John Krasinski Completely Changed 'A Quiet Place's Monsters at the Last Second (2024)

John Krasinski could have easily been comfortable with being best known as the lovable Jim Halpert on The Office, and while that would have been a great legacy, we are grateful that he wanted more, both in front of and behind the camera. This year, Krasinki helmed IF, but early in his directorial career he made the smaller films Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and The Hollars. Everything changed with 2018's A Quiet Place, which he also co-wrote with Bryan Woods and Scott Beck, and starred alongside his real-life wife, Emily Blunt.

A Quiet Place is an alien invasion film like no other. The premise of a movie about monsters who hunt by sound brought in audiences to the cinema, who sat in quiet terror on the edge of their seats, afraid to even eat their popcorn. That premise doesn't work, though, if the aliens aren't terrifying when we see them. A Quiet Place succeeded in creating a new iconic movie monster, which is set to have an origin story with A Quiet Place: Day One starring Joseph Quinn and Lupita Nyong'o, but if Krasinski had gone with the original alien designs, his most successful project could have been his biggest bust.

A Quiet Place

PG-13

Horror

Documentary

Family

Sci-Fi

Thriller

A family struggles for survival in a world where most humans have been killed by blind but noise-sensitive creatures. They are forced to communicate in sign language to keep the creatures at bay.

Release Date

April 3, 2018

Director

John Krasinski

Cast

Emily Blunt , John Krasinski , Millie Simmonds , Noah Jupe , Cade Woodward , Leon Russom

See Also

A Quiet Place Monsters Explained by John KrasinskiEverything You Need To Know About The Monsters In A Quiet Place - LooperA Quiet Place: Who Are the Monsters?John Krasinski's A Quiet Place: Ending And Monsters Explained

Runtime

95

Writers

Bryan Woods , Scott Beck , John Krasinski

Studio

Paramount Pictures

'A Quiet Place's Aliens Originally Had a Bizarre Humanoid Look

As with the best horror, John Krasinski realized that you needed characters to care about first in order to make the monsters matter. A Quiet Place is a small film within a big story, following the Abbott family, who have survived an alien invasion with monsters who hunt by sound. The only way to live to see another day is to make as little noise as possible, and the Abbotts have perfected that until it all goes wrong when their youngest son, Beau (Cade Woodward), can't resist playing with a noisy toy he finds. His death is shocking and sets the family on their path for the movie to follow, but the quick mess of arms and legs that swoop in to take Beau could have looked a lot different, and not in a good way.

In a special feature for the DVD of A Quiet Place, we're given a look at drawings of what the alien monsters were going to look like. While they're computer animated and not fully completed, we're given a good idea of what they would have been like. The biggest thing to notice is that they're more humanoid, standing upright, with wide shoulders, a hardened exoskeleton, and a head with devil horns that made the alien look like a cross between a rhinoceros and something out of a Transformers movie. One look, and it's easy to see why it wouldn't work.

John Krasinski Realized the Alien Designs for 'A Quiet Place' Wouldn't Work

In an interview with Collider, Krasinski said that the original alien design was kept until post-production before being changed in the final hour. He said:

“I had designed this character and this creature, and we loved it. We had so many details like drawings and boards and things for the kids to look at. And then I was really deep in the [post-production], and it was one of those moments where — this sounds super nerdy, but now I understand when people talk about visual effects and seeing this — you could just see that he wasn’t going to work as well as a different design.”

Krasinski was right that the original alien design for A Quiet Place was not going to work. The monsters become something completely different and too human. They look more like warriors from another world rather than some unfathomable creature that still looks realistic to the world it's in. Even Scott Farrar, the visual effects supervisor (who had worked on Transformers movies), knew that what they started out with wasn't good, going so far as to tell Vanity Fair that they were silly looking, and that "We went through a total redesign because it wasn't scary enough." To get it right, they needed to make the aliens look familiar but also as gross as possible.

The Revised Aliens in 'A Quiet Place' Are Original and Frightening

One of the best decisions about A Quiet Place was the choice to not show the creatures a lot. Like with Jaws or The Blair Witch Project, it's scarier when you don't see the monster. That wasn't just an artistic choice, but one made because of time, with Farrar explaining to Vanity Fair that it takes about thirty weeks to make a fleshed out computer-animated creature. They didn't have thirty weeks, so they created many shots that show the aliens in quick flashes or running in the background, but still, there are several scenes where we do see the aliens in all their glory. No shortcuts could be taken, which meant that they had to go back to the drawing board to create something truly frightening.

In the DVD special features for A Quiet Place, production lead Jeffrey Beecroft and concept artist Luis Carrasco said John Krasinski wanted a design that took inspiration from prehistoric fish, and Beecroft came up with the idea of the nautilus shell-like ears for the beings. Krasinski wanted them to look evolved and somewhat humanoid, but, as Farrar told Vanity Fair, still alien enough that it couldn't just be some guy in a suit. “I kept saying to John, we gotta make this gross. I want it to look really medical and raw, like you open up and it’s almost guts or brains—you don’t know what you’re looking at.”

To make the aliens as gross as possible, they drew design inspiration from bog people, which are human cadavers mummified in peat, their skin black and sagging like leather. That's exactly what the final aliens look like. They feel part humanoid and part animal, as they run on all four of their twisted, unfathomable limbs. They're at once familiar, a bit like the Cloverfield monster, the xenomorph from the Alien movies, and the Demogorgon in Stranger Things, while also being a creature we've never seen before. Rather than being just another humanoid-like alien from something out of a bad '50s sci-fi movie, we stare at the aliens in A Quiet Place, both disgusted and fascinated by them, while also trying to study them and figure them out. Stare at them and admire their frightening design, but just make sure you do so quietly.

A Quiet Place is available to watch on Paramount+ in the U.S.

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