The Silence, A Quiet Place, and the Subtle Art of Coincidence
If you told me 10 years ago we would be seeing a renaissance of the unstoppable, inexplicable, world-ending monster genre, I wouldn’t have believed you. These films pop up throughout cinema history, but they certainly reached their apex of popularity (at least in America) in the 1950’s and 60’s. Films like The Blob, The Birds, Godzilla, and Creature from the Black Lagoon all played with the idea of an unstoppable force upending our lives and indiscriminately fighting against humanity. This particular style of monster movie is odd in that if one is a hit, we’ll see another dozen (at least) come out hoping to hit the same trend.
The Silence (full review at the Patreon) is riding on that wave of apocalyptic monster films ushered in by A Quiet Place and 10 Cloverfield Lane. We even got another Godzilla out of the uptick in interest, though that (sadly) did not play as well this time around. No, the movie-going public wants the mysterious appearance of an unimaginable force that forces society to live under terrifying restrictions. I’m not going to go into the problematic nature of these conditions usually being a sensory disability (really blindness and deafness) that callously suggests that living that way is worse than death. That discussion will have to wait for another day.
My focus today is on shared inspiration in creative fields. The biggest story when A Quiet Place came out was its similarities to Tim Lebbon’s novel The Silence. People who read Lebbon’s book (or even the dust-cover summary) could see a lot of unlikely coincidences in the narrative. A previously undiscovered creature begins attacking humanity, hunting by sound and forcing people to remain silent or die. Our intrepid survivors are a family with two parents, a younger brother, and a deaf older sister. Everyone already became fluent in sign language to speak with the sister, so they are more prepared than anyone else to live in silence. They hunker down on a farmhouse until something big changes the status quo.
Which story was I describing? A Quiet Place or The Silence? The answer is both. If you push the context of a narrative to much more general terms, you can make a lot of different stories sound exactly the same.
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Art is not created in a vacuum. We are all influenced by the grander collection of media available to us. Creators borrow from each other all the time without realizing it. It doesn’t mean that intellectual theft is happening or this copies that; it doesn’t mean it’s not happening either.
The writers of A Quiet Place found themselves in a situation I’ve been stuck in many times before (albeit with far less money involved). Brian Woods and Scott Beck claim they began writing their treatment in 2012 or 2013. Tim Lebbon’s The Silence came out in 2015. By 2016, A Quiet Place was optioned for production. By 2018, A Quiet Place was released in theaters and The Silence had already been optioned for a film adaptation. The Silence came out in 2019, the same year that A Quiet Place Part II announced a theatrical release for 2020.
What happened last year when The Silence came out? The media narrative flipped. The Silence was accused of being a rip off of A Quiet Place. You see, The Silence is the story of a world where a previously undiscovered creature begins attacking humanity, hunting by sound and forcing people to remain silent or die. Our intrepid survivors are a family with one grandmother, two parents, a younger brother, and a deaf older sister. Everyone already became fluent in sign language to speak with the sister, so they are more prepared than anyone else to live in silence. They hunker down on a farmhouse until something big changes the status quo.
How could that not be a total rip-off of A Quiet Place?
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If I had a nickel for every time I had a story not published or a play pushed back indefinitely because someone beat me to the finish line with an eerily similar idea developed at the same time without knowledge of the other person’s work, I’d at least be able to get a dollar cone at McDonald’s. The fact is these kinds of chance hive-mind moments do happen.
I remember having a story rejected by every major horror/sci-fi publication maybe 16 years ago. It was a dystopian/apocalyptic story where speaking was replaced with digital communication. We entered end times when the network collapsed and people could no longer communicate with each other. The hero was someone who physically could not communicate with the network and had a supportive family who was more equipped than anyone else to survive the total collapse of society. They did fine until SOMETHING came in the change the status quo.
How are A Quiet Place and The Silence not blatant rip-offs of my never-published novelette? Do you see how ridiculous this kind of argument can get? No one stole that story from me. No one should WANT to steal that story from me. I was spinning my wheels at that point in fiction publishing, trying to recreate the magic of some award-winning dystopian stories I wrote for science fiction contests in high school and basically started plagiarizing my previous success and hoping no one would notice; they did.
Frankly, I’ve dealt with more intellectual property right theft in online media criticism than I ever saw in writing fiction and plays. That doesn’t mean this kind of theft doesn’t happen. It means it’s not as common as this kind of press cycle narrative would assume.
So what could cause this kind of group think? How do we wind up with so many similar narratives coming out? In the case of A Quiet Place and The Silence, it’s chasing trends. Hollywood likes to invest in films that are similar to films that made them a lot of money. If apocalyptic monster movies are the hot ticket, we’re going to see apocalyptic monster movies for years until the genre again descends into self-parody. Look at all the mediocre horror/thrillers that tried to recreate the magic of the twist in The Sixth Sense in the early 2000s or the J-horror remake craze after the success of The Ring. The entertainment industry is a high risk world. It’s safer to try to recreate success based on trends than be the trailblazer trying to revolutionize the medium. We have a perfectly good wheel already. We don’t need to reinvent it.
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Horrors and thrillers do have an interesting wrinkle that blurs the lines on copying versus inspiration. A lot of horror films are based on popular short stories; a lot of thrillers are based on popular novels. These stories and novels rarely come out of nowhere when it comes to the trends. Editors can be encouraged by publishers to go a little heavy handed with the notes to make a round peg fit a square hole of what they think will sell.
When I was actively submitting horror short stories to market, I would often get back editorial notes asking me to resubmit with changes. Can you set the story in a city versus the suburbs? Could you switch it to the villain’s perspective but keep the same beats? These were fair critiques, and I could take them or leave them (spoiler alert: I usually said no because untreated mental wellness problems do not put you in the best mind frame to trust and collaborate with people on what you consider to be deeply personal work).
Then there were the blatant trend chasers. I don’t fault the hustle, but the results can be pretty absurd. For example, I had one of the highest paying markets in horror ask me to take my haunted kitchen story “Take Out” and make it a story about werewolves instead. 14 years later I can tell you how I could make it work, but in the moment it was a blatant attempt to capitalize on the success of other monster/transformation stories at the time; I declined. The story never found a publisher and it wound up being the title story in my first short story collection years later. That magazine found plenty of other werewolf/transformation stories to publish until they stopped publishing them for years because people got tired of werewolf/transformation stories.
With regards to stories like A Quiet Place and The Silence, I read quite a few novels a few years before they came out with similar characteristics and imagery. They centered on younger children navigating upsetting new circumstances while being tormented by birds or other animals in their new home. Their past trauma somehow led them to being better prepared to deal with this unusual threat than anyone around them, leading to a newfound confidence and a stronger familial bond by the end.
I also saw quite a few over the top monster stories stemming from the success of Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. That book opened up the market for the reemergence of the monster novel and weird fiction. Suddenly, you could have novels on the front table at chain bookstores about cities attacked by giant insects or dream vacations dashed by floating cephalopods. Pretty soon, films like 10 Cloverfield Lane and A Quiet Place got surprisingly wide distribution for smaller indie efforts and turned huge profits.
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That brings us back to 2020. You can’t shake a stick on Netflix without finding a modern horror/thriller that plays off these same concepts. They’re not all well received, but they’re easy to find. Watch one, and the algorithm with boost the rest.
The Silence will not be the last film accused of copying a previous film in this genre. Bird Box got the same criticism in relation to A Quiet Place, and that was also based on a novel predating the release of A Quiet Place and Tim Lebbon’s The Silence with very similar circumstances. But so was Stephen King’s The Mist (written in 1980, adapted to film in 2007, adapted to TV in 2017) and very few people want to make that connection. And The Mist was playing in the same territory as The Swarm, which itself smashed together elements of Jaws and The Birds for its own take on the mysterious appearance of an unexpected deadly force threatening humanity sub-genre. I could go on.
The newest film will always be compared to the most popular film with the same subject, but that doesn’t mean that the newest literally copied the most famous. We’re all riffing on the same themes while the companies financing the latest blockbuster book, film, game, or TV series push us to do the same thing, just in a different way.
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