The Ominous Silence

Hush presented to the viewer that intensity does not have to come from non-stop actions or naked sex scenes it can come from silence. Besides the introduction, the rest of the Hush episode was all filmed in silence, where people’s ability to speak was taken away. When the silence falls, the intensity of the film started to build up. The characters in the episode got tensed. If it was a badass Vampire, Buffy could find a way to stake the Vampire and be done with it. However, this was something that Buffy never experienced before. Unlike the usual, the goal of the bad guys in this episode, the Gentlemen, was not targeted at Buffy. Buffy was confused and worried. The audience was confused and anxious to find out what’s going on. Because all the characters were muted, audience could only hear the background music, which makes the audience to pay extra attention to the scenes to figure out what the sound cues meant, intensify the atmosphere. Silence gave the show an uneasy feeling. We don’t know when something might pop out like when Gile’s girlfriend lift up the blind and saw the face of the Gentlemen turning towards her. Or we can’t hear sounds of torture but forced to fill the gap with our worst imagination like when the Gentlemen were cutting open a student’s chest to take his heart.

In Dracula, silence was again causing uncomfortable feeling that intensified the atmosphere. At the beginning of the novel, when Jonathan was traveling towards the Count’s castle, he was muted due to his lack of knowledge of the local language. The audience, too, suffered with him. Since Jonathan couldn’t understand what the locals were quarreling about, he, like the audience watching Hush, must pay extra attention to people’s body language and speculate what they meant. Jonathan noticed people looked at him with sympathy and fright, which brought an ominous feeling, heightening the atmosphere. Although there wasn’t much talking between Jonathan and Dracula during his stay at Count’s castle, those were the most frightening times that Jonathan experienced due to the lack of communication. Dracula revealed very little about him and gave Jonathan strict and strange rules for his stay at the castle without giving any reason. After finding out the horrid truth about the Count, Jonathan was forbidden to write letters about his experience at the castle, silencing him from the outside world. The silence sentenced Jonathans ominous fate.