[Intro]
Welcome to The Kill Count where we tally up the victims in all our favorite horror movies.
I'm James A. Janisse and today we're looking at Hush. Released in 2016 on Netflix.
Hush was directed by Mike Flannagan who is one of the most impressive horror film makers of our time.
He created the Haunting of Hill House Netflix series which is one of my favorite things
And also wrote and directed the upcoming sequel to the Shining, Doctor Sleep.
I read that very enjoyable book and with Flannigan in charge of the adaptation
I am FUCKIN' pumped for it!
Mike Flannagan cowrote Hush with his
wife Kate Siegel, and as with many of his projects
she also stars in the film.
Here, she plays Maddie, a deaf, mute woman
who becomes the victim of a sadistic criminal's home invasion.
Hush is a wonderful twist on the home invasion sub-genre
that blends the main character's disabilities with
film making techniques to help put the audience in her shoes.
In fact, Flannagan briefly considered making the movie
entirely silent, to imitate Maddie's experience.
But he decided against it after thinking about how most modern moviegoers aren't used to silent films.
Instead, Hush switches back and forth from Maddie's perspective to what the other characters experience.
But it keeps things quiet with only 15 minutes of dialogue throughout the near 80 minute film.
Most of the screen time is instead devoted to the cat and mouse game between a sick minded murderer and our creative courageous heroine.
If a kill happens in the forest and no ones around to hear it...
Does it really count?
Let's find out and get to them!
The movie begins with some soundless production company cards before the silence is broken up by a...
TITLE CARD!
I heard you calling my name now.
At a cozy little home in the woods author Maddie Young cooks in close-ups and although the sounds of sizzling and etc are audible to us...
[sizzling and etc]
Maddie doesn't hear any of it which is related to the audience and point of hearing sound design.
She gets a visit from her neighbour Sarah who has been practicing
her American Sign Language even though Maddie can read lips just fine.
Sarah just finished reading Maddie's book and was a huge fan of its ending
and Maddie explains that she came up with it because of her so-called writers brain.
Their book club goes on for so long that Maddie's dinner begins to burn,
setting off a strobing lights smoke detector with a thousand decibel alarm tone that's able to warn Maddie through vibrations.
Maddie's first book, "Midnight Mass", gives the audience some backcover backstory about how she lost her speech and hearing which happened when she was 13.
Meanwhile she's been working on a follow-up book named "Sweetwater" but if writing has ever been a part of your job
you know that working can also mean just staring at a computer screen and frustrated silence.
For Maddie though it's not completely silent since she has a
a voice in her head that runs through all the scenarios she could write for her story's ending.
[chaotic voices] Need something more some things okay better Aaron dies I can't
kill Aaron piss em all off and set it up properly
For various alternate endings are actually endings that Flanagan and Siegel went through during the writing process which was quite a unique one.
"We would like sit in the house, Kate would sit inside and I would go outside and try to find different ways to break in."
"Yeah which was great." "It was really really fun."
Yeah, they actually wrote most of the script by acting out different invasion techniques and they had to do one last rewrite when they finally found their
shooting location - a house in Alabama with a different floor plan than their home in Glendale that they used for blocking.
As Maddie productively procrastinates by cleaning, we see Sarah slamming to the door outside, crying for
help from her neighbor who can't hear her please. After failing to get Maddie's
attention Sarah is shot with a crossbow bolt and accosted by a masked man who
then stabs her a couple of times in the gut. Oh wait, I'm sorry. Did I say a couple?
I meant a frigging dozen, cuz this guy goes to squishy town on her abdomen with
some serious overkill, all while staring through the window at Maddie the would-be witness.
The criminal is known only in the credits as The Man, even though he don't look like Becky Lynch to me and after realizing his unique situation
he simply opens the door to Maddie's house and stands behind her menacingly
and she's too busy typing shit about herself to notice him at all.
A FaceTime call from her sister Max scares the man into crab walking away
and although Max notices him as he steals Maddie's phone,
"Listen, behind you, I thought I saw something move"
Maddie blames it on her kitty cat and pays it no mind. She's just about to get ready to get back to the hard work
when she gets a picture message on her laptop from her own phone and it's of her
sitting on the couch and walking around her house. Wow, that is skin crawlingly creepy!
Maddie follows the angle from the last picture sent to find the man in a mask
standing outside her open sliding door.
She rushes over and closes it right before he can get back inside, then heads him off at all of her homes other
entrance point, safely locking the crossbow wielding son of a bitch out for now.
I know what you're thinking: why didn't the man kill her when he came in the first time?
Well, as you'll see this dude's in it for the game of it all.
He's one sick motherfucker.
Before Maddie can FaceTime anyone for help the man shuts the power off from the outside,
then uses the momentary pause in action to taunt her by rubbing some knife blood on the window.
There, I guess, Sarah blood. Sarah blood that was on the knife, you know what I mean.
After he stabs out her tires, Maddie is left feeling more isolated than ever but this woman's a problem solver
so she gets the idea to write him a lipstick message on her window that says her boyfriend's 'bout to
be back and he's gonna be in trouble. Hey, la de la!
She also says that she never saw his face so there'd be no liability and letting her live
but he removes that deniability by removing his mask to reveal that he's that guy from The Belko Experiment?
Yeah, it's John Gallagher Jr. and I've got to say I know he wasn't plenty of other things like newsroom
but I just love that in the span of only two years he was the calm level-headed protagonist in Belko,
a nervous survivor in 10 Cloverfield Lane and the sociopathic murderer in Hush.
Mad props for all that variety in the genre, dude.
The man sauces out that Maddie can read his lips,
"Nod your head if you understand"
so he takes this opportunity to tell her what's up. First off now she has seen his face so yeah,
that's a problem. Also, he was in the room when her FaceTiming sister talked
about how lonely Maddie must be all by herself in the woods. So this dude knows
that the boyfriend line is BS. Finally he tells her that he's here to have fun.
"I can come in anytime I want. And I can get you anytime I want.
But I'm not going to. Not until it's time. When you wish you dead."
Wow, the man sucks! He walks away with a kind of hilarious little half turn at first.
I don't know what that was but I loved it! And Maddie continues to be doped by
arming herself with a knife. Oh, and a hammer. Hell yeah, dual wield that shit!
She barricades herself inside a room and takes a defensive position at the window
but the man must have figured out she was in there cuz here he is now!
Tap tap tapping on the glass with Sarah's dead body! Yeah, Maddie, I hate to tell you but
the man is not your run-of-the-mill criminal. This guy's fucked up.
Maddie allows herself to feel helpless for a minute before she comes up with another plan of action.
Realizing that Sarah's phone might be in her back pocket,
she uses her car fob to set off her vehicle's panic setting. While the man
goes to see what's going on, she rushes back to that window
and goes a-pickin through Sarah's pockets. Maddie's unable to find the phone before
the man comes back around but she does manage to crush his fingers with the
window and hit him in the arm with her hammer, leaving him with a gnarly flesh
wound while she locks him back out again. Nice try, Maddie, but turns out that plan
was in vain anyway. Sarah's phone was already taken care of by the man.
Damn, that buzz cutted bastard, he thinks of everything!
Maddie's next course of action is to just try and make a run for it but a
close call with a bolt from the Mane's crossbow sends her scrambling back
inside, putting the players once again back in their starting positions.
Maddie then goes upstairs and out a second-story window onto the roof of her house.
She uses the man's hearing against him by tossing her flashlight loudly
into the woods and that sends him away from the house to check it out.
Damn, Maddie, you friggin chucked that thing! You play softball or something?
Unfortunately, her escape attempt here probably causes too much noise that she
can't hear and while she's climbing down a trellis she gets a crossbow bolt in the leg.
Damn! Thankfully she manages to avoid a second one with some wicked flexibility.
Despite her leg injury she's able to steal the crossbow from the man
and knock him off the roof but she's unable to figure out how to work the
thing before he climbs back up the trellis so back into the house she goes!
You stay out, mister man! No boys allowed! Okay, bye, I guess.
She crawls into the bathroom and washes out her wound, then ties herself a tourniquet around her leg.
All right, Maddie, you're good to go. Get back to the fight! While trying to figure
out that crossbow again she notices some engraved notches on the weapon.
Uh-oh, is that man keeping his own Kill Count? Better learn how to use that bow soon, Maddie,
this guy's a professional! While she's working on that a guy shows up at her house.
This is Sarah's boyfriend John who kind of looks like a buff Adam Scott
and he's there wondering where the hell his girlfriend is. He sees the lipstick
message on the window but before he can call for any help
he gets duped by the man. "I said on the ground, drop it!"
The man approaches John with a flashlight acting
like a police officer and the blinding light is so convincing that he even gets
John to turn over his wallet but even though the man rolled high for this deceptive performance,
"- You're police? - Deputy. Just barely though.
he's still dressed like a fucking graffiti artist and John begins to suspect that something's up.
John plays it cool and stealthily picks up a rock to take this faker out
but then Maddie tries to warn John, distracting him long enough to get a knife in the neck.
I don't know what's more disturbing, the stab itself or the man's total nonchalance about it.
Another stab takes John down and as the man continues to gloat about his underhanded ways,
John appears to die. Just kidding! John finds the strength to
wrassle the man to the ground and even gets the guy in a stranglehold of some sort
but John's strength and life give out on him and he dies before he can seal the deal.
Damn, man, at least you tried before you die.
Maddie makes another run from her house towards the woods but with that leg wound of hers
the man catches up and knocks her to the ground with a rock, then he... wait, what?
He bashes her brains in with the rock, what the fuck? And fuck you, Hush!
You're not supposed to end like this!
You can't run.
Oh, good. You didn't. Nope.
Maddie's head voice is now running through all the different possible
outcomes for the situation just as if she were writing the ending out in a book.
[chaotic voice]
Her brain voice runs through all of her options and she realizes that just hiding until the man goes away
won't work and she would just bleed to death from her still open leg wound.
Oh, and obviously I won't be counting any of these hypothetical kills on the list but
hey, if Maddie's new plan works out we'll be adding to the count again in no time.
Outside, the man comes across Maddie's cat but thankfully she springs into
action before he can kill the kitty. A bolt to the shoulder hurts the man but
after Maddie runs back inside, she gets her arm caught in a sliding door slam
and the man makes things a whole lot worse by raising his foot up and pretty
much stomping her hand apart. Oh, man, that one hurt to watch. She locks him out once
more but he's done with this shit and tells her that game time is over.
"I'm coming in." Maddie finds some resolve and stands to stare her tormentor in the face.
With some blood from her leg wound she writes a new window message and
the challenge is ah, do it motherfucker! Maybe I will! Gosh! As the man retrieves a
crowbar and starts to smash the window in, Maddie writes out a physical
description of him in a goodbye message for her family, then she locks herself in
the bathroom with a knife, while outside the man proves unable to break through
her sliding door glass. Damn, Maddie, what you got there, wall side windows?
That's okay with him though, he'll just come in through the bathroom window, which we see
from the broken glass shards falling behind Maddie but because of the sound
design we know that she never hears it. The man over plays his hand by leaning
over her and gloating and when he laughs at his own joke,
she feels it on her neck. Maddie reacts with the little flippy stab and sticks
her knife in the knee of the man, then she runs away from him out of the
bathroom but her blood loss has left her feeling a little woozy
so she passes out in the kitchen before she can rearm herself. Or so the man
thinks as he limps over to finish her off. Only to get a face full of wasp killer spray.
Ouch, I bet that stings! Maddie turns on the fire alarm and uses
the head's splitting sound to disarm the man but before she can pick up the knife
he takes her to the ground and they get into a fight. A bitey strangly fight.
He just about has her dead, her pulse slowing beneath his fingertips when her
hand finds a fallen corkscrew on the ground. A stab to the man's neck
pierces through it entirely and the evil bastard splurts blood out the hole for a
couple of beats before it finally takes him down and he falls to the ground dead.
We've had some detestable killers on the Kill Count before but this dude was one of the shit baggiest.
Maddie recovers from the strangling and retrieves her phone from the man's pocket to call 911.
The movie ends with her stepping out onto the porch, petting her still okay kitty cat and waiting patiently for the blue blinking lights of the cop car to arrive.
Good job, girl, you did it!
How many kills occurred while Maddie defended her home? Let's find out and get to the numbers!
Only three people died in "Hush", a quiet count for a quiet movie.
The victims consisted of one woman and two men, giving us a two-to-one ratio of dudes
and with a runtime of 78 minutes that left us with a kill on average every 26 minutes.
I'll give the Golden Chainsaw for coolest kill to The Man because it's
so splurty splurty and it's great to see that bastard finally get his comeuppance.
Dull Machete for lamest kill will go to Sarah, I guess, because I
really liked the fight that John put up while he died so I didn't want to give it to him.
And that's it! Hush came out in 2016 and is one of many impressive works on the ever increasing filmography of Mike Flanagan.
Until next time I'm James A. Janisse, this has been the Kill Count.
Thanks a lot for watching this Kill Count. I want to thank some patrons like Hayley Nicole, South Arc, Luis Morales,
Kayne Applegate, Brian Torres and Loni Washington.
This is unfortunately the last summer sunday Kill Count.
With august here we're gonna start covering "Final Destination" and those movies are a lot. So back to one a week for a while. Sorry!
Hope you enjoyed all the extra episodes though. Be good people!