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The one-two punch of 2018's A Quiet Place and its 2020 sequel saw actor-turned-director John Krasinski tune into a new frequency for horror filmmaking. Through intricate world-building and an emphasis on emotionally rich character work, Krasinski's vision of apocalyptic Americana – a place in which silence is vital for survival from misophonic alien invaders – captured cinemagoers' imaginations, creating one of the great modern horror franchises in the process.

Now, with hotly anticipated spin-off prequel A Quiet Place: Day One, Krasinski is teaming up with Pig writer-director Michael Sarnoski and a stacked ensemble – Lupita Nyong'o, Joseph Quinn, Djimon Hounsou and Alex Wolff – to take audiences all the way back to the day the world went quiet. And viewers beware: before it goes quiet, things are going to get really loud.

If the franchise's first two entries used the absence of noise to amplify their extraterrestrial terror, then our first glimpse of A Quiet Place: Day One reverses the polarity in dramatic fashion. Invoking the frenzied, city-wide panic of disaster movies like War Of The Worlds and Cloverfield, the cacophonous first trailer for the prequel promises a huge-scale, high-intensity experience from the get-go.

Winding the clocks back to long before we first met the Abbott family, Sarnoski's film lands viewers in New York City on the day humanity's extraterrestrial annihilation began. The car horns, howling sirens, hustle and bustle of the Big Apple represent a radical departure from the eerie, noiseless world of Quiet Places past. And the immediate, violent arrival of our noise-activated assailants as fire punctures the city's skyline and ash rains down vividly recalls the tonal shift from Ridley Scott's atmospheric Alien to James Cameron's action-packed Aliens. It's epic. It's also horrifying.

At the heart of the carnage, trying to make their way through a city quite literally on fire, are franchise newcomers Lupita Nyong'o and Joseph Quinn. No strangers to genre fare (Nyong'o proved her horror chops with an Oscar-worthy turn in Jordan Peele's 2019 horror Us; Quinn won legions of fans with his portrayal of axe-shredding outcast Eddie Munson in Stranger Things), the duo respectively play Sam and Eric, two strangers thrown together when the aliens make first contact.

They're joined by Hereditary star Alex Wolff, who's worked with Sarnoski once before on Pig, and Djimon Hounsou, whose Henri first appeared in A Quiet Place Part II as "The Man On The Island".

Little else is known about the cast's characters or the plot yet (that Sam's cat is called Frodo is about all that has been given away), but Krasinski's decision to trust Sarnoski – whose knack for suffusing genre filmmaking with character-driven storytelling mirrors his own – with this pivotal moment in A Quiet Place's canon speaks volumes. Just look at Sarnoski's subversive 2021 revenge-thriller Pig. It took a silly-on-the-surface, John Wick-like premise – a truffle hunter (Nicolas Cage) searches for his stolen pig as he traverses the underworld of Portland's haute cuisine scene – and transformed it into a wrenching meditation on grief and trauma.

So although A Quiet Place: Day One moves within disaster and horror genre circles, expect there to be far more bubbling away beneath the surface. Plus, with Sarnoski's Pig cinematographer Pat Scola behind the camera, expect shock and awe in every dynamic frame.

This is already shaping up to be the blockbuster horror of 2024, so feast your eyes (and ears) on A Quiet Place: Day One at Picturehouse this summer.   Jordan King