This is essentially the first studio picture made by a very hot indie team, James Wan and Leigh Whannell, just off of genre juggernaut Saw, which came out in 2004. Dead Silence was shot in the summer of ‘05 for an early 2007 release. And there are Saw Easter eggs peppered throughout this movie. If you watch very closely, you will even see Billy, the tricycle riding doll from the Saw films, around an hour and 10 minutes in as the camera passes by him. We also see the repetition of the spiral from the directionality of shots to the stairs in Jamie's father's house to a design on the clown's forehead later in this film; and the spiral of course comes from the Saw franchise. There's even an entry in the Saw series called Spiral. And if you know Wan and Whannell's other collaborations, you might realize that they're not so much Easter eggs as they are sort of the trademark flourishes of emerging auteur filmmakers.
Wan and Whannell would, of course, go on to create the Insidious franchise and what's come to be known as The Conjuring universe, which is filled with dolls like Annabelle and other menacing toys and music boxes that sound an awful lot like the score of this film which sounds an awful lot like the score of Saw, which makes sense, of course, since both Saw and Dead Silence were scored by Charlie Clouser. He's scored all of the Saw films. He wrote the theme song for American Horror Story. But I chose this film because it proceeds from an ostensibly untraceable local legend that's passed down by oral tradition. And I tend to like films and horror stories that kind of traffic in that area, like Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, which we covered last season at Scare U. And this one stems from a nursery rhyme that's made from an unfortunate event. And obviously, because World Nursery Rhyme Week is from November 13th to 17th, that felt like a pretty good reason to talk about this film.
But I do love a nursery rhyme or a children's song in a horror movie, and whether it's direct, like “One, two, Freddy's coming for you” from the A Nightmare on Elm Street series, or something that's kind of repurposed, like “The Three Little Pigs” in The Shining. I appreciate the use of this kind of source material when it's employed to nasty ends in genre films. It: Chapter Two has nursery rhymes; The Babadook is about a children's story; in The Haunting in Connecticut, the nonsense poem about two dead boys getting up to fight features prominently.
It's also one of a number of films produced around the same time, like Boogeyman from 2005, or Darkness Falls from 2003, that take a scary juvenile tale and magnify the terror, and that traffic in this world of legend or local superstition. These films all feature male protagonists who return to places where they started out. And as is specifically the case with Darkness Falls, these films tend to be concerned with the idea of a wronged, fairy tale, witch-like woman who's seeking revenge against those who harmed her or those who fear her and who kind of punish those who scream when they encounter them. Dead Silence operates a little bit like a fairy tale — and like a fairy tale, if you pull too hard at the threads, its logic might unravel, but it's a beautiful and delightful ride.
I think it looks really good. It's filled with really pretty anachronisms. Like a Hammer horror film from the ‘60s, Dead Silence is more about the aesthetic or tone or mood that it creates. And gore, while it's present, is used pretty sparingly. And like a Hammer picture, the gestures it makes to period details are just that: gestures to “period.” And that is very often deployed more for effect, evocation, or conjuration as opposed to authenticity. But also there's little to no reliance on certain attributes of horror cinema broadly either. There's very little bad language, there's no nudity, there's no sex. What little violence occurs, we only really see the after effects. This seems to be a specialty of Wan’s and Whannell’s. The same holds true for Insidious and The Conjuring. And it yields truly scary, but ostensibly family-friendly, genre fare. And to me, there's also a kind of familiarity to the story and a nostalgia about it and to its kind of dying post-industrial setting. As a kid, I used to have recurring dreams about exploring flooded grand houses by boat. And the ruins of the Raven’s Fair Guignol Theater out on Lost Lake checked some serious boxes for me.
But Dead Silence is a supernatural horror film—always my favorite. There are ghosts and there are dolls. Dolls and dummies and mannequins and a little bit of taxidermy, which I can never get enough of.
Ryan Kwanten's Jamie says at one point, “In the town where I'm from, a ventriloquist dummy is a bad omen.” A bad omen is like a black cat crossing your path. And I would imagine that sending someone a murderous ventriloquist dummy is probably, in fact, a crime of some sort. But murderous ventriloquist dummies place Dead Silence in a long continuum of horror movies that wander through the uncanny valley with characters who are human-like, but not human, and through whom supernatural means are possessed, pun intended, of an agency they otherwise wouldn't have. Annabelle, as previously mentioned. Chucky from Child's Play, Brahms in Brahms: The Boy Il, and Megan the girl doll from M3gan. Magic with Anthony Hopkins has a terrifying ventriloquist dummy. Also, Trilogy of Terror with Karen Black, The Clown in Poltergeist, and from the ouevre of Full Moon Features producer Charles Band, all of the dolls in Dolls from 1986, the murderous puppets from the Puppet Master series, which kicked off in 1989, Ooga Booga from 2013, and Baby Oopsie from 2021.
But as great as it is to look at, and as much fun as that ride is to go on and to experience viscerally (especially the first time you see it), as much fun as it might be to be spooked by Billy the Puppet, what is the sort of internal infernal mechanism by which Dead Silence operates? I can't help but wonder if, as A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 director Jack Sholder posited when we talked about Sleepaway Camp, if the filmmakers were perhaps more interested in creating kind of memorable set pieces than in connecting the narrative dots to create the most dramaturgically sound and satisfying film.
To listen to our episode on Dead Silence, click here.
Bradford Louryk