Introducing gimmicks to horror movies may not be a revolutionary concept–in fact, it’s practically a trope all its own–but that doesn’t stop the A Quiet Place series from shining in its own, terrifying way. Set in a world beset by noise-hating, practically unkillable alien monsters, the first Quiet Place movie took an up close and personal look at one family’s fight for survival with a baby on the way, which is maybe the absolute worst case scenario for a world where making any noise gets you brutally killed. That, of course, begs the question–how do you up the ante for the sequel while still maintaining the gimmick as it’s been established? How does A Quiet Place Part 2 invent new scares when the series already explored the concept so effectively in the original?
GameSpot spoke with long-time John Krazinski collaborator and A Quiet Place producer Brad Fuller to get the behind-the-scenes perspective on keeping the second movie just as horrifying as the first. "If it felt to an audience that we were going back to all the same beats in the first movie, I think that we would have failed in making this," he explained. "I think that people respond to when they see this movie is they love the family and they love this family surviving, and it’s incumbent upon us to put that family in new and different situations where we see how they handle them."
To engineer these moments, Fuller elaborated that they often looked for ways to up the stakes and the tension without necessarily leaning too hard on their alien creatures. "We have to continue figuring situations out. [There are major moments that are] scary and it has nothing to do with the alien, necessarily," he said. "Stuff like that, where you know the alien’s around, but it causes a different effect, I think, is satisfying to an audience."
Source: GameSpot