Scary business: "A Quiet Place," "It"

For most of my adult life, I’ve not been a big fan of horror movies. Well, of a certain kind, anyway – mad slashers with no clear motivation, exercises in gore, movies where narrative takes a back seat to the slaughter of the innocent and the guilty (with both categories including a lot of young people, and a fair amount of sex. Classic horror – where tension was as important as terror – I still embraced. But newer movies would roll out, and I would roll on.

Except lately I have not rolled as much. I credit “Get Out” for a renewed willingness to see horror, because “Get Out” was about far more than carving up victims; it used that for a meditation on race and identity, doing so in a way that could still be unnerving – that argued the Old South was still around, and still eager to maintain white superiority. It was a movie for the it’s-OK-to-be-racist times that Donald Trump and his minions have brought back to Main Street.

So now I will risk getting the willies, in selected cases, which have most recently included “It” (seen via pay-cable) and “A Quiet Place” (now on Blu-ray).

There’s an argument to be made that “A Quiet Place’s” enormous box-office success ($332 million worldwide on a budget of $17 million) was the result of its being a movie you had to watch in a theater, in the dark, with none of the possible distractions that come with home viewing. But even at home, in the middle of the day, it worked nicely. (With exceptions: for example, if news organizations learned that sound attracted the blind monsters rampaging over the earth, how did they run their presses to print all those newspapers? Wasn’t this a story made strictly for the Internet?)

Director and co-writer (and star) John Krasinski blended horror clichés – don’t go in the basement! – with a layering of tension that has less to do with violence (much of which is implied rather than seen) than with knowing that Something Is Out There, and any mistake could be your last. On top of that, the film establishes early on that anyone, no matter how sympathetic, can die. And, in keeping with tension, it uses a sound palette that shifts by scene and character perspective but is constantly making you wonder how long things can stay quiet, and what is fatally loud.

By keeping the film focused almost exclusively on a family (headed by Krasinski and his real-life wife, Emily Blunt), “A Quiet Place” asks viewers what they would do in a horrible, deadly, apparently endless situation while trying to hold onto an ordinary life. And it asks who out of that family would stand up when the horror seems insurmountable.

 The movie has satisfying answers to those questions, but it is blunted somewhat by the up-close view of the monsters; especially when we have been living in our own imagination for a long stretch, the actual revelation may disappoint, and here it just looks like something reconfigured from an old “Alien” outfit. Only in the minutes leading up to that. “A Quiet Place” ably got my eyes wide -- and made me jump a couple of times. Even in the daytime, at home.

“It” is the second screen adaption of the Stephen King novel, which also inspired a TV miniseries (which was pretty good until the very end, when it suffered a lack of imagination when it came to the climactic scary monster). Like the earlier production, the new movie recognizes that the novel deserved more than single-feature treatment, so there will be a second film completing the story. Of course, as readers of the book know, there’s a break point in the narrative that makes it possible to create a first movie with a clear ending, and still carry on later.

 So the first new “It” lets you take a breath while waiting for the second film, and breath-taking is called for after all this scary business. Particularly when it gets in your head. 

Because “It,” like so much other King, is about mental and emotional damage as much as bloodletting (though there will still be blood). In this case, young people’s individual torments are the weapons employed by the clown menace Pennywise, and anyone who has had an awkward adolescence – or worse – is going to feel the fear here. Although I seldom go looking for movies to scare me, “It” certainly did. I may even go to a theater for the sequel – if I am ready to deal with my fears in a crowded dark.