Rotten Tomatoes Names ‘A Quiet Place’ as Best-Reviewed Horror Movie of 2018

Rotten Tomatoes announced its “Golden Tomato Award” recipients on Saturday, naming A Quiet Place the best-reviewed horror film of 2018.

Rotten Tomatoes has a wealth of metric data on TV shows and movies available for public consumption at any time. To wrap up each year, it summarizes that data in the form of its Golden Tomato Awards, an online award accompanied by an article and social media honors. This weekend, the winners among critics were announced, while voting for fan categories was just opened. In the horror category, A Quiet Place took home the gold.

A Quiet Place was the third feature directed by John Krasinksi, the actor best known for playing Jim on the The Office. Krasinski also co-wrote the script with Bryan Woods and Scott Beck, and he took a starring role as Lee Abbott.

The movie is set in a post-apocalyptic near-future, where bizarre monsters have wiped out most of the earth’s animal and human populations. The Abbotts have survived only by learning to be as quiet as possible, since the monsters are attracted by even the slightest sound.

The film was lauded as a heart-pumping thriller amongst critics and audiences alike. It was a unique blend of horror, sci-fi and drama, with building on genre tropes and establishing new ones. The movie also got a lot of praise for its depictions of deafness and American Sign Language in an authentic way.

As Rotten Tomatoes pointed out, A Quiet Place‘s win was even more impressive considering the range of excellent horror movies out this year. The runner-up was Hereditary, a film that took over pop culture for weeks and dolled out some of the most authentic scares of the year.

Behind that was Mandy at number three, followed by Halloween at number four. Rounding out the list was Overlord, a zombie movie set during World War II.

Rotten Tomatoes gathers and aggregates data on movies and TV shows, providing average ratings amongst fans and critics alike. For better or for worse, its ratings have come to carry a lot of weight in Hollywood and in the public eye.

The site has systems to take averages amongst scoring on many different criteria, as well as letting fans voice their opinion.

A Quiet Place excelled in this format. At the time of this writing, the movie has a 95 percent rating on the “Tomatometer” amongst critics, with an average of 8.2 out of 10 out of 330 reviews. Fans actually enjoyed the movie a bit less than professionals, giving it an 83 percent.

A sequel to A Quiet Place is currently in development, and slated for release in May of 2020.