With one mother and two children on the run from the shadowy monsters that are more felt rather than seen, the fear almost becomes real to a point where the audience can taste it. Sandra Bullock, however, says that the creatures in Bird Box which are meant to terrify and hunt their prey once had a face and it was far less blood-curdling than the unseen terror of it all.
One of Netflix’s most-watched films to date, Bird Box remains an irrevocable masterclass on how to do horror without actually showing something horrific.
Bird Box Producers Wanted To Give a Face To the Monsters
In Bird Box, it becomes the terror on people’s faces and their destructive actions immediately thereafter that works to instill fear in the audience rather than the presence of a definite and monstrous shape to haunt the people into crashing their own heads into walls. This, the director as well as the screenwriter knew for a fact. But the producers wanted something real, something tangible that could explain the irrationality of the depths of such an inhuman cataclysm. Screenwriter Eric Heisserer claimed:
“There was a time when one of the producers was like, ‘No, you have to see something at some point,’ and forced me to write essentially a nightmare sequence where Malorie experiences one in that house.”
Sandra Bullock, who plays the lead, Malorie, supports the claim by saying:
“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.”
Ultimately, even though the scene did not make it to the final cut of the film, the fact that it almost did brings to light the age-old debate on the creative difference between the financiers of a film, the producers, and the ones who give it a vision, i.e. the writers and directors.
Bird Box Director Salvages the Film Without Show-and-Tell
In an interview with Bloody Disgusting in the aftermath of the Bird Box premiere on Netflix, Academy Award-winning director Susanne Bier recounts the horrors of filming a scene with the model of a potential monster that would go on to make an appearance in the film’s theatrical cut.
“It so easily becomes funny. We actually shot that and spent a lot of energy on, but every time I saw it, I was like this is not going to be tense. It’s just going to be funny. At first, Sandy was like, ‘I don’t want to see it’ because she thought it was scary. Then it was like, ‘Don’t show it to me because [I’ll laugh].’ Every time I did it, I was like, ‘Shit, that’s a different film.’”
Screenwriter Eric Heisserer additionally explained why he took it upon himself to have the creatures take a backseat and let the humans portray how terrifying these predators are instead. After joking about sending the green dummy to the props department of Saturday Night Live, Heisserer claimed:
“Whatever those beings are, they tap into your deepest fear. Everybody’s deepest fear is going to be different from the other person. I think to suddenly take upon a concrete shape in order to illustrate that becomes weak. Where the conceit is really strong, then trying to illustrate it is kind of almost meaningless. So it would have been the wrong decision.”
Bird Box holds a 64% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and was filmed on a budget of only $19.8 million. The film is currently available for streaming on Netflix.
Source: Bloody Disgusting
