This may be lost to time now, but back in the aughts when SAW was a new thing it was seen as a huge underdog story. These clever young Australians, director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell, had taken first Sundance and then the world by storm with their gritty, against-the-grain little high concept horror movie that cost a million dollars and grossed more than 100 times that much just in theaters. Soon it would be tarred as “torture porn” and looked down on for having an endless series of sequels, and then it would sort of outlive that criticism and become a beloved institution. It hasn’t been Wan’s baby for most of that time, but unlike the makers of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT or PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, he was able to grow a bigger directing career from that success. He didn’t want to repeat himself, and stepped back to executive produce the first sequels while he and Whannell hooked up with Universal to make a $20 million ghost story called DEAD SILENCE.

But it was seen as a huge dud. It made less than its budget in theaters and received “generally unfavorable reviews” according to Metacritic. Man, I should’ve known to see it anyway. I mean I did, I always meant to catch up with it, but it took me this long. It’s funny because you can see how people back then who pegged Wan as this extreme horror guy and wanted something really seedy were like, what the fuck is this? Haunted dolls? Flying cameras? I want to see something fucked up! I don’t think I would’ve agreed with them at the time, but today this is definitely the kind of enthusiastic absurdity I want from the director of MALIGNANT.

Regardless of the specifics of the horror content, I found DEAD SILENCE exhilarating just as an exercise in spookablastic style. The guy with the breakout indie getting his first studio budget and going for broke. I immediately fell in love with its heightened atmosphere. The opening takes place in an apartment with so much city noise and rain outside it reminded me of THE CROW. Jamie Ashen (Ryan Kwanten right before RED HILL) and his wife Lisa (Laura Regan, HOLLOW MAN 2) are a happy young couple but someone anonymously delivers them a ventriloquist dummy named Billy (you know how it is) and the next thing you know the poor lady has had a spooky encounter and is dead with her tongue cut out and her jaw detached like she’s the puppet.

Jamie doesn’t know what the fuck happened, but the box includes a note about Mary Shaw (Judith Roberts, ERASERHEAD, SILENT NIGHT DEADLY NIGHT), a famous ventriloquist from his home town of Raven’s Fair, and one of those horror characters whose tale is so scary it became a rhyme that kids say. Yeah, you know – “Beware the stare of Mary Shaw, she had no children only dolls, and if you see her in your dreams, be sure you never, ever scream.” All children say this. Or maybe it’s regional.

So he goes home to investigate, and we get one of those “everything’s changed” drive throughs where every business on Main Street has giant “OUT OF BUSINESS” signs. His father Edward (Bob Gunton, BATS) still lives in a mansion, though. They haven’t spoken in years, and he seems like a jerk, but Edward’s pretty new wife Ella (Amber Valletta, TRANSPORTER 2) pushes him around in his wheelchair and swears he’s much nicer since the stroke and wants to make things better.

Jamie talks to the town mortician Henry (Michael Fairman, ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN) about his wife’s funeral, and Henry insists that he needs to bury that puppet, Billy, to end the curse of Mary Shaw. Turns out the old man was there as a child when Mary did a big puppet show and some kid heckled that he could see her lips move. The kid later disappeared so the town assumed she did it, cut her tongue out and lynched her. Now she’s following the Freddy model, supernaturally going after the descendants of the mob who killed her. The beautiful thing about this movie is that the more we learn about the backstory the more ludicrous it gets, for example Shaw made sure when she died they turned her body into a puppet and buried her with her 100 “children” (puppets). And Henry saw her rise out of her grave but luckily he kept the titular dead silence. If you scream she takes your tongue and then throws her voice to speak for you!

I didn’t mention this but there’s a homicide detective named Lipton (Donnie Wahlberg, DIAMOND MEN) who thinks Jamie is a murderer, follows him around, catches him burying the puppet, also finds little holes where somebody dug up Mary Shaw’s puppets and blames him. Wahlberg is in that unfortunate situation like many TV stars where he can be pretty good but it’s just hard for us to not think of him as the guy we originally knew him as (a New Kid On the Block). I know he was good in THE SIXTH SENSE and he has a Wan association from being in SAW II, III and IV. But it’s still funny to see him hangin’ tough in a trenchcoat like he’s Sam Spade. And I think they recognize this – he’s doing oddball things in all the scenes, always getting an uncomfortable chuckle.

Personally I’m not a fan of this approach to evil dolls where you make them look purposely evil. The whole concept is that dolls can be accidentally scary looking, it totally kills it when you force it, it’s just not the same thing at all and looks more embarrassing than creepy. This also applies to clowns. Though Wan definitely doesn’t go as over the top as he did with Annabelle in THE CONJURING here, I think these ones are pretty mediocre. I would point to THE BOY as a modern movie with a way more effective creepy doll design. But DEAD SILENCE gets away with it because the whole tone is so over the top anyway, I forgive it pretty quick.

Wan said he wanted to do something in a Hammer vein, but I was thinking more E.C. Comics. We get to see all the dug up puppets in display cases creepily turning their heads at the same time, corpses turned into puppets and marionettes, and a gorgeously preposterous twist at the end, with the rhythm and feel of the end of SAW, which had the rhythm and feel of the end of THE USUAL SUSPECTS, but neither of those had (SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER) a reveal that earlier when dad ate soup he was actually dead and hollowed out and the soup was just being scooped into his mouth and pouring out of a hole in his back. So obviously whoever told us this was a bad movie all these years has some explaining to do.

Also the style never lets up. There’s this shot that zooms into a map pinned to a wall, and it dissolves to an overhead view of the exact place from the map, and drops down into a car driving along the highway and inside the car Jamie has the same map (stolen from the wall?) with his finger pointing right to this spot where he’s driving. Another shot shows him crossing a bridge and zooms into the sign for the bridge, which includes an engraving of the bridge itself, and we zoom into that until it dissolves into the actual bridge as his car crosses it.

Why do that, you ask? A better question is “why not?” You got a problem with cool shots? Do they offend you? I’m sorry. I’m sorry that eager young Wan and cinematographer John R. Leonetti (CHILD’S PLAY 3, THE MASK, I KNOW WHO KILLED ME, director of MORTAL KOMBAT ANNIHILATION) are having a great time doing awesome shit and being awesome. I guess you’re gonna call the cops on them now.

But I’m gonna stay and have fun. Watching DEAD SILENCE all these years later as a fan of MALIGNANT (or even AQUAMAN) it kinda seems like the first real Wan movie. I see it and I think yeah, that’s my boy! But Wan might see it differently, because he apparently had some disagreements with the studio, and Whannell (who has since become a reliable director himself with UPGRADE and THE INVISIBLE MAN) is vocally not a fan of the movie or the experience. I couldn’t get an archive of it to load, but at some point he wrote a blog post called “Dud Silence: The Hellish Experience Of Making A Bad Horror Film.” He says his management convinced him to try to sell a pitch before SAW came out, in case it didn’t do well. He did and was stuck writing this idea he wasn’t that into, and then Universal hired script doctors to add some of the wonderful/ridiculous rules.

In an interview with JoBlo when the movie came out, Wan politely admitted that he didn’t have complete control, but the way he described the game is a pretty good preview of his career up to AQUAMAN AND THE LOST KINGDOM: “The trick is to try and sneak in all the strange, weird ideas that you love as a horror fan and see if you can get away with it. So we’ll see how many I got away with.”