One Cool Thing: Martin Griffin

As part of this year's September Shorts I've asked writer friends to contribute posts inspired by the title One Cool Thing. They'll be telling you about one cool thing they're looking forward to as Autumn approaches. It might be a book or movie, a tabletop or computer game, an event or visit to a special place, a chance to achieve something... or perhaps even an exciting new project.
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But I couldn't ask everyone else to help out without doing the graft myself, could I? So I'll go first, that way there'll be a marked improvement once the guest writers turn up...

​Martin Griffin: A Quiet Place Part Two

A Quiet Place has featured prominently in a recent slew of sensory-deprivation horror stories. There was home-invasion thriller Hush featuring a deaf heroine, there was that thing Don't Breathe which I never saw, then Eleven's flotation tank visions in Stranger Things... and then in 2019, Bird Box was very good and The Silence very wasn't. In short, there've been plenty to choose from.

Now, I've never been one to miss a chance to vault onto a swiftly-disappearing bandwagon, so I've been working on a screenplay for my own sensory-deprivation project. It features a protagonist who can't smell anything but that turns out to be an advantage because they have to battle an alien monster who stinks real bad. I'm calling it Sniff Movie.

Aa-anyway, A Quiet Place was taut, spare and thrilling, and featured one of cinema's best ever barefoot-woman-steps-on-a-sharp-nail scenes. It was killer. However I have to face the fact that Part Two is starting from a tricky position. It's already played its big cards. We're not going into theatres wondering what a silent post-apocalyptic world will be like because we've already spent ninety minutes there. We know the characters well, and we've seen the baddies too.

​However, though the cast remains largely the same (with the addition of the wonderful Cillian Murphy,) it is a damn fine cast, and Kransinski writes and directs so the signs are good. All I need now is a cinema that's actually open by the time the movie arrives later this month...