When you ask a horror fan for their favorite work from director Mike Flanagan, they’ll probably point right to The Haunting of Hill House or Midnight Mass. I go back further: Flanagan’s suspenseful psychological horror-thriller Hush, now 10 years old, shakes up horror tropes in a way that is sure to surprise seasoned scare seekers.
Anyone on a steady diet of horror films knows the Final Girl — a trope in which the last woman standing is left to either escape or confront the masked killer. She’s bruised, battered, and forever changed by the harrowing events she’s been through. Hush has its own final girl with Maddie Young (Kate Siegel), whose life is changed forever when a masked man turns up at her door after murdering her friend and decides to torment her. However, Flanagan added a twist to his protagonist: Maddie is Deaf and non-verbal, the result of contracting meningitis at age 13. The result is a tense and spine-chilling horror that I’ve always enjoyed because of how much story it tells from a single location, but it’s resonated with me even more since I was diagnosed with auditory processing disorder in my mid-20s.
The depiction of disability in horror is a mixed bag. Sometimes, a character’s disability is reason enough for their malice, as with Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy) in M. Night Shyamalan’s Split, whose dissociative identity disorder is portrayed as the reason he kills. Other times, it can turn characters into burdens, highlighting their inability to escape danger, or it can be used against them, thereby justifying their abandonment and eventual doom. The latter happens to the character Carlos (Ricky Dean Logan) in Wes Craven’s Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, where Carlos, who is hard of hearing, gets a hearing aid that amplifies sound so loudly it explodes his head.
From the beginning, it’s clear that Maddie, despite being Deaf, lives a typical daily life. We see her cooking dinner, replying to texts, and getting annoyed by her ex’s messages. In the opening scenes, we hear the sizzle of food, the ding of a notification, and her frustrated sigh. We then see these activities from her perspective in silence. This brief scene, lasting about a minute or two, highlights Hush’s approach, contrary to the usual portrayal of disabled characters in horror movies. Maddie is shown as sharp and capable. Even when she burns food, her fire alarm is extremely loud so she can feel the vibration, which suits her needs but is painful to other ears. As the movie’s plot unfolds, Maddie’s needs eventually turn the tables on a masked killer.
While Maddie’s Deafness — and its portrayal by Siegel and Flanagan — has provoked some controversy over the years, it has always felt like a fascinating twist to the Final Girl trope. Final Girls are known to make noise: they swear, they scream, they yell out in defiance, and they give as good as they get. Maddie also does this, but in keeping with the film’s title, the audience never gets the chance to hear it because for much of Hush we follow Maddie’s point of view. Maddie cannot hear it, so the viewer locked into her perspective can’t either. Because of the sparse dialogue in Hush — much of its script consists of stage directions and descriptions — Maddie’s plight may seem quiet in comparison to the screams and shouts of other well-established Final Girls.
However, that is far from the case. Maddie’s defiance, as she sticks her finger into her own bloody wound to write taunts to the masked man waiting outside to kill her, is just as exciting to watch as Halloween’s Laurie Strode sticking a coat hanger into Michael Myers’s eye.
Flanagan makes sure that Maddie, while just as competent as a hearing person, isn’t a superhero. When the masked man attacks her, she bleeds just the same as any other Final Girl. When her friend’s husband John arrives, she forgets the danger he’s in, makes a noise to distract him, and inadvertently seals his death. She’s just a normal person, and for a genre that can so often forget to do that for its disabled characters, Flanagan’s Hush isn’t just a compelling watch, but a deeply human one.
Hush is available to stream on Shudder, Pluto TV, Tubi, and PLEX.