Whatever you do while you watch A Quiet Place, don’t make a sound — and definitely don’t eat any popcorn. In fact, it’s probably the most stress-inducing thing you can do to your fellow theatergoers. Not that making a bit of noise could possibly ruin the excellent viewing experience that is this year’s best-rated new sci-fi horror.
Because the sound in A Quiet Place is so intentionally quiet, during most scenes you can hear every slurp of that absurdly big “small” soda, every fart, and, obviously, every single crunch of popcorn coming from the audience.
Erik Amdahl of E² Sound did the sound design on A Quiet Place alongside Ethan Van der Ryn. “The coolest thing about this film is the negative space we’ve created with the shades of quiet,” Amdahl told Inverse, talking about how they stripped out almost all of the ambient noise to amp up the suspense. “That’s really why it’s so effective and audiences are really reacting. It’s kind of something that is so hard to find in these modern times. There’s just always noise — traffic, freeway, weed wackers, cell phones — with all that stipped away it’s almost more terrifying.”
In typical glorious Twitter fashion, tons of people delivered jokes about how the tension of A Quiet Place compels its viewers to themselves remain quiet. Obviously the noisiest and most common thing to happen at the movies is some chump chomping on popcorn kernels.
Seriously, popcorn can ruin the experience!
It’s amazing how things that are normally so innocuous accidentally become totally terrifying.
It brings out the passive aggressive noise-hating monster in all of us:
We all tense up and breath quieter in the scarier horror moments, but in a movie this quiet, everbody hushes up:
It made tons of people self-conscious:
Even the film’s studio, Paramount Pictures, got in on the action:
So if you do go and see A Quiet Place, do yourself a favor and try to avoid crunchy snakes and slurpy drinks.
