A Quiet Place Monster
With A Quiet Place Part II hopefully releasing sometime in 2020, monster movie lovers like myself can’t wait to get our fix of seeing these vicious creatures returning to the silver screen. With their alien design, strange behavior, and frightening strength, we wanted to answer all of your A Quiet Place monster questions. We scoured the internet for some of the most common inquiries regarding the creature and curated all of them here for your convenience. Here’s everything you need to know about the A Quiet Place monster!
What Is A Quiet Place About?
In a post-apocalyptic world, a small family is forced to live in silence while hiding from monsters with ultra-sensitive hearing. The film was directed by John Krasinski and written by Bryan Woods and Scott Beck. The film stars Emily Blunt, John Krasinski, and Millicent Simmonds.
What Is The Monster From A Quiet Place?
Death Angels, more commonly referred to by characters of the film as “creatures”, the behind-the-scenes name is Death Angels. The A Quiet Place monsters come from another world without any type of light and serve as the primary villains in A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place Part II. They landed on Earth when a large meteor crashed into our planet and the Death Angels were by chance hiding inside of the meteor.
How Many Monsters Are In A Quiet Place?
Fifteen to twenty Death Angels were inside of the meteor that crashed on Earth. So most likely after the first movie, there are fourteen to nineteen creatures left if they haven’t begun reproducing.
What Is The Monsters Weakness In A Quiet Place?
High-frequency sound is lethal to the creatures of A Quiet Place. The only other weakness that the Death Angels feature aside from high-frequency noise is that they are unable to swim.
Why Don’t The Monsters From A Quiet Place Eat Humans?
Since they came to Earth by chance, they’re more so fixated on stopping the noises that disturb them rather than eating people. As of now though, we’re not sure what the Death Angels actually consume.
What Do The Red Lights In A Quiet Place Mean?
There is a present danger. When the mother Evelyn is moments ready to give birth, she turns on a switch within the house to turn the outside string lights an ominous red. These red lights signal to Lee that danger is nearby and she is about to give birth to her child.
The Design Of The A Quiet Place Monster
I’ve been wondering since the release of A Quiet Place why the monsters look so familiar. Films such as Super 8, 10 Cloverfield Lane, Godzilla (2014), and yes A Quiet Place all have monsters with very similar body plans. These include three elements: long arms that the creatures walk on similar to a gorilla, a thin body, and smooth skin or armor. So one must ask why these monsters look the same. The answer could lie in the film industry after the creation of CGI.
After the release of blockbusters such as Jurassic Park and Terminator 2: Judgement Day in the early 1990s, many filmmakers and studios were wowed by the power of CGI (computer-generated imagery) and its potential of creating anything on the big screen. However as seen throughout the decade, this became an overindulgence that heavily dated the films.
Unlike practical effects, CGI can create an uncanny feel in reality, and in its early uses… woof it can look VERY bad. Films such as Lost In Space, Mortal Kombat, and Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers the Movie are some infamous examples of this awkward period of CGI in films where their monsters look pretty bad. Even bigger budget films such as 1998’s Godzilla while having competent CGI definitely shows its age.
Even with today’s films, CGI is still difficult to nail for monster movies. So how do you deal with the challenge of convincing the audience the monsters on-screen are living breathing creatures and not something from a video game? Well as seen in the films that sparked this obsession such as Jurassic Park the effects crew blended both CGI and practical effects, with the practical effects grounding the audience so they have a frame of reference for the CGI, ensuring they aren’t taken out of the film.
A second method is simply having enough of a budget to make the best possible CGI, something most filmmakers don’t have the greatest of luxuries. But there is a third option that seems to be the basis of the recent similarities in monster design: CGI suitmation.
What do I mean? Well if you look at all the creatures I list earlier you noticed one thing they all have in common and that they all have a relatively humanoid shape. Not a completely human shape mind you but enough where one could possibly make a creature suit out of them. Hell, you can compare the monsters from A Quiet Place and then look at a practical monster such as Sammael from 2004’s Hellboy and the similarities are striking. Reality is the basis for these designs. In an interview with io9, Cloverfield creature designer Neville Page explained “With that, I had to be very efficient with my time and the process of development I chose.
There were many different versions that we explored as we were all looking for what it could be. There were tentacles, there were fewer limbs, more limbs, no limbs… big, broad strokes in search of Clover. I am not recalling being told to NOT do Godzilla-like designs, it was more implicit. Since it was not a Godzilla movie, it would have been a huge mistake to do things like it. However, it still needed to be huge, have a head full of teeth, arms, and legs, and, because of it coming out of the water, I felt it needed a tail to justify an aquatic potential origin or existence.”
With many monster fans pointing out how the Clover from Cloverfield seemed to have inspired many monster designs, I feel it’s a combination of inspiration and a way to ground the creature in CGI form. Look at recent kaiju films such as Shin Godzilla that had a motion capture actor as well as rendered the monster to appear like a suit.
This effect worked so well that many assumed it was a practical suit, thus the effects team found a way to merge the effectiveness of ground a design seen in practical effects within the CGI model itself. And with most of the modern monster designs, they do look really convincing! A lot of them feel that heavy mass, a skeletal structure, and realistic ways of walking.
Just look at the creatures from A Quiet Place, they have a defined texture that is layered and very much looks organic, not something that looks like plastic or rubber. You have the crab/reptilian armor with the very fleshy ear hole and flash underneath the face plating. Not the way director/star John Krasinski frames each encounter with them, they have weight whenever they are on the attack so the threat feels very feasible.
Probably my favorite example is when one of them is stalking Emily Blunt’s character in a flooded basement and while we assumed it couldn’t swim, it was both a shocker that it could yet the way it fluidly transitions into swimming felt very real and I never questioned it. “I kept saying to John, we gotta make this gross,” A Quiet Place visual effects supervisor Scott Farrar said in an interview with Vanity Fair “I want it to look really medical and raw like you open up and it’s almost guts or brains—you don’t know what you’re looking at.”
The Features of a Creature
So as horror and monster fans eagerly wait to see A Quiet Place Part II, the conversation on the creatures’ design and how it’s a “Cloverfield rip-off”, I urge you not to instantly jump to conclusions. A lot goes into creature design and that kind of attitude dismisses the hard work of everyone involved with the process. And as seen with influential creature designs such as Godzilla and the Xenomorph from Alien, filmmakers, and effects artists see what works and add their own spin to it, which is what good art should be doing.
What Do You Think Of The A Quiet Place Monsters?
What do you think of these creepy, crawly, sonic menaces? Let us know your thoughts today about the monsters from A Quiet Place on social media!
