Hollywood Silencer

A black cylinder that screws to the end of any gun, from pistol to massive rifle, and reduces the bang to a soft "fwip" that nobody will hear. This sound is an example of The Coconut Effect. Roger Ebert likened it to a cat sneezing.

It's the Rule of Cool: the smooth assassin can make his hit, then melt into the night with nary a sound.

The idea of the Hollywood Silencer is so prevalent that real silencers are referred to as "suppressors" to emphasize they do not make weapons completely silent and to distance them from the trope.

One common variant is for a character to squeeze a pillow between the gun and the victim to muffle the sound of the gunshot.

With the exception of the Nagant and similar (few of which exist and even fewer show up in fiction) silenced revolvers are a sign that the work is not gunning for realism.[1] Please see Useful Notes On Silencers for more on how they actually do work.

Examples of Hollywood Silencer include:

Anime and Manga

  • Gunsmith Cats
    • Used straight in the anime, as a rare exception to otherwise showing their work with recordings of the exact weapons shown. Rather excusable, as the gun in question was the extremely rare Welrod, not something the range they used could have rented them.
    • Subverted in Gunsmith Cats: Burst when Misty customizes a Python revolver to accept a suppressor, only to be chewed out by Rally because (with the weapon being a revolver) the suppressor has no effect.
  • Averted in Noir, which took actual audio from the guns used and doesn't completely diminish the sound when a silencer is fitted. If anything the sound of the silenced guns is more like a "pew" than a "bang" and it's still fairly loud.
  • Averted in an episode of Detective Conan where, when confronted by Conan under the stands, the episode's culprit knows that a silencer does not completely mask a gun's noise, but he's in a crowded stadium where everyone around is watching a football match so he can still shoot without attracting unwanted attention.
  • Gunslinger Girl - In this firearms-heavy anime and manga series, one of the characters, Henrietta carries a Fabrique Nationale P90 as her standard weapon (in a violin case, just to be cute). Later in the storyline she uses it with a silencer (or more properly a suppressor).
  • Averted in Highschool of the Dead. Hirano hands Saya an MP5, warning her that even with a suppressor, any shots will still be audible enought to be heard by them.
  • In Black Lagoon during a flashback to Revy's childhood she's shown killing a man using a pillow to suppress the sound. Subverted in that we don't actually hear the sound so can't judge how well it worked.


Comic Books

  • In the Batman story The Long Halloween, the main assassin uses the teats from baby bottles as one-shot silencers.
  • In The Losers, an evil character comments on how badly silencers throw off your aim.
  • One story in The Punisher had a convict try to kill the temporarily-locked-up title character with a pistol muffled by jamming a glass bottle over the muzzle. Castle noted that it'd be good only for one shot -- and not much good even for that. Of course, everybody within easy earshot was also a convict, hoping for the Punisher's death, so it wasn't like anyone would yell for the guards....


Fan Fiction

  • In A Sad Story, Uncle Vernon uses one on his shotgun. These actually exist, but they serve only to reduce the report of the weapon just enough to eliminate the need for hearing protection; it's clearly audible and identifiable as a gunshot from at least a hundred yards away.


Film

  • Averted by The Bourne Identity where the Treadstone operative that kills Conklin uses a silenced pistol that sounds rather accurate. Although this is all the more confusing due to the fact that all the other silenced pistols in the movie had used the traditional Coconut sound effect.
  • Averted in Escape from New York, in which Snake Plissken has a MAC-10 with a colossal silencer and the sound is more like "CHOOM" than "fwip".
    • It's also worth noting that by the time Snake is captured by the Duke, the silencer is no longer effective, as evidenced by the scene where the Duke toys with the president by shooting around him.
  • Parodied in Fatal Instinct. When Max Shady test fires his silencer-equipped weapon in the train it makes a soft "fwip" as usual. He adjusts the silencer to "softer" and fires it again: this time it makes no noise at all.
  • The Steven Seagal "movie" Fire Down Below; his character uses a two-liter soda bottle as a silencer.
  • Subverted in the Steven Seagal movie Under Siege - Krill shoots the captain with a hollywood silenced pistol however the guard stationed outside the room immediately runs in.
  • In Ghost Dog: The Way of The Samurai, Ghost Dog has a plethora of silenced guns which fire with the traditional fwip.
  • Subverted in Doomsday: The suppressed rifles and silenced pistols make a fairly loud bang, but the main character's unsilenced pistol makes a really loud bang.
  • Parodied in A Scanner Darkly, when Robert Downey Jr's character creates a home made silencer. When tested, it explodes, amplifying the sound considerably and partially deafening Downey Jr.
  • The sniper in the movie Shooter uses a bottle as a makeshift silencer for his rifle.
  • The otherwise brilliant movie The Sting features the silenced revolver mistake.
  • The Boondock Saints have silencers that make a small "fwip" sound, though they are mainly used to keep others from discovering their activities, not for the element of surprise.
  • The barkeeper in Desperado has a silencer on his revolver that is obviously not even compatible with the weapon. Subverted in that it doesn't actually work.
  • Payback uses the pillow version of this with a revolver.
  • In the Dirty Harry sequel Magnum Force, a motorcycle cop killed another motorcycle cop using a silenced revolver.
  • In Spy Hard, the trope is parodied: baddies use a pillow to silence the noise of the machine gun used to execute prisoners, who were mimes that "refused" to talk.
  • Averted in RoboCop; Clarence Boddicker has a fairly large silencer on his pistol when he visits Bob Morton, and it doesn't make the "fwip"; it does what a real silencer does and turns a sharp crack into a dull thud that's still pretty loud.
  • Semi-averted in Casino Royale. Characters are alerted to a shooter in the next room by the fwip sound. Makes you wonder why the gunman bothered, if they heard him coming any way from the next room over through a shut door.
    • Another James Bond aversion, in The Man with the Golden Gun the gangster assassin from the opening scene has a silenced weapon, but you wouldn't have guessed based on the noise it makes.
    • Yet another James Bond aversion in Tomorrow Never Dies: On the stealth ship, Bond's suppressed Walther P99 sounds probably just a little less loud then it would without the suppressor.
  • Averted, at least in one instance, in Nurse Betty. When one of the hitmen goes to the other room with his silenced pistol into the adjacent room to Betty to commit suicide with the door closed, the "thump" of the gun is loud enough to make Betty jump. Ironically, this is a movie about a person that had trouble separating soap opera characters with real people.
  • Averted in U.S. Marshals. The Chinese spy Chen fires an assault rifle fitted with a suppressor at Deputy Marshal Sam Gerard at a cemetery. Gerard immediately reacts to the only slightly muffled gunfire, and shouts and screams are heard from funeral attendees away from the action.
  • McQ. The opening murders of two policeman are committed with a .45 with a ridiculously short silencer. Later a witness is murdered with a silenced revolver. Only the silenced MAC-10 sounds right, but as the Military Armaments Corporation was using this movie to showcase the weapon it's not surprising.
  • No Country for Old Men - Psycho for Hire Anton Chigurh uses a silenced shotgun that's apparently quiet enough to fire in a small town, at night, with no one coming to investigate.
  • Played to the extreme in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang where in one scene a bad guy has a silenced pistol that makes no gunshot noise at all. Not even 'fwip'! The only noise is that of the ejected cartridge hitting the floor - a sound effect that is normally missing in Hollywood movies.
  • In the 2009 Sherlock Holmes movie, visitors to 221b Baker Street are startled by the sound of repeated gunshots. It turns out that Holmes is trying to invent a silencer for his Nagant M1895 revolver (see below), and failing miserably.
  • Con Air - When Nicolas Cage's character stumbles on a betrayal plot, he tells a would-be gunman that if he fires his weapon, others would hear the shot come and investigate. The other man wordlessly replies by attaching a silencer to his pistol, to which Cage delivers the classic line: "Well hoo-ray for the sounds of fucking silence!"
  • Soylent Green - Charlton Heston's character gets chased by some Mooks packing short-barreled revolvers fitted with silencers. It's handled surprisingly realistically; they emit a sort of dull, booming thump that's far from quiet, but which wouldn't be readily identifiable as gunfire at a distance.
  • Pretty much averted in Mr. Brooks.
  • In The A Team, an incompetent CIA agent attempts to clumsily put one on his gun while his target complains about him calling it a "European silencer" when it is in fact called a suppressor.
  • Original 1962 The Manchurian Candidate: "Is that a silencer?" (Yes, and it's on a revolver.)
  • In Inception, Cobb's silenced pistol does indeed make the "fwip" sound, however it did in fact only exist in the world of the dream so it can be assumed that Cobb simply used that to his advantage to make the silenced pistol actually be silenced. Also subverted in that when he uses it, he catches the bodies before they hit the ground as to not attract attention.
    • He also catches the shell casings in midair, nicely accounting for the noise they'd ordinarily make when they hit the ground.
  • The 1972 French comedy The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe featured several government spies with silenced guns that, when fired, emitted only a puff of smoke with no sound at all.
  • In The Man With One Red Shoe, two competing teams of agents use these in Drew's apartment.


Literature

  • Averted nicely in The Dresden Files. A hitman uses a silenced .22 (which Harry specifically mentions uses subsonic ammunition) and says that the silencer makes the shots sound like "someone slapping a heavy dictionary against a desk." The gunshots get louder as the silencer begins to give out.
  • In the first Jumper sequel, Reflex, a silenced pistol shot was described as being similar to someone stepping on a dry twig.
  • In The Chase, a 19th century bank robber doesn't just silence a revolver- he silences it by wrapping a scarf around the muzzle.
  • The espionage novel by David Morrell, Brotherhood of the Rose has the protagonists using the Mossad homemade silencer designed to be constructed from innocuous materials like washers and glassfibers, assembled for the kill, then broken up and thrown away.
  • Towards the end of Atlas Shrugged, the protagonists infiltrate the State Science Institute to rescue John Galt. They are all equipped with guns which are silenced to the point of not making any sound at all when fired. Not even a single fwip. Then again, the protagonists are a community of "geniuses" that owns all sorts of physically impossible technology, including an entropy reversing motor.
  • The Godfather II - A young Don Corleone commits his first murder with a revolver wrapped up in a towel to muffle the sound. The towel realistically catches fire due to the muzzle flash.
  • Game, Set & Match - The towel-as-silencer trick also appears in the trilogy by Len Deighton. Someone borrows a revolver from the protagonist, then returns it wrapped up in a towel. Which has bullet holes and powder burns in it.
  • A Hymn Before Battle - In a fairly rare slip-up regarding firearms, author John Ringo has an assassin using a silenced Colt .45, with the sound of the shots described as "four rapid huffs", with no one reacting until the targeted people fall into the Reflecting Pool in front of the Washington Monument.
  • Averted quite consistently in Tom Clancy's novels, which isn't surprising considering the amounts of Shown Their Work involved. John Kelly of Without Remorse home-builds a suppressor for his Colt .45, but that requires a full-blown Navy machine shop, several years' of special forces experience, and a caliber conversion kit for his Colt down to .22 caliber. He later does the same to a bolt-action .22 rifle after a few techniques for suppressing rifles' noises, too. Another scene from the same novel features a Navy chief building a suppressor for his assault carbine on the Boxwood Green mission: the gunfire could "only" be heard out to a hundred yards, as opposed to several hundred unsuppressed.
    • Clancy is also at pains to point out that a silencer does not totally silence the guns, but makes the noise carry less far and, in the case of non-automatic weapons, means that anyone not in the know is more likely to mistake it for something else. Also, he points out that no silencer can stop the occasionally rather loud mechanical noise of the gun cycling, which, thanks to Hollywood, people don't mistake for harmless noise.
  • One of the Encyclopedia Brown stories played this straight, although there wasn't any real shooting: a school play was being put on, a murder mystery, but the lead actor's parents wouldn't let him touch even a cap pistol. So to avoid Special Effects Failure, they pretended the killer used a really good Hollywood Silencer, with no sound at all ... or flash, or smoke....


Live Action TV

  • An episode of Sanctuary averts the trope, showing suppressed pistols as making 'pop pop' noises. It goes even further, making the characters put their hands over their ears when shooting off a lock in an enclosed space with the same pistols.
  • Law and Order: An episode had an improvised silencer made by taping an empty two liter of soda to the front of a pistol. No one in the building was able to hear the gun shots.
  • CSI
    • An episode featured a coke bottle silencer. Another had a potato silencer. While neither would work for more than a few shots, the Coke bottle would be more effective after the first, having a much greater surface-to-volume ratio.
    • Another episode had a potato was used for two gunshots, and it worked. Not because it actually silenced the shot, but because the target is deaf.
    • An episode of CSI New York had a teddy bear used as a silencer for a large Desert Eagle pistol.
  • Inverted on Sledge Hammer!, where the title character uses a loudener in one episode. As if his .44 Magnum wasn't loud enough already. Amusingly enough, devices that increase the loudness, or at least direct more of the sound back at the user, do exist; they're called "muzzle brakes," and their main purpose is to reduce recoil.
  • Averted in Chuck. Guns with silencers still make noise, and it's more of a realistic 'crack' than it is a 'thwip', and at one point was shown to be audible through a flight of stairs and a closed door. Played straight in other parts of Chuck, most notably when Casey practices shooting pictures of bin Laden and Hitler with a silenced gun inside his own apartment.
  • Get Smart
    • An episode features a villain using a silencer on a cannon.
    • In another episode Smart had to make a call on his Shoe Phone during a gun battle, but the operator could not work because his gun was too loud, forcing him to install his silencer.
    • More prosaically (and not for comedic purposes), "silenced revolvers" are used frequently on the show.
  • The second season finale of Sons of Anarchy employs this when Jax shoots A.J. Weston in the tattoo parlor.
  • Averted indirectly in Castle, in which the detectives work out that in order to murder a man in the middle of Grand Central Station without being heard, a killer must have not only used a silencer, but also waited until a train was passing. And despite these precautions, someone still heard him.
  • Subverted in the season three finale of Breaking Bad, where Mike uses a gun with a silencer to murder several cartel members selling meth on Gus's territory without permission. Only... the gun is far from silent.
    • Though a lack of a gun blast is played straight, the casings hitting the wall/floor and the operation of the pistol are clearly heard.
  • MythBusters tested the Hollywood silencer, and found that while it didn't make the classic film "thwip" sound, they did lower the volume considerably, into more of a thud of similar volume, and declared it "Plausible."
  • One episode of Columbo featured a silenced revolver.
  • Averted in the second episode of Alcatraz; Cobb uses a sniper rifle fitted with what appears to be a silencer, but it still makes a fairly loud noise when he fires it.
  • In possibly one of the worst offenses ever, during the second season of Prison Break, an assassin from The Company is sent after Lincoln Burrows and his family. The assassin breaks in and shoots one of Lincoln's father's bodyguards with a silenced pistol. No one could hear the gunshot (or the body hitting the floor), but apparently Lincoln's ears are so good that he could hear the shell hitting the floor from the other side of the (huge) house instead of the gunshot.


Tabletop Games

  • Called a cinematic silencer in GURPS: High-Tech; they're three times as effective as the real versions.
  • Shadowrun has silencers, but notes that subsonic ammunition is necessary to make them really effective (else the sonic boom will alert someone).
  • Played with, given that one of the options in some Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine armies is to turn a boltgun into a sniper equivalent partly by extending the barrel and stock but mostly by the dint of using special "Stalker" ammunition which is gas propelled rather than the standard rocket propelled rounds, and has a "solidified mercury slug" to punch through the target rather than having a mass-reactive warhead tip. The gun modifications make the gun capable of longer ranges, but the switch in ammunition to one that doesn't ignite a rocket engine behind the bullet just after firing is what silences the gun.


Theatre

  • Within the Law by Bayard Veiller features a revolver that can fire absolutely noiselessly, using smokeless powder and a Maxim silencer. Probably the Trope Maker for silenced revolvers, though this one is explained to be a specially made weapon.


Video Games

  • Mostly averted in the Call of Duty games that allow you to attach suppressors to weapons; in singleplayer (especially on low difficulties), enemies will typically ignore the report of a silenced weapon, though they will still notice the bullet itself if it impacts an object near them or hits them nonfatally. The shots are still clearly audible to a human player in multiplayer so long as all the other guns firing don't drown it out, however; the only concrete advantage to putting a suppressor on a weapon there is that you won't appear on the enemy's minimap when firing it, though realistically the weapon's maximum range is also reduced.
    • In Modern Warfare 2, three weapons do appear on the radar in multiplayer even with a suppressor (the M9, MG4, and M240). However, this is due to either a glitch or the programmers missing the issue (other similar issues exist, such as some weapons' sights not lining up correctly), NOT an intended feature.
  • Averted in Deus Ex where close proximity to an enemy makes your stealth pistol audible. Very noticeable in the "Rescue Tiffany" mission. Tiffany is typically toast.
    • Further averted in Human Revolution, as even silenced weapons generally take a good distance or a wall to keep from alerting enemies, and you cannot put a silencer on the revolver.
  • In the N64 GoldenEye, no guards would respond to silenced gun fire no matter how close they were to you. Amusingly enough, the guards wouldn't even respond to other guards firing their weapons at you, which often included incredibly loud assault rifles and submachine guns. Apparently, invading superspies intruding into the base is such a common occurrence that the guards can only be bothered dealing with it when they actually see the intruder.
    • Note also that a single tap of the trigger is apparently inaudible too. They could only notice multiple gunshots; a single shot from any weapon (with the possible exception of the shotguns, which fired multiple projectiles per trigger pull) would count as totally stealthy no matter how loud the weapon itself, provided no enemy saw the shot impact.
  • Perfect Dark did this a bit differently. Guards would notice if you fired the gun, so long as you were close enough or fired it multiple times. "Close enough", however, generally means "same room". This got complicated in more open levels, where enemies would either be able to hear you from the other end of the map, or arbitrary sound cutoffs would stop enemies hearing you ten feet away in one direction but not thirty feet away in another.
  • In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas one weapon is a 'silenced' pistol. Using it in a crowded scene does not trigger a pedestrian panic (then again, pedestrians don't seem to panic when you're just lugging around an assault rifle in the open). You might even get away with a few shots. But when the target keels over dead, that's when the screaming begins.
  • In Jagged Alliance 2, pistol silencers (changed to suppressors in the fan-made v1.13) will still attract attention from nearby guards, both near you and near the guard you shot. The real "silent" option is hurling a throwing knife at unaware guards' backs and necks, though even that can alert nearby guards if they see the body fall...though if they move away before the kill and return after, they won't notice a thing. Kinda weird, that. v1.13 also introduces a wealth of new "silent" weapons, mostly the subsonic variety like the AS-VAL assault rifle and VSSK Vychlop sniper rifle, as well as suppressors for assault and sniper rifles.
  • The Metal Gear games get this almost right: Starting with Metal Gear Solid, the suppressed weapons make a more realistic "puff" or "crack" sound (the silenced tranquilizer pistol makes more of a "fwip" noise because of its subsonic ammunition), and from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater onwards the suppressors wear out (apart from some weapons where the suppressors are a part of the gun itself) and can throw off your aim quite a bit - but you can still fire them inches away from a sentry's head and they won't hear a thing (except on harder difficulties in later games, and they will also hear bullets and darts ricocheting off nearby surfaces). This of course only applies to non-human opponents: Players in Metal Gear Online can hear suppressed gunshots just fine if they're alert enough.
    • The series, from Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty onward, also realistically depicts how a silenced weapon would actually need to be set up to work properly: the tranquilizer gun has the slide lock after every shot. In real life, a properly silenced pistol would have the shot be quieter than the action of the pistol itself (the metallic clack of the slide moving back and forth), so the slide has to be locked to prevent it from working (not that the tranquilizer bullets have the explosive force to work the slide on their own anyway, but that's a different story). Hence the single-shot nature of the gun.
  • Red Faction
    • Red Faction - The silencer in this First-Person Shooter makes your pistol both inaudible to guards and more accurate. Granted, the game takes place in the future, but other than that there's not even a Lampshade Hanging or a Hand Wave to justify it.
    • Red Faction 2 has a silenced SMG which seems to the player to be only slightly quieter than the pistol. It also seems to be useless, however, since the majority of the game involves head-on attacks with no need for stealth - and given the insane firing rate of the SMG (which releases a five-round burst with a single tap of the Fire button), it seems difficult to believe that any guard would have difficulty locating the shooter if that guard had the ceaseless muffled coughs of a silenced SMG to go off.
  • Notable aversion: In Resident Evil 4's "Mercenaries" minigame, Albert Wesker packs a pistol with a silencer (the only one of its kind in the entire game). Rather than the stereotypical "pyoo" sound, there is instead the sound of the gun's mechanism cycling and a barely-audible pop, making it one of the more realistic silenced guns sounds of recent.
  • In Rainbow Six: Vegas and its sequel, your character apparently has a Hyperspace Arsenal full of silencers that will fit onto the barrels of pretty much any pistol, submachine gun, or assault rifle. You can't silence some of the weapons in those classes, however, and with the exception of the integrally-suppressed SR-25, none of the shotguns, LMGs or sniper rifles can be suppressed either. Your allies also avoid the hyperspace arsenal bit - they only ever carry two weapons, one of which is an MP7 with a suppressor they never remove (if you tell them to go loud, they just switch to their other gun).
  • In Postal 2 you could grab cats, put the end of the gun in their ass, and shoot the gun with the characteristic "fwip" silenced noise, accompanied with a progressively-higher-pitched meow from the cat. Do remember that nothing in that game is supposed to be taken seriously. This was also done in the Postal movie. The cat was fine too.
  • The Hitman series tends to play this straight, with optional silencers on pistols, rifles and submachine guns turning the noise into the usual 'thwip' without degrading weapon performance- though you can use less effective silencers that only limit the sound instead of removing it.
    • Blood Money offers accessorizing 47's custom guns with a "Type 1" silencer, which works best with whatever low-velocity ammo is offered for the gun (and even then, is noisy), or the "Type 2," which had full Hollywood effectiveness even for "Magnum" ammo.
    • Silent Assassin had five suppressed weapons, each with a suitably AKA-47-ish name. Of them, the Baller SD was massively overpowered, the SMG-SD6 was fairly useful for mook-sweeping due to having the highest magazine capacity among suppressed weapons, the .22 SD was so weak that sometimes not even a headshot was fatal and the Custom Rifle (custom-modified Walther WA2000) was audible for at least 20 meters. As for the 9mm SD, it was probably the most useful weapon in the whole game due to having nice damage, very high magazine capacity (15 bullets), easy concealability and plentiful ammo (guards always carry either this or an assault rifle).
    • Hitman's Russian World War Two cousin Death to Spies features silenced Nagant revolvers extensively, all of them producing a muffled sound similar to "fwip", but reasonably loud. It can alert nearby guards, especially on higher difficulty settings. Silenced rifles in the game are generally more guilty of this trope. For the silenced Nagant revolver, take a look at the Real Life section.
  • Far Cry 2 has the Dart Rifle. The Sniper Rifle thwipping puts enemies on alert without revealing your exact location, unless the round goes whizzing past someone's head, in which case they will immediately find you, the Silenced MP5 is only slightly quieter than without silencer, however the same basic detection rules as with the Dart Rifle seem to apply. The Silenced Makarov 6P9 is complete with thwip, and has same rules for stealth.
  • Splinter Cell series
    • Chaos Theory, the "SC Pistol" (An FN Five-seveN with a microwave emitter from this game onwards) has a suppressor that is (semi-)realistically (in)effective. Most enemies will notice the suppressed sound, unless they are standing very far away, or the sound is drowned out by heavy machinery.
    • Conviction went the other direction: suppressed weapons are impossible for enemies to hear, even that suppressed fully automatic assault rifle you're firing from five feet away. Of course, if you're shooting more than two bullets from anything, you're going to be spotted unless you kill the targets you're shooting at. Taken to fully ridiculous levels when, through pre-order bonuses, you can acquire a suppressed SPAS-12 semi-automatic shotgun, and still retain the shotgun qualities of the weapon (bullet spread, etc.).
  • Partially averted in Ghost Recon in which suppressed weapons have realistic sounds but are inaudible from more than a few feet away.
  • Averted in Shadowrun for the Sega Genesis, the silencer only gives the benefit of not setting off the alarms when you fire your weapons inside corporate offices. Every NPC will still hear you firing your gun regardless of being equipped with a silencer or not.
  • Halo 3: ODST features the M7S and the M6C/SOCOM, a sound suppressed sub-machine gun and pistol (respectively). They do not sound realistic and Bungie attests that they simply followed the Rule of Cool, seen in this video. While the actual gun noises are just The Coconut Effect the enemies reactions to the firing of a silenced weapon is realistic. Especially on legendary the enemies are still very likely to notice you even if you shoot with a silenced weapon.
    • Funnily enough, the Behind-The-Scenes video released before ODST revealed they actually made the guns sound louder than usual.
  • Played straight in Battlefield Bad Company 2—The two silenced semi-auto sniper rifles are completely silent, even if an enemy player is right next to you, and you fire past them, they can't tell where it is coming from until you hit them. The silencers on the submachine guns are fwippy, too. The gunshot sounds in that game are generally pretty accurate with echo and resonance, too.
  • Medal of Honor plays realistic takes on this one on-and-off: the first game has the silencer reducing the sound to a rather realistic muffled bang, whereas Allied Assault has a hand-loaded silenced pistol where all the sound comes from the mechanism. Either way, shooting it will cause any nearby Nazis to notice.
  • Ukrainian video game STALKER has the famous VSS Vintorez sniper rifle and AS Val assault rifle that use special subsonic cartridges and a highly effective integral suppressor—it gives a report similar to BB-gun as well as metallic clank from the action. Another Ukranian video game, Metro 2033 from 4A Games features a successor of the Vintorez and Val - the VSK-94 silenced sniper rifle.
    • Metro 2033 also has the option to buy suppressed versions of standard weapons, and these behave more or less realistically. They don't outright give away the character's presence the way an unsuppressed weapon would, but nearby foes will notice the noise and start actively looking for the player if they were previously idle or patrolling.
  • While the silenced pistol in Command & Conquer: Renegade has a Hollywood-style fwipping sound, it does not prevent enemies from noticing you, mostly due to The All-Seeing AI. Rather jarring, considering the gun is described as having specialized ammunition for stealth purposes.
  • Fallout: New Vegas plays this trope straight with one exception---the Anti-Materiel Rifle variant added in the Gun Runners Arsenal DLC can be suppressed (essentially) but not silenced. Since, after all, it is a .50-caliber sniper rifle which is referred to as a cannon by more than one NPC. The effect is distance-based, as in firing it in someone's ear is quite different from firing it at the limit of the draw distance.
  • Some video games, likely due to not enough attention paid, actually invert this - Half-Life and Far Cry, for instance, both feature an integrally suppressed MP5 which neither sounds like or is treated as though it is suppressed.
  • Saints Row the Third includes suppressors as an upgrade for some of its weapons, which make it harder for unaware enemies to tell where you're shooting from. Likely in reference to Red Faction above (sharing the same developer), the suppressors actually make the weapons they attach to more accurate, without any explanation.


Web Comics


Web Original

  • Played straight in the Madness Combat series, where all you can hear from a silenced gun is the clicking of the mechanism.
  • Used in We're Alive. The silenced pistol used to kill Pippin has the "fwip" sound.
  • Oddly both averted and played straight in Freddie Wong's Duct Hunt. The silenced gun makes a reasonably loud sound, but the guards don't hear a thing.
    • The video description jokes "This is a sneaking mission where I infiltrated a Deaf Person's Warehouse."
    • Special focus is also given to removing a silencer so Freddie's gunshot will be heard in Claymores.


Western Animation

  • Averted in the Men in Black cartoon where J eventually gets a silencer for his Noisy Cricket. Its purpose is actually to cut down the blaster's massive recoil. (It's also kind of a play on the gun's name, putting a silencer on the Noisy Cricket.)
  • Honorable mention: One Rocky and Bullwinkle plot revolved around "Hushaboom", a silent high explosive.
  • Made light of in The Simpsons. Marge finds that a pre-made pancake mix bottle makes farty noises, and proceeds to attach a silencer to it, giving it the trademark "phut" sound.
    • And again in the episode when Homer buys a gun, as the salesman informs him about the various accessories on offer:

Gun Shop Owner: Silencer...
Homer: Mmm-hmm.
Gun Shop Owner: Loudener...
Homer: [drools]
Gun Shop Owner: And this is for shooting down police helicopters.
Homer: Oh, I don't need one of those... yet.

  • Inexplicably, Family Guy played this trope straight and then averted it in the same episode. A silenced pistol is so quiet that nobody even notices anything until blood starts spreading on Stephanie's dress. Later, Diane Simmons is about to kill Lois(with an unsilenced weapon), you hear a bang, Diane drops dead, and Stewie is seen with a smoking sniper rifle, which clearly has a silencer. Interestingly, the guns work exactly as they need to for each scene to work.


Real Life

  • This trope may have sent some people to prison since there have been cases of killers convicted by trace evidence of improvised silencers they wrongly assumed they needed—possibly by exposure to too many movies. Real hitmen do not often use silencers.
  • There are a couple of revolver designs that have a sealed cylinder. The most famous is the Nagant M1895 (see guns.ru and Wikipedia). Note that you don't see many followers: this solution made the Nagant Awesome but Impractical with its slow reload and lack of traditional revolver advantages due to its complicated mechanism and relatively weak cartridge. Revolvers with this design, or similar, can be suppressed. Check it out here. Note that most Hollywood-silenced revolvers are not these models, however.
    • The other secret to the weapon's silence is that the bullets are subsonic, only going at ~.8 times the speed of sound. Therefore the bullets don't produce a sonic boom, which are quite noisy, when it leaves the barrel.
  • There are special bullets that make about the same amount of noise as a BB gun, but are only available in 22 caliber. They're legal because few people would actually attempt to kill someone with a .22—most people think that any rifle less than 30 caliber, pistol less than .44, or shotgun less than 16 gauge is as lethal as a BB gun (to be clear, this is not true; .22 can indeed kill you).
    • There are also subsonic 9mm rounds that are significantly quieter than regular 9x19mm pistol rounds, especially when used in conjunction with a silencer. Most firearm rounds travel at very high velocity, breaking the sound barrier, and a silencer can't affect the sonic boom of a bullet that's already left the barrel. Subsonic rounds remove the "crack" of the bullet breaking the sounds barrier, leaving only the small explosion which, inherent to the process, occurs in the chamber of a weapon that is being fired... and that, a silencer can, well, silence. Somewhat.
  • If one was to summon the all-powerful Reds with Rockets, this trope theoretically can be played straight in real life. The Soviet\Russian designers had developed both pistol and sniper rifle that are almost completely silent. They are just completely unavailable to anyone but strictly badass operators working for Russian government agencies.
    • The double-barreled MSP and self-loading PSS are small concealed-carry pistols designed around SP-3 and SP-4 cartridge. These rounds do not let the gases escape the shell casing at all (a short-stroke piston pushes the bullet out, containing the pressure). The PSS was also designed to lower cycling noise with a sophisticated mechanical recoil dampener. This results in (supposedly) perfect Hollywood Silencer effect (and makes ejected shell casings a hazard for handling).
    • Here is a video of PSS, "developed for special personnel of the Soviet KGB, as well as for elite elements of the Spetsnaz of the Soviet Army."
    • The now rather famous VSS Vintorez sniper rifle uses other special purpose cartridges, the 9mm SP-5 and SP-6 (AP). The rifle has a highly effective integral suppressor similar in concept to the MP5SD. Combined with steel-core, low-velocity rounds, it is both capable of penetrating military-grade body armor and is silent enough to make its operation the loudest part of the report. It's still not FWIP-silent, and gives a report similar to a BB gun as well as a metallic clank.
    • They've made silenced 12.7mm [read: .50] anti-materiel rifles.
    • And let's not forget the "Tishina" (en. "Silence") noiseless 30mm grenade launcher.
  • Then there's the DeLisle Carbine which had a barrel that was basically made up completely of the suppressor. It was so quiet that the action was louder than the shots.
  • The M32 MGL almost makes the trope Truth in Television. Imagine a hollywood silenced gun. Now take away the "fwip" noise. Now imagine the gun firing 40mm grenades.
    • It is so silent because it doesn't fire the grenades very fast for a weapon (76 m/s, 249 ft/s). The MGL depends on the explosives of the grenade to do the damage, rather than sheer kinetic energy like a bullet uses. And no silencer on Earth or anywhere else can silence the Boom.
  • Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, seems to have been a victim of this trope. In a diary, he expressed disappointment that his homemade silencer reduced the noise of a pistol by about one third. If this is so, then his homemade silencer actually worked pretty well.
  • The most important thing is not silencing the weapon to a fwip, but changing the noise to sound unlike a true gun would. On a silent sporting range, even the puny .22LR fired from a target rifle (whose action is almost 100% silent, no clicks or clanking, unlike a hunting or military rifle) makes a loud crack when leaving the barrel, but in a noisy urban environment, cars and heavy trucks running around, people talking or shouting, TV sets adding to the noise, even a crack goes unnoticed as long as witnesses can attribute it to some accidental noise: a breaking window, dropping a heavy object, breaking a glass bottle etc.
  1. ↑ In reality there's a gap between barrel and cylinder: real ones make a loud noise even with a silencer on the front. Some revolvers can be suppressed because the gap is sealed when firing but this can not be achieved through just a do-hicky on the barrel, see Real Life
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