Hush (2016) | 31 Days of Horror: Oct 5

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Hush, hush, I know she can’t hear me calling her name.

Mike Flanagan’s Hush is a taut thriller that makes use of minimal actors, a single location, and a huge amount of tension. It’s a modern classic which proves that horror films are not all about gore and monsters.

Before Viewing

The trailer is creepy in and of itself. A woman that is deaf and mute is stalked by a mysterious man in a white mask. He grabs her phone and texts a picture he secretly took of her back to her computer before trying to get into her house. What does he want? And why does he pick her? This is from the director of the super creepy Oculus, so let’s quiet down now. Hush!

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

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After Viewing

In a remote house in the woods, Maddie Green (Kate Siegel) is prepping dinner. She is deaf and mute, but that doesn’t stop her from being a successful author of books. Her neighbor Sarah (Samantha Sloyan) stops by to return a copy of Maddie’s latest book. They chat for a few minutes, before Sarah notices the smoke alarm going off in the house. Maddie’s dinner is burning and the alarm is deafening. Maddie signs that she needs it loud so she can feel the vibrations if she’s asleep.

Sarah returns home and Maddie deletes a text from Craig, then feels bad, tries to call him, and then shuts her computer when he calls back. Instead, Maddie starts working on the ending of her next book. She has seven different endings and cannot decide which one to use. On her porch, unbeknownst to Maddie, a bloody Sarah bangs on the window to get her attention before being attacked by a masked Man (John Gallagher Jr.) who stabs her to death. When Maddie doesn’t react he realizes that she can’t hear him.

Maddie takes a call from her sister Max (Emma Graves), which lets the Man know she’s single. Maddie wanders around the house looking for her cat, Bitch. The Man steals her phone and texts pictures he takes of her, causing her to panic. He cuts her power so she can’t dial 911, and slashes her car tires. She writes on the glass door with lipstick, “Won’t tell, Didn’t See Face, Boyfriend Coming Home.” He removes his mask, and tells her he won’t kill her until she’s ready to die.

Maddie tries several things including getting Sarah’s phone off her body, hiding under the deck outside, and eventually running. But each time she is either too frightened or stopped by the man, who also has a crossbow he fires at her. She gets out onto her roof and throws her flashlight into the woods, then begins heading the other way. But the Man is ready for that and shoots her in the thigh with an arrow. She manages to get back inside, having stolen the crossbow from him. Bleeding heavily, she patches her leg up as best she can.

Sarah’s boyfriend John shows up looking for her. The Man, pretending to be a police deputy, questions John–claiming he got a report that someone was stalking the girls at the house. John becomes suspicious when he sees blood on the Man’s arm (from where Maddie stabbed him during one of her escape attempts). Maddie suddenly bangs on the glass to get John’s attention, but unfortunately the Man uses that split-second to stab John in the neck, causing him to bleed out. The Man thanks Maddie, since he was not certain he could take John on his own.

Her inner voice runs through all her possible endings, and she decides she must kill the Man. He is outside about to kill her cat, when she finally manages to get the crossbow loaded and shoots him in the shoulder. As she gets back inside, he catches her arm in the sliding glass door, stomping her right hand with his boot and breaking her bones. She writes “Do It, Coward” in her own blood on the glass, setting him off. She hides in the bathroom with a knife, but he manages to come in via her skylight. Luckily, she feels him breathe on her neck and stabs him in the knee.

He chases her into the kitchen where she begins to black out from loss of blood. She sprays him in the eyes with wasp spray and sets off her loud smoke alarm again (which also has a flashing light). He begins to strangle her. As her heartbeats slow down, she flashes to pictures of her life, friends, and family. She finds a corkscrew that has fallen on the floor and stabs the Man in the neck. He bleeds out and slumps onto her. With her final ounces of strength she pushes him off, gets her phone back and dials 911. She is sitting on the porch, beaten, battered, and bloody–petting her cat, when the police arrive.

“                 ” – Maddie

Hush is Mike Flanagan’s sixth credited directorial film (with the first three being student films). His previous two thrillers, Absentia and Oculus, were both strong films with unexpected moments. For this film, he teamed up with Blumhouse Productions to create a taut thriller that grabs the viewers attention. When I first saw this five years ago I was stunned by the adrenaline surge brought on by the film. The setup, and movement of this film are both fresh and logical. Flanagan and Siegel create a story that is both plausible and horrifying, with a well-rounded character that transforms from an individual with a disability to a perfectly capable survivor of trauma. Hush also did one other thing for me. It put Flanagan and his projects on the radar for me. Before I Wake, Ouija: Origin of Evil, and the Stephen King adaptations of Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep are all well made thrillers/horror films. He’s attracted even more attention with his current trio of Netflix miniseries which include The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and Black Mass. He also has two upcoming series, The Midnight Club and The Fall of the House of Usher.

Hush is a well constructed film. Not just for a horror film, but for any film. It creates its world, setting up all the necessary information within the opening minutes without making it feel like certain elements are being overly foreshadowed. Several examples include showing Maddie using the corkscrew in her cooking montage at the beginning, which is also seen on the countertop in a couple shots–but not too overtly, setting up the use of technology that Maddie needs to function with other people or her home–like the deafening alarm, and showing the geography of her house–while searching for her cat. Flanagan doesn’t linger too long on any of these elements, but comes back to them for plot points later. And since she is unable to hear or speak, Flanagan depicts that in a way similar to the way that The Hunt for Red October transitioned the dialog from Russian to English. His camera lingers in on Maddie’s ear with the normal sounds of her kitchen, and as it comes around behind her head (almost to her POV) the sound cuts out to almost a white noise.

The amount of tension that builds throughout the film is also palpable. The Man is not some huge muscular burglar, but he does have several advantages over Maddie that Flanagan translates in cinematic ways so the audience can feel the helplessness as well. Maddie tries several times to escape, or to go for help, but each time she is forced back into the house. Flanagan provides quiet moments of Maddie thinking during these times to give the view suitable “what if” time. Time for them to wonder, what would I do in a situation like this? The viewer probably has several suggestions for what the character should do, and the story cleverly includes a moment when Maddie’s “writer brain” kicks in and examines all those possible avenues of escape–including a great fake out where she is bludgeoned to death by a rock. Certainly the plan doesn’t survive first contact with her enemy (or her hand for that matter) but her sheer determination to piss off this assailant by writing–in her own blood, no less–that he’s a coward. At the beginning of the film she does not seem like the type of person that would be able to survive this attack, but she proves to herself, and the audience, that she is made of tougher stuff than even she realized.

The biggest question to come out of watching this film is why was the Man doing this? This isn’t some spur of the moment decision. His character is a tried and true psychopath who plans this sort of thing out. When Maddie gets a hold of his crossbow, she notices that there are 13 scratches on it. Thirteen hashtags for his previous victims. But what is his motivation? There’s no hints or clues presented in the film, which is rare for a horror film to not at least tease some sort of backstory for the villain. He seems like he’s just a thrillkiller that gets off on the sadistic killing and hunting of random people.

Hush ends on a relatively happy note, as much as that can happen. Maddie survives and even though she has had her hand crushed and lost a lot of blood, the emergency services are showing up so the viewer knows she’s in good hands. But her healing is only just beginning. Firstly, her hand was pretty messed up by the Man, fingers splayed in various directions. As a character that uses her hands for communication, it’s possible that she may have difficulty in the future with sign language due to this injury. Beyond that, she may also need to work out the killing of her friends. While Sarah’s death is a tragedy, and occurred on Maddie’s porch, her involvement with John’s death is so much more of a tragedy. If it weren’t for her distracting John at that moment, he would probably have been able to subdue the Man. This moment isn’t dwelt on in the film, but seems like it would be a particular painful moment for Maddie.

Overall, Hush doesn’t waste time or energy with its runtime. It’s a lean 81 minutes that streamlines the story to the most relevant elements. It doesn’t waste time with backstories, but gives a quick overview of everything the audience needs in the opening minutes as it takes off for an adrenaline laced thrill ride. While it does contain some intense and graphic scenes of killing or maiming, it does take more of a cue from older masters of suspense like DePalma and Hitchcock. It does what many other films of the modern generation try to do, yet fail. Hush is a modern suspense-thriller masterpiece.

Assorted Musings

• The book that Sarah returns, Black Mass, would become the name for Flanagan’s third horror series for Netflix, after The Haunting of Hill House, and The Haunting of Bly Manor.
• Kate Siegel married director Mike Flanagan the same year that this film was released.
• The film shares similar elements with the 1967 Wait Until Dark, which features Audrey Hepburn as a blind woman who must survive a home invasion.