Revisiting ‘Dead Silence’
What was the first horror movie you remember watching? Mine was James Wan and Leigh Whannell’s ‘Dead Silence’. I remember it vividly, like a picture painted in the back of my head, a memory etched in my mind. For months, I had seen the DVD copy perched on my brother’s shelf, a move he probably orchestrated on purpose in order to ensure I stayed out of his room. I was a bit of a scaredy cat back then, immediately covering my eyes at any intense moment during a film – as I did for the bulk of the first few ‘Harry Potter‘ movies, which should tell you how low my intensity threshold was – and with its image of a deteriorating malevolent-looking puppet holding his rusted finger up to his lip in a “shh” gesture, coupled with the tagline ‘You scream. You die.’ (which, in hindsight, is admittedly clunky and on-the-nose), it ensured I stayed as far away from his room (which was right next to mine) as was physically possible. Every time I passed by, his door left ajar at my father’s insistence, I could feel it staring back at me, its green eyes almost daring me to come in and press play.
I finally got my chance when, a few weeks later, I hosted my first ever sleepover. After a long day of activities – which included video games and, despite my protests, a game of soccer, it was finally time for my favorite part of sleepover night: movie time. It was tradition in our circle for the host to choose the movie and previous choices ranged from ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’ to ‘Cars’ and, oddly enough, ‘Borat’, a movie that largely went over our heads and prompted our mothers to exercise more control over what we got up to during sleepover night. That night, my mother was too pre-occupied with my 3 year old sister to notice it was time for movie night and feeling particularly daring, I stealthily snuck into my brother’s room, stood on his office chair and reached up to get the ‘Dead Silence’ DVD from the highest shelf, successfully grabbing it before I lost my footing. Giddily, I made my way back to my basement and proudly showed my selection to my friends, who snobbily turned their noses at it. “It looks like a movie for babies,” they insisted. “That doesn’t look scary at all!” Undeterred by their attempts at mocking the film, I turned off the lights, placed the disc in the DVD player and pressed play.
It turned out that no amount of mocking could prepare us for the intense thrill ride of a movie that we were about to experience. We were enthralled from the moment the opening credits, a black-and-white montage of Billy (the ventriloquist doll that is featured on the DVD cover and the object of my intense fear) being constructed, began. The movie’s cold open, in which main character Jamie’s (Ryan Kwanten) wife Lisa (Laura Regan) is brutally murdered after the couple receive a package containing Billy, completely unnerved us. The image of her corpse, jaw open unnaturally wide and skin decayed and blue, was one that haunted me for months afterwards. The proceeding events, which included scenes of tongues being ripped out, characters climbing narrow passages (which left my claustrophobic friend a nervous wreck), people being turned into dolls and a twist ending that completely pulled the rug out on us (and left us lifelong fans of twists in movies), left us shaken to our cores and ignited our love for the horror genre. A poem recited in the film (‘Beware the stare of Mary Shaw / She had no children, only dolls’) became a schoolyard taunt that we ended up reciting regularly in order to scare one another. Since then, we’ve had many horror a movie night and marathon, but no experience came close to that of watching ‘Dead Silence’, a memory we treasured and reminisced about for years to come.
Imagine my surprise when, years later, during a discussion with some acquaintances about which movie “popped [my] horror cherry”, my admission that ‘Dead Silence’ was the first horror movie I vividly remember watching was met with complete derision and disbelief. “Not ‘The Exorcist’?” That was the second one. “’Friday the 13th’? ‘Halloween’? ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’?” Nope, nope and nope. “What about ‘Saw’? There’s no way you haven’t seen ‘Saw’ first!” My household was functioning under a strict no-‘Saw’ rule after my brother, who had snuck into theaters to see ‘Saw 3’, handcuffed two of his friends together, told them they had an hour to break free and ended up forgetting where he hid the key in the process. I did desperately want to see ‘Saw’ at the time but I simply wasn’t allowed to. On the way home, I paid a visit to the ‘Dead Silence’ Wikipedia page, curious to see whether my opinion on the film was an anomaly as my friends kept insisting, and discovered that they were right: the movie was greeted with complete abhorrence when it first debuted in theaters a little over 13 years ago. Aside from an abysmal Rotten Tomatoes score (20% at the time of writing), it was also a box office flop, barely surpassing its production budget during its theater run – which, according to Box Office Mojo, only lasted for 16 days.
I was at a loss for words. The idea that the movie that sparked my interest in the horror genre was a “complete dud” was one that I was struggling to comprehend. Could this movie, that left my friends and I completely terrified and shell shocked, and sparked our obsession with horror movies, actually be bad? To make matters worse, I came across a blog post written by Whannell in which he referred to the process of making ‘Dead Silence’ (which he referred to as ‘Dud Silence‘) as the worst filmmaking experience of not only his, but Wan’s life as well. He described the film as “toxic waste” and a “coal-face lesson in what not to do,” detailed how he was pressured into coming up with a new idea directly after ‘Saw’’s Sundance Film Festival premiere, a process he referred to as “creativity at gunpoint”, and revealed that a “script doctor” was hired by the studio to take over his script. He has also repeatedly spoken about how the distributor decided to dump the film in theaters instead of giving it a proper promotional roll-out, a move that undoubtedly harmed its box office performance. While these stories somewhat soured my opinion on the movie and made me second-guess my opinion of it, I eventually decided not to rewatch ‘Dead Silence’, instead choosing to treasure the memories of the experience of watching it.
Suddenly finding myself with an abundance of free time in light of current events and feeling vindicated by the recent track record of Wan and Whannell, who are responsible for a bulk of what I consider to be some of the best horror modern movies and a few of my all-time favorites as well, I decided to rent ‘Dead Silence’ on iTunes and give it a long overdue rewatch. I immediately noticed how dated the movie was; with its cyan color grading and orchestral rock-inspired score that was an obvious attempt to recreate the iconic ‘Saw’ theme, it was very much a product of its time. Undeterred, I continued to watch, convinced that rest of the movie would only validate my initial thoughts on it (which I have shared many times on my Twitter account throughout the years). As the film progressed, I begrudgingly came to the conclusion that ‘Dead Silence’ was not the horror masterpiece I once thought it was nor was it anywhere near the disaster its critical and commercial performances might suggest. My final opinion on the film lied somewhere in the middle. While it does suffer from wooden acting, questionable CGI and an uneventful second act, ‘Dead Silence’ is a tense and atmospheric film that wears its British 60s and 70s horror influences proudly on its sleeve. One scene that lands midway through the film is particularly brilliant; set in the past, it depicts a ventriloquist performance by main antagonist Mary Shaw and her puppet Billy that descends into nightmarish chaos after a young boy taunts and disrupts her, prompting Billy to threaten the boy by promising to “show him just how real [he] is”. It’s a nerve-wracking, unsettling scene and it does an incredible job of establishing Billy as an actual character in the film and a threatening, terrifying presence. The film’s alternate ending (which I only saw for the first time during my rewatch) is also vastly superior to the one that made it into the final cut, expanding on its notorious twist and humanizing the character of Ella, Jamie’s stepmom, who is unfortunately nothing but a blank slate in the finished film.
‘Dead Silence’ also gave Wan and Whannell the opportunity to flex their muscles and dip their toes into what was brand new territory for them at the time; a subgenre of horror that valued aesthetic, tone and mood over blood and gore (which were used sparingly in ‘Dead Silence’, a far cry from their groundbreaking and iconic first film). It also set the foundation and laid the groundwork for some of Wan and Whannell’s more recent outings, such as the excellent ‘Insidious‘, which both Wan and Whannell worked on, and Wan’s ‘The Conjuring‘, both of which have become highly successful franchises. The Bride in Black, one of the main antagonists of the ‘Insidious’ series, carries shades of Mary Shaw with her white hair and deteriorating skin, while the now-iconic Annabelle doll from ‘The Conjuring’ series carries a more-than-striking resemblance to Billy. While ‘Dead Silence’ may have been a “nightmarish” experience for its creators and audiences alike (and not in the way that they intended), it was (and still is) a very special movie for me, one that was instrumental in establishing my love for the horror genre and, I suspect, also a necessary stepping stone for its filmmakers, who went on to create some of the most influential horror movies of our time.
