James Wan’s Ventriloquist Horror Flick Is Ready to Be Rediscovered

In 2007, James Wan was a horror up-and-comer who’d scored a huge hit with 2004’s Saw, which had by then already released its first two sequels with a third on the way. But before Insidious and The Conjuring he made a couple of one-offs: the Kevin Bacon vigilante thriller Death Sentence, and the ventriloquist horror tale Dead Silence.

The latter was just added to Shudder, and though it was a bust 18 years ago, it’s now a fun one to revisit—especially taking into account all that Wan and his frequent collaborator Leigh Whannell, who scripted Dead Silence, have accomplished since then. Though they were still just the Saw guys at the time, you can easily pick out certain narrative choices and imagery that would later become touchstones of their work.

Saw‘s game-obsessed Jigsaw puppet was already entered into the record ahead of Dead Silence, and it’s echoed here in Billy, the main ventriloquist dummy in a movie that gives him a lot of evil toy back-ups. The white face, the ghoulishly hinged jaw, and the fondness for bow ties are all shared characteristics, though Billy has luminous blue eyes that peer around in sinister ways the audience notices far before the characters do.

Wan is notably a huge fan of cursed objects; the Conjuring cinematic universe is built around them. It can’t be a coincidence that Annabelle—a doll even more ghastly than Billy—is the most charismatic escapee from Ed and Lorraine Warren’s stash of occult treasures. (Wan’s Instagram handle? “Creepypuppet“.)

Dead Silence also hints at stylistic elements that would enter Wan’s later work, with eerie sound design that plays up silence as much as shrieks, as well as jump scares that predate the furious old-lady entity in Insidious, as well as the Nun’s fondness for dramatically emerging from the shadows… then contorting her face to bring out her demonic side.

You also can’t ignore the fact that Saw mainstay Donnie Wahlberg is also in Dead Silence, playing a familiar sort of scruffy police detective. This version of the character is more skeptical than the corrupt cop in Saw; he’s fond of issuing warnings like “You don’t want to make me chase you!” as he races after the protagonist into an abandoned theater full of haunted dolls. He also has a weird obsession with his battery-operated razor, a tic that leads nowhere despite being foregrounded as a key personality trait.

Dead Silence’s set-up also hints at Wan supernatural stories to come, with a malevolent figure in the past poking its way across generations to make sure a curse never dies. Unfortunately the main character, Jamie—Ryan Kwanten, just prior to True Blood—isn’t as compelling as the central figures in Insidious or The Conjuring. He’s just sort of an unmemorable dude, though he is a determined one. When his wife dies in an absolutely hideous way—the very night a ventriloquist dummy is delivered to their apartment from an unknown sender—he heads straight to his hometown, where his estranged father (Bob Gunton) lives with his suspiciously young and glamorous new wife (Amber Valletta).

Though Dead Silence takes place in 2007, it’s set in a reality seemingly devoid of cell phones and Google searches. There are land lines galore, and historical exposition comes courtesy of a mortician’s extended flashback as well as a literal scrapbook that Jamie happens to come across. There’s also a nursery rhyme that references the town’s boogeyman figure: a theater performer named Mary Shaw so obsessed with the dolls in her act she insisted they be buried with her… each with their own tiny coffin and grave marker.

There’s even more to the backstory that surfaces as Jamie digs deeper—including a decades-old cold case involving a missing child, and an extended bit about tongues being ripped out that seems like it should tie into the “throwing your voice” part of ventriloquism, but the details don’t quite come together there.

Still, “Be careful! If you go looking for answers, you just might find them” is the advice the mortician passes on to Jamie (naturally, he never even considers abiding by that), and Dead Silence agreeably ties up most of its plot threads by the end.

It also has an absolute scream of a twist ending that makes you think perhaps, just maybe, Wan and Whannell had campier ambitions for this story. As it plays out onscreen, Dead Silence skews a little too much toward taking itself too seriously, especially considering the sheer amount of dolls involved. It’s also filmed with a relentlessly dour blue-tinged filter, which is maybe the greatest sin committed here, as well as what marks it so clearly as a mid-2000s relic.

If you don’t mind turning up the brightness to ease that gloom, though, you can have a jolly good time watching this one. Don’t be surprised if you have the urge to watch a few more Wan flicks once you’re done.

Dead Silence is now streaming on Shudder.

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