Back in 2016, I was looking for the perfect 90-minute movie and found “Silence.” Arguably horror director Mike Flanagan’s breakout film (though some might say that’s 2013’s “Oculus”), “Hush” was quickly released to South by Southwest in early 2016 by Netflix, showcasing the relationship between the broadcaster and writer that would take on “Gerald’s Game of Hill,” “The Haunting Game,” “Midnight Mass,” “The Midnight Club,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” It stars Flanagan’s frequent collaborator Kate Siegel, who is his wife and co-writer of the script, as deaf writer Maddie Young who lives alone in an isolated house. He is followed by a masked killer, played by John Gallagher Jr., who intends to end his life.
It’s that simple—and it works so well. “Hush” combines horror and thrills, as a single, successful scene in all genres of horror films from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” (1954) to recent entries like Christopher Landon’s “Drop” (2024) and Sam Raimi’s “Send for Help” from January.
It also uses several characters, Samantha Sloyan’s main character Flanagan and Michael Trucco as Maddie’s bad neighbors, Emma Graves as Maddie’s sister, who only appears via FaceTime, and Gallagher Jr. like his masked tormentor at first.
“Hush” owes its name to “Wait Until Dark,” the 1967 horror film that starred Audrey Hepburn as a blind woman threatened in her home by a gang of criminals, and is a precursor to a rash of disability horror films, such as 2018’s “A Quaifred Actress,” starring Simmonds. In the same year, where blindness is a salvation from a vision-based infection that causes suicide, and the “Smile” franchise, which explores trauma, mental illness, and suicidal thoughts.
Disability advocates have been vocal about the lack of representation of actual Deaf people in “Hush,” since neither Siegel nor Flanagan are Deaf. However, they hired a Deaf counselor for the film, and Siegel actually learned American Sign Language for the role.
Talking to IndieWire in 2020, Simmonds told Kristen Lopez, critic and author of Popcorn Disability: The Highs and Lows of Disability Representation in Moviesthat despite the research and consideration that Flanagan and Siegel put into “Silence,” “You can’t really do enough research if you’re not alive. If you’re not in the situation, and you’re not living with it, and you’re not signing [then] it’s hard to express that again [have] it still feels real.” I don’t think I can speak for the Deaf community as a non-disabled person myself, and the lack of people with lived experience in front of and in positions of power behind the camera makes me feel otherwise, but I think there’s still merit to “Silence” despite this.
Where it resonates most is Maddie’s refusal to play the victim. Despite the limitations of her disability and the fact that she lives in a remote cabin, Maddie is far from a damsel in distress, using the bias of her stalker, known only as The Man, to her advantage. Maddie arms the noise against The Man, using her car alarm and a blaring smoke detector to catch him off guard, and uses her heightened senses to feel his breath on her neck as he approaches from behind.
Most horror movies—and, you know, real life—would be someone close to Maddie (and “Hush” shows that when Maddie rejects text messages from her ex early in the film), but “Hush” resists this temptation. The man is just a random psychopath with no clear motive for targeting Maddie—he initially expresses surprise that Maddie is Deaf—leaving the audience confused and dismissive as Maddie’s conclusion, “Shut Up,” is even more infuriating than it would have been if he had explained the origin of his killer.
All of this makes “Silence” a very satisfying pay-per-view. But where can viewers find “Silence” if they choose to gamble on it? Despite the initial purchase by Netflix, which for a long time seemed to crown Flanagan the new king of horror, his contract there expired in 2022 when he moved to Amazon Studios, where he has not yet produced any content. (“Carrie” series is coming later this year.) While Flanagan’s long-form series lives on Netflix—for now—“Hush” disappeared from it in 2023 and is currently unavailable for streaming on any major platforms, though it is available on video-on-demand for a fee, and Plex has it for free.
Ultimately, “Hush” fell victim to the streaming giant, and Flanagan criticized Netflix’s prioritization of subscriptions to virtual media. There is a backlash against this and a progression of visual media as well, especially when the subjects can completely disappear from the screens, like “Silence,” which makes it the best horror movie you’ve never seen.
