Being the fourth of the three monkeys...

"Don't make a sound! Don't even breathe! The Iraq veteran whose house you entered is blind, but he's a formidable hunter!"

The story of the 2016 film Don't Breathe was based on this principle: If you don't want to die, don't raise your voice...

Two years later, A Quiet Place (2018) followed, based on the same premise. Making noise again led to death, but this time the killer wasn't a human, but an alien invader. This film had a much more reactionary undertone than Hold Your Breath : It was always the women who brought the terrifying aliens upon the family.

That same year, another "warning film" was made, targeting another sense: the eyes. In this film, Bird Box , the world was being overrun by an unseen horror. Those who witnessed the horror were driven mad, immediately finding something they could use as a weapon and killing themselves. If you didn't want to die, you had to avoid seeing it. A mother and her two children, constantly blindfolded, were forced to make a terrifying journey to reach safety.

These films were such box office hits that all three were spawned sequels: Hold Your Breath 2 (2021), A Quiet Place 2 (2020), A Quiet Place: Day One (2024), and Bird Box: Barcelona (2023).

Of course, it's not just these; many films, good or bad, made in the last decade have turned our senses into objects of fear: The Silence (2019), in which bats mutated into sound-sensitive monsters invade the world; Raw (2016) and Fresh (2022), which give us a taste of the horror of the sense of taste; Never Blink (2025), in which terrifying ghosts pass from dark realms into our world if you blink. We could even add to this list the unfortunately unsuccessful Netflix Turkey dystopian series Sıcak Kafa (2022), about a strange state of madness afflicted by hearing nonsensical conversations.

True, there have been films like 2002's May , which showed how terrifying touch can be; 2008's Pontypool , about a zombie virus transmitted through words; and 2013's Chilling Visions: 5 Senses of Fear, which illustrated the dangerousness of the senses through five separate stories. But these, perhaps primarily because "the time hasn't come yet," haven't attracted as much attention as the aforementioned "I don't see! I don't hear! I don't speak!" films.

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These, and many other films I haven't even mentioned, are almost entirely Hollywood productions. In other words, these "three monkeys stories" have a connection both to Trump's first and second terms as president and to the totalitarian trajectory of the world in general.

In these narratives, voluntarily giving up expressing oneself and voicing one's reaction is presented as a prerequisite for survival in the 'post-truth' era.

Hollywood has an Oscars face; it's a Hollywood showcase where actors and directors demonstrate humanist and progressive responses to global events, sometimes hurling insults at Trump on stage, and where they can be described as anti-racist, anti-fascist, democratic, and even leftist in some cases. If you were to ask these directors and actors, they'd likely say they wouldn't want the masses to play the three monkeys; they'd say they should take to the streets and show their opposition. In fact, watching an Oscars ceremony might even make you think Bernie Sanders will win the US election. But unfortunately, the production system they operate in directly works for capital. And it's been doing this for nearly a century, openly under the guidance of the FBI, CIA, and Pentagon.*

Mass culture products impose the ideological codes of the system in which they are produced, regardless of the ideology of the workers who produce them. Hollywood, the most productive machine of the culture industry, is a prime example of this.

It may sound like a conspiracy theory at first glance, but consider this: Less than a century after the capitalist Rockefeller and his press trust Hearst began their operation to change the face of the visual arts from realistic artworks focused on concrete human stories to "storyless abstract art movements," a banana taped to the wall sold for $6.2 million.

Please think about this, involving all your senses...

*For information on the disgusting collaborations between Hollywood and the Pentagon, please refer to David L. Robb's book: Hollywood Operations, Translated by: Sinan Okan, Güncel Publications, Istanbul, 2005.