Unseen ‘Bird Box’ Monsters Revealed By Special Effects Company That Created The Creepy Villains
Warning: Spoilers for Netflix’s Bird Box below.
Unless you’ve been living with a blindfold on, Netflix’s creepy smash hit Bird Box has been topping the streaming charts for weeks, and it seems as though everyone’s been talking about it. No longer just a film, Bird Box has been inspiring internet wide memes, and blindfold based challenges all across the world. Fans of the flick perhaps noticed something particular about the adrenaline pumping movie, however. For the entirety of the film, Bullock’s Malorie and her fellow survivors are being chased by something, but what, exactly, are they?
In the film, Lil Rel’s Charlie, a grocery worker with an in depth knowledge of apocalyptic demons, proposes that the unseen creatures terrorizing humanity and causing them to commit suicide are the “end game” — a natural wiping out of the population that causes insanity by taking on your deepest fears.
“Humanity has been judged and we’ve been found wanting. They go by different names. You got world religion and mythology that’s full of mentions of demons or spirit creatures,” Rel’s Charlie explains in the film.
Between the blind folds, the newspaper window covers, and the blacked out car windows, fans of the movie never actual see the creatures, we’re just alerted to their presence by leaves blowing around and dark, twisted whispers calling out to the survivors to take a glimpse. Unless, of course, the survivor is clinically insane. As Bird Box portrayed, escaped mental patient/survivor Gary has a collection of hand drawn art of the entities, and he hatches a plan to get his new roommates to take a peek of what he can see, calling the creatures “beautiful.”
Me to my three friends who still haven’t watched Bird Box: pic.twitter.com/EDaR8j7G9P
— Netflix Tudum (@NetflixTudum) December 29, 2018
According to the Nerdist, now fans of the popular film can actually see what these entities were meant to look like before they were cut out of the flick. SFX Atlas, the special effects team tasked with creating the creepy monsters, took to their Instagram to share a snap of the creature before it found its way to the cutting room floor. Why was the entity scrapped, you might ask? Apparently filming Bullock’s first encounter with the creature wasn’t exactly what the directors were hoping for.
‘It was a green man with a horrific baby face. It was snake-like, and I was like ‘I don’t want to see it when it first happens. Just bring it into the room. We’ll shoot the scene.’ I turn and he’s like this [growling at me.] It’s making me laugh. It was just a long fat baby,” Bullock said of her first time seeing the actor in costume playing the entity.
Director Susanne Bier went on to say that while Bullock’s initial reaction to the “fat baby” was funny, they had spent a lot of time and energy working on the creature, but they knew once Bullock started giggling, there was no way that viewers would be terrified by them. It would, in turn, become a different film altogether. They decided to forgo revealing the entities all together, especially since every time they showed it to Bullock, she burst out in to laughter.
