Movies

'A Quiet Place' Test Audiences Couldn't Stop Laughing At John Krasinski Playing The Monster

a quiet place test audiences
By Hoai-Tran Bui/

A Quiet Place may elicit nothing but screams and terrified shushes now, but once upon a time, it made audiences laugh. And not intentionally. John Krasinski's riveting horror film wasn't exactly a nail biter for test audiences, who saw A Quiet Place before most of the VFX was finished. As a result, they got to experience one of the best horror-comedies that the rest of us plebians will never got to see.

In an interview with Yahoo Entertainment, A Quiet Place producers Andrew Form and Brad Fuller revealed that despite the raves that A Quiet Place receives now, it was a movie that didn't quite work at early screenings.

"We never tested the movie. It was a very hard movie to test because we never had the visual effects in the movie," Form said, before Fuller corrected him, saying they tested it only once to a small group — which failed miserably. And that's because A Quiet Place test audiences got an early, unfinished version of the film that featured none other than director and star John Krasinski in a mo-cap suit as the monster:

Fuller: "Whenever the alien would come onscreen [in the test screenings], people would laugh, because it's John playing him. You can't say, 'Pretend that's an alien' to a test audience."

Form: "As hard as you try to tell an audience, 'Please, we understand all the visual effects aren't in, but that will be the creature,' it's impossible. It just is. Someone's gonna laugh, and it just kind of breaks everything. So it was a very hard movie to test, so we only put it up the one time and then we stopped."

Yes, Krasinski not only directed and starred in A Quiet Place, he even played the monster in a few scenes — notably, the scene when Emily Blunt and Millicent Simmonds were cornered in the basement. Just imagine: Krasinski in a skin-tight, grey mo-cap suit trying to snarl at his real-life wife and fake daughter. Yeah, you'd laugh too.

So that was the end of test screenings for A Quiet Place, but somewhere out there, that version of A Quiet Place with Krasinski running around in a mo-cap suit lives on in infamy. But god forbid Krasinski lets anyone see it.

So you'll just have to imagine Krasinski in a grey mo-cap suit. Hey, it's not too late to make that your Halloween costume.

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