I saw A Quiet Place Part II in a large multiplex theater that was entirely empty except for me. Which is odd, considering that this sequel to the hugely successful 2018 horror film A Quiet Place is also making a ton of money. With this early sign of life from a post-lockdown box office, the collective sigh of relief from everyone in the film industry is probably big enough to interfere with weather patterns right about now.

It was my first trip to a movie theater since the pandemic shutdown over a year ago, and the echoing vastness of that strangely private screening room helped make the movie even creepier. Add to this uneasiness the fact that A Quiet Place Part II was shot in my stomping grounds of Western New York and it all made for a pretty strange experience. Watching the film all alone felt like I was enacting a scene from a typical post-apocalyptic horror movie, in which the protagonist wanders into empty public spaces and tries to enjoy the old popular entertainments in solitude, right before the resumption of the zombie attacks, or whatever the monsters happen to be.

The monsters in A Quiet Place I and II are huge, blind, slimy, angular, leaping aliens with double rows of sharp teeth and acute hearing — they hunt by sound alone. It’s a smart horror film premise — any humans hoping to survive are forced into a life of total, permanent, Trappist-monk-level silence. It fills the imagination immediately, how hopelessly difficult that would be, and how many times a day you’d probably doom yourself and your loved ones by accidentally dropping a fork or stepping on a squeaky floorboard, and then making gruesome death even more certain by automatically exclaiming, “Oh shit!”