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A Quiet Place: Day One–the latest entry in the popular A Quiet Place horror franchise–is hitting theaters this Friday, June 28. In preparation for the upcoming third entry in the series, Paramount Pictures has released a new trailer giving audiences a closer look at the film, its monstrous alien creatures, and its cast. But one character in particular is stealing the show: Frodo, a domestic housecat who gets caught up in the conflict between humans and the alien monstrosities that have overtaken Earth.
In one scene, Frodo can be seen accidentally bumping a small bell with his tail as his adoptive owner Samira (Lupita Nyong’o) and Samira’s friend Eric (Joseph Quinn) look on in horror, desperately trying not to make a sound.
But cat-loving horror fans need not worry (yet, anyway). At the trailer’s conclusion, Eric can be seen running for his life–with an enormous alien chasing him–while tightly holding onto Frodo. Just when all seems lost, Eric jumps off the edge of a broken bridge and plunges into the water below. We don’t see what happens after that, but the trailer suggests that both Eric and Frodo survive (in that particular scene, at least). Frodo’s probably not happy to find himself soaking wet, but on the bright side, at least he’s not alien food.
The film is directed and written by Michael Sarnoski, with series creator John Krasinski pitching in as co-writer. Instead of following the Abbott family, who spent the first two films trying to carve out a safe space for themselves in a post-apocalyptic world plagued with danger, A Quiet Place: Day One follows Samira, a cancer patient who adopts Frodo and does her best to survive the alien threat, starting on the first day of the invasion in New York City.
As for Frodo–who is played by two cats named Schnitzel and Nico–the cat’s fate remains unknown, but the film’s director was adamant that a real cat be used rather than added in post production.
“Early on, a lot of people assumed, ‘OK, it’s a big movie, we’ll CG the cat, and it will make everything a lot easier,'” Sarnoski told IndieWire in a recent interview. “It was important to me to have a real cat that you could feel connected to.”
The production team worked with an animal-training company from London, meeting “a lot of different cats” in search of the ideal feline star.
“We just had a couple days where we would sit in the office, they’d bring in a dozen cats,” Sarnoski said. “We’d meet them and get a sense of their personality, and Schnitzel and Nico were clear choices of, ‘Thank God, they’ve got a sort of soul behind their eyes.'”
So, how does one bond with a cat-actor for the purposes of earning their trust in a manner that will pay off on-screen? It mainly entails treating them the same as you would the enormous, sound-sensitive aliens that serve as the franchise’s main antagonists. According to Sarnoski, getting the cats to work well with their on-screen human counterparts required, “just sitting quietly on set and not riling the cats up.”
Fans of A Quiet Place have even more content to look forward to this year, as the franchise is also dipping its toes into the gaming space with A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead, which is set to release on PC and consoles sometime this year.
