Here’s Why ‘A Quiet Place’ Got Laughed at by Test Audiences

Despite becoming one of 2018’s most surprising box office hits, John Krasinski’s horror/thriller A Quiet Place got off to a pretty rocky start in its first and only test screening. The initial screening saw reports of fans laughing during the film’s climactic moments but, as we are now learning months later, there was a very good reason for the giggling outbursts.

While speaking with Yahoo, producers Andrew Form and Brad Fuller revealed that the laughter in the test screening was a result of unfinished special effects. The monster in the movie was build from a motion capture performance from director John Krasinski. When this first test screening took place, the alien wasn’t yet finished, so audiences simply saw Jim from The Office in a grey bodysuit.

“So whenever the alien would come onscreen, people would laugh, because it’s John playing him,” Fuller said. “You can’t say, ‘Pretend that’s an alien’ to a test audience.”

Only adding to the laughter was the fact that Krasinski was wearing a pair of Vans sneakers over his bodysuit, and they could be seen stalking Emily Blunt in key scenes.

“As hard as you try to tell an audience, ‘Please, we understand all the visual effects aren’t in, but that will be the creature,’ it’s impossible,” Form added. “It just is. Someone’s gonna laugh, and it just kind of breaks everything. So it was a very hard movie to test, so we only put it up the one time and then we stopped.”

The big reason for the delay in effects was that the creative team had a hard time deciding on a style for the alien creature.

“The development went all the way through post-production. This was a hard one for us,” admitted Form. “In pre-production we had the artist going, and we thought we had landed on a design right before filming. And then we made the big [cardboard] cutout that you have on set of what the creature’s head would look like. And then halfway through shooting, John and I were talking about it and it just wasn’t landing for us. And then we went back to the drawing board.”

After the interview from Yahoo was posted, Krasinski tweeted that the footage of his bodysuit performance still exists.

What did you think of A Quiet Place? Was it one of your favorite movies of the year? Let us know in the comments!