The X-Files’ equally confounding “black oil.”) In real life, a late-night tapping at the window loses its capacity to terrify when the morning light reveals the source to be a branch. Alien creates fear most efficiently when its fictional crew and actual audience are in the dark—literally and figuratively—about the Xenomorph’s origins and whereabouts, an insight Noah Hawley seems to be bringing to his upcoming prequel TV series, Alien: Earth. (Director Dan Trachtenberg, by contrast, seems to be boldly pivoting by centering a Predator in his follow-up to Prey.)
Two of the worst-reviewed entries in the Halloween franchise—and that’s saying something—are Rob Zombie’s Halloween (2007) and Halloween II (2009), which attempt to explain how Michael Myers became a masked slasher. A BBC review of Halloween (2007) called the origin story “surprisingly effective” but lamented that the movie “botch[ed] the supernatural dread”—maybe because it’s difficult for understanding and dread to coexist. I could keep going: In the first book of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles series, Interview with the Vampire, the origins of vampires were lost to time. Subsequent books divulged more and more lore, a progression that culminated in vampires’ bloodlines being traced back to aliens and Atlantis. (No foolin’.) Heck, horror isn’t the only genre that sometimes strays into TMI territory; midi-chlorians come to mind. Explaining something scary or mystical can backfire as surely as explaining a joke.
To date, the only indication that A Quiet Place might pierce the privacy of its monsters comes during a tense scene in Day One, when Eric (Joseph Quinn), Samira’s companion, comes across a monster hot spot as he tries to rescue Sam’s cat, Frodo. A particularly large monster tends to the gruesome setting, which looks a little like the nest from Aliens. But it’s not a nest; it’s a farm-to-table eatery. As Eric looks on, the monster cracks open an egg-like growth—some sort of plant, apparently nourished by human corpses submerged in pink goo—and appears to tell its friends that dinner is served. This glimpse of the monsters’ diet addresses one of the franchise’s most glaring unknowns: Why don’t the Death Angels eat the humans they kill, and what do they use as sustenance instead?
It would seem that either the aliens have switched to a vegetarian diet because Earth-based biology doesn’t agree with them or they’re herbivorous by nature, and their deadliness evolved purely for protection against some unspeakable apex predator that hasn’t accompanied them to our planet. (I can envision it now: In some distant sequel, those even nastier beasts show up on slower-moving asteroids, forcing humans and Death Angels to team up against a greater threat.) To its credit, Day One doesn’t overindulge in this alien lore. As Sarnoski told SlashFilm this summer, it’s intentionally limited to a tantalizing tease, a sidenote to a side quest:
There wasn’t some Bible of like, “Here’s how the creatures work and you’ve got to do this stuff.” Everyone was kind of open to new ideas. I think a big thing with these creatures was finding that balance of you don’t want to over-explain them. Part of what’s so fun about them is that they’re very alien and we don’t fully understand them. So I wanted to hint at a couple things. … It’s very not made a focus—I didn’t want to make that scene like, “Hey, here’s what’s going on,” and that’s important because it’s not important to Eric at that time. He’s just trying to save Frodo and you’re just kind of getting a hint that there’s an ecosystem of these creatures around him.
Sarnoski went on to liken the aliens to leafcutter ants, suggesting that “these are farmers” with “a little bit of a family dynamic to them,” not unlike the Abbotts of the first two films. It’s an intriguing tidbit and a memorable movie moment—but it’s also a tactic that future filmmakers might fall in love with, to the detriment of the franchise. A Quiet Place works when its extraterrestrial terrors seem, well, alien. The key will be for subsequent installments to maintain some mystery by continuing to serve up revelations like these only in moderation—as morsels, not meals.
The main course of A Quiet Place is its characters. As Sarnoski said in another interview, Krasinski’s films are “family dramas at their core,” and although the prequel doesn’t follow a family, per se, the Day One director honored the intimacy Krasinski cultivated. As with Signs or The Walking Dead, A Quiet Place isn’t about the monsters; it’s about what the monsters make people do. At creator Robert Kirkman’s behest, The Walking Dead has never definitively established how humans got zombified. A Quiet Place can keep some secrets, too.
Eventually, A Quiet Place may start to seem stale, as The Walking Dead did. How many times can we watch people whisper and tiptoe and flee for an island before it’s time to try something new? But six years after the first film premiered, A Quiet Place still hasn’t ranged far from its roots, either in place or in time. (Part II takes place less than 16 months after the Angels/Listeners land.) And with so much narrative, temporal, and geographic territory to explore, a shake-up doesn’t have to happen for quite a while. To ensure its longevity, the franchise would be wise to employ the same strategy concerning its monsters that the series’ survivors do: Keep quiet.
