A Quiet Place Part II: The Alien Monsters' Origins Explained (2024)

Despite being destructive beasts that took over the world with seeming ease, there is still not a lot known about where the A Quiet Place monsters came from. The first movie in the horror franchise dropped the audience into a world that was already torn apart by this invasion. These monsters have wiped out most of the human population thanks to their ability to hunt based on sound. However, the first movie mostly revolves around the survival of the Abbott family, not being overly concerned with explaining what these monsters are and where they came from.

The A Quiet Place franchise continues to grow with a sequel, A Quiet Place Part 2, and a prequel, A Quiet Place: Day One. With each new entry, more is revealed about these monsters. While the latest entry will likely reveal even more, there have been clues placed throughout the first two movies that offer some insight. From where these beasts came from to how they hunt to their own weaknesses, the hidden details of the monsters in A Quiet Place expand the world of this modern horror franchise.

A Quiet Place Part II Reveals The Monsters Are Alien

It Is Confirmed The Monsters Came From Another Planet

A Quiet Place Part IIconfirms early on that the monsters are in fact aliens and later refers to them as such. The idea is hinted at earlier in the horror franchise as well. In A Quiet Place, newspaper clippings that Lee has reference meteors crashing down on Earth, but nothing specifically connects the meteor with the monsters' arrival. The alien origin of the monsters is confirmed in A Quiet Place 2 in the flashback to the first day of the invasion.

Lee walks through a store shown earlier in A Quiet Place, and the store’s TV is broadcasting news about a mysterious giant meteor crashing in a foreign country. Shortly thereafter, however, the Abbott family attends a baseball game that is interrupted by a sudden meteor. The town starts to run from the impending crash, and the confusion turns into a frenzy when alien creatures begin attacking and killing the citizens. The implication is clear: the A Quiet Place monsters are alien.

Where Did The A Quiet Place Monsters Come From?

The Aliens Arrived On Meteors

Although neither movie spends too much time explaining the A Quiet Place monsters' origin, Krasinski said in an interview (via Collider) that the aliens came to Earth after their homeworld was destroyed:

"So the idea is if they grew up on a planet that had no humans and no light then they don’t need eyes, they can only hunt by sound. They also develop a way to protect themselves from everything else so that’s why they’re bulletproof and all these things. ... [which is] also the reason why they were able to survive kind of the explosion of their planet and then survive on these meteorites, because they’ve evolved to be bulletproof. Until they open themselves up to be vulnerable, they’re completely invulnerable.”

These details reveal that A Quiet Place's alien monsters arrived from a planet much harsher than Earth that lacked any kind of light. The alien planet's environment forced the creatures to develop their strong body armor that made the creatures so difficult to kill in A Quiet Place. The monsters were strong enough to survive their planet exploding, which speaks to how invulnerable they are to force.

The A Quiet Place aliens' planet also likely didn’t have water — or at least water deep enough to drown in. One of the monsters' most significant weaknesses that A Quiet Place 2 introduces is their inability to swim. When Regan and Emmett are attacked, they escape by diving into the water, taking a risk to swim away from the chaos. By doing so, they're able to watch as the monster that jumps in after them immediately drowns. Based on that behavior, it's safe to assume the aliens don't have experience with bodies of water.

Alien Monster Clues In A Quiet Place 1

Lee Abbott Collected Information Of The Monsters

The most obvious clue from the first A Quiet Place that the creatures are aliens is the newspaper clipping of a meteor landing in Mexico, suggesting the monsters came from another planet and are neither a science experiment gone wrong nor a manifestation from Earth. There’s also a small newspaper clipping from A Quiet Place with the headline “Alien Invasion,” but it seems more like a guess than an actual confirmation of the species.

Another clue in A Quiet Place is the young son’s obsession with rocket ships and escaping the chaos through space. These subtle clues indicate a connection between the problems on Earth and space travel.

A Quiet Place 2's Alien Origin Plot Hole?

The Sequel May Have Retconned Details About The Alien Invasion

One fault with movie sequels is that when they include more information about the past or the origins of a situation, they tend to adjust certain details for the narrative to fit more cleanly with their new exploration. This causes a few plot holes in A Quiet Place 2 regarding the aliens’ origins hinted at in the first film. For example, the newspaper clipping Lee has posted in the basem*nt indicates that the first known meteor carrying the aliens crashed in Mexico.

If the meteor had crashed in Mexico, it wouldn’t be as visible as it was for this coastal New England town in A Quiet Place 2. In fact, the aliens come so quickly after the meteor hits that it isn't possible that the same meteor in A Quiet Place 2 has crashed in Mexico. It's possible, however, that the meteors are debris from the alien homeworld, and that multiple meteors crashed across the Earth.

Another plot hole with the aliens arriving on Earth is that the meteor they were carried on was enormous. More immediate destruction would have been caused by the meteor’s impact, debris, and explosion radius than by the aliens themselves. If the meteor was that close in A Quiet Place 2, it’s nearly impossible that they wouldn’t have felt some of its impact, especially since the aliens began to attack so quickly after its initial sighting.

A Quiet Placesubtly mentions multiple crashes on Lee’s whiteboard, which reads cities and timestamps like “Bogota: 19:52, Moscow 19:54, and Boston: 19:58.” This creates another plot hole because there’s no way that newspapers would have been able to widely circulate a meteor crashing in Mexico or Singapore with no mention of alien creatures before the meteor in New England hit.

In A Quiet Place 2, Americans have no knowledge of the aliens or a meteor until they see the live newscast on TV and the meteor itself coming down, so a newspaper story about an international crash wouldn't have had time to be printed and circulated before the ensuing chaos.

A Quiet Place: Day One Should Shed More Light On The Aliens

The Prequel Will Dive Deeper Into The Invasion

A Quiet Place: Day One continues the franchise with a spinoff story taking the spotlight off the Abbot family and focusing on new characters dealing with the first day of the invasion. The trailer for the movie shows various characters at the center of the invasion as it hits New York City, once again suggesting that the invasion wasn't really known about until the meteors hit. The prequel movie also seems to feature more monsters than any of the other movies with an army of them descending on the city.

While the approach of simply dropping the audience into this destroyed world in the first movie was effective, it seems that the A Quiet Place movies have realized that audiences want to know more about this invasion. Following the sequel's flashback opening to the first day, this spinoff will focus entirely on the beginning of it all. This sets the stage for more revelations about the aliens which could confirm certain aspects, give new information, and hint at how humanity will ultimately overcome them.

A Quiet Place

A Quiet Place is a film franchise that centers on a post-apocalyptic Earth following an alien invasion by ruthless creatures that are blind but have unparalleled hearing. Beginning with the first film in 2018, the core plot surrounds the Abbott family, who use sign language to communicate with each other in a world where an errant sound can mean death.

Created by

John Krasinski , Scott Beck , Bryan Woods

Cast

John Krasinski , Emily Blunt , Millicent Simmonds , Noah Jupe , Cillian Murphy , Djimon Hounsou , Lupita Nyong'o , Joseph Quinn , Alex Wolff