A Quiet Place Part II opened in theaters earlier this year, welcoming eager horror fans back to the big-screen movie experience as cinemas reopened safely amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, the film is available to own on 4K Ultra HD Combo Pack, Blu-ray and DVD from Paramount Home Entertainment. In celebration of A Quiet Place Part II being available on home video, PopCulture.com had a chance to speak with the film’s sound editors Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van der Ryn, both of whom worked on the first film as well.
Aadahl and Van der Ryn have been part of many major franchise projects, such as Transformers and Godzilla but they say that the Quiet Place films, especially the new sequel, stand out for the phenomenal use of silence throughout. This is thanks to the characters having to remain quiet so as to not spark the attention of bloodthirsty creatures who have the ability for high-frequency hearing. Another aspect that makes it unique is that one of the main characters, Regan, is deaf. “There’s a lot of quiet in the film and the only true silence in the film is when Regan…has her cochlear implant turned off,” Aadahl shared. “It’s many different shades of quiet down to pure digital silence.”
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Aadahl further shares how one scene in the film with Regan, who is played by actress Millicent Simmonds, utilizes “complete digital silence for a big stretch” to better capture her perspective on the events. “For me, that’s kind of the most unsettling, emotional, crazy experience,” he said. Aadahl added that even “as an audience” member of the film, the scene gives him “goosebumps.”
Commenting on how they knew where to best use complete silence, Van der Ryn praised John Krasinski’s script and directing approach for leaving a “road map” that allowed them to have a perfect understanding of what was needed. “We realized how powerful it could be that John actually wrote many of these moments into part two into the script,” he shared. “When we started doing the post-production, our job the sound design, we really had a bit of a road map in the script for where we wanted to flip the track and go into her sonic point of view.”
Van der Ryn continued, “That was great to have that road map. It also gave us places to take it for longer stretches and to really play with that a lot more in this movie and that was super fun.” A Quiet Place Part II is available to own on 4K Ultra HD Combo Pack, Blu-ray and DVD. It is also available to stream on Paramount+ for subscribers of the new streaming service, which offers a free trial subscription to new members.
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