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Sensory deprivation has become a common and effective tool in the horror genre for building a sense of unease and terror in the audience. In this instance, I am defining sensory deprivation as the loss of one or more of the five senses. To do this, many films focus on those with various disabilities, such as the deaf and mute protagonist of Hush (2016), the deaf child in A Quiet Place (2018), or the blind antagonist of Don’t Breathe (2016). Similarly, some of these movies use the threat of the monsters as a tool to deprive the senses, such as the unseen evil of BirdBox (2018). In this paper I will explore the origins of sensory deprivation as a tool to incite fear and investigate the effectiveness of removing the senses in film to increase a sense of terror both in the viewer and the affected character. I will also address the binary opposition in interior/ exterior terror, and ask is the horror made worse when we cannot fully sense it?
