Netflix Tried To Capitalize On The Success Of A Quiet Place With The Silence, And It Didn't Go Well
The mockbuster industry is a fascinating entity. Chief among the studios that specialize in mockbusters (ie. low-budget knockoffs of popular studio titles) is The Asylum, the company behind the "Sharkando" films. In 2023 alone, The Asylum has released a riff on "Cocaine Bear" titled "Attack of the Meth Gator," the latest installment in its "Transformers" ripoff franchise, "Transmorphers: Mech Beasts," and its own animated version of "The Little Mermaid" featuring the voices of Steve Guttenberg and "E.T." star Dee Wallace. And they say cinema is dead!
Shane Van Dyke, the grandson of acting legend Dick Van Dyke, got his start as a writer on the mockbuster circuit, penning films like "Titanic II," "Paranormal Entity," and "Transmorphers: Fall of Man" for The Asylum in the late aughts. Around that same time, he also teamed up with his brother, Carey Van Dyke, to co-pen the studio's "Street Racer" — a riff on the "Fast & Furious" films, specifically "Tokyo Drift" — and "The Day the Earth Stopped." Gradually, the pair would move on to writing films for major studios. In 2012, they joined forces with "Paranormal Activity" director Oren Peli on "Chernobyl Diaries," a critically-derided horror-thriller that managed to turn a healthy profit despite being condemned for exploiting a real-life tragedy.
Some years later, the Van Dyke brothers would pen "The Silence," a film based on Tim Lebbon's 2015 horror novel of the same name. Shot in the latter half of 2017, the film would spend an extended period of time gathering dust on the shelf before Netflix acquired it from its original distributor, Global Road Entertainment, and began streaming it in April 2019. By that point, however, a rather similar critically-acclaimed thriller titled "A Quiet Place" had already made a huge splash at the box office.
This did not go unnoticed.
Netflix's other Quiet Place (sort of) copycat
Kiernan Shipka stars in "The Silence" as Ally, a deaf teenager whose life is turned upside-down when a species of underground, carnivorous flying creatures dubbed "vesps" is accidentally set loose and begins wreaking havoc on the surface world. The vesps have an exceptionally strong sense of hearing, which inspires Ally and her family to retreat to the countryside in the hopes of finding a safe harbor to hunker down in until the U.S. government can, hopefully, get a handle on the situation.
Sound familiar? Despite being filmed prior to "A Quiet Place" opening in theaters in 2018, "The Silence" is remarkably identical to John Krasinski's own apocalyptic monster movie featuring creatures that hunt by sound and a deaf teen female lead. It is at first, anyway, as "The Silence" ultimately tries to heighten the stakes by throwing in a subplot involving a cult whose members react to the vesps by cutting their tongues out. Krasinski himself would begin to explore how society breaks down and rebuilds itself in the wake of a global disaster in "A Quiet Place Part II," but his original film focused squarely on a single family surviving in near-isolation.
More curious still, "The Silence" began streaming less than five months after a different Netflix exclusive that was undeniably reminiscent of "A Quiet Place." Indeed, director Susanne Bier's "Bird Box" was another end-of-the-world monster horror film, albeit one where the monsters cause anyone who looks at them to kill themselves, forcing the survivors (those who aren't blind, of course) to navigate the world wearing blindfolds. What's that old adage about things coming in threes again?
The sound of silence is booing
It's genuinely interesting how much "The Silence" reads like it was manufactured up by Netflix's algorithms. Besides the parallels to "A Quiet Place" and "Bird Box," the film features two stars from Netflix's hit series "Chilling Adventures of Sabrina" in Shipka and Miranda Otto (who plays Ally's mom, Kelly) and hails from two writers with an extensive background in crafting cheaper riffs on profitable hits. Then there's "The Silence" director John R. Leonetti, who knows a thing or two about capitalizing on successful films, having also helmed "Mortal Kombat: Annihilation," "The Butterfly Effect 2," and the "Conjuring" spin-off "Annabelle."
Critics, as you've likely already guessed, didn't care for "The Silence." Reviewing the film for RogerEbert.com, Brian Tallerico called it "a dull retread of ideas explored more interestingly in other films and TV shows" and "barely a horror movie." Kristy Puchko, who reviewed the film for IGN, acknowledged "The Silence" isn't technically a "Quiet Place" ripoff, "but considering the masterful suspense, strong performances, and thoughtful visuals of that film, 'The Silence' suffers by comparison at every turn." In a review for The Guardian, Charles Bramesco even argued it was a shame the film didn't tap into the Van Dyke brothers' mockbuster background, writing, "There's a watchable movie to be carved out of all this, one that embraces its intrinsic slumminess as a knockoff and pursues that ignominy out the other end to B-movie paradise."
Leonetti was also criticized by members of the deaf community for hiring a non-deaf actor to play Ally, as opposed to Krasinski casting real-life deaf actor Millicent Simmonds for "A Quiet Place." If there's any single element of "The Silence" that's symbolic of the film's greater failure to capitalize on the success of Krasinski's monster movie, it might be just that.