In Netflix’s Bird Box, Sandra Bullock and the rest of the population are terrorized by inhuman beings that can take the shape of an individual’s worst fear. The only way to survive is to make sure you never make eye contact with them – and now that I’ve actually seen what a scrapped version of this Bird Box creature looks like, I’m the one who’s wishing I had a blindfold. Take a look at the photos of the creature below, which Bullock previously described as a “long fat baby.”
“It was a green man with a horrific baby face,” Bullock previously said, describing a practical version of the Bird Box creature that was used during the shooting of the movie. “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 [growling at me.] It’s making me laugh. It was just a long fat baby.” That scene ended up being cut from the final version of the film, but now you can see what it would have looked like in these new photos from creature designers SFX Atlas (via Collider):
So why does this creature look like a weird infant? Spoilers for Bird Box ahead, but if you’ve seen the film, you know that Bullock’s character Malorie’s greatest fear is becoming a mother, so this form would presumably been what scared her the most. Since Malorie never lays eyes on the creatures in the film, it seems like this would have had to been designed for a nightmarish dream sequence. Ultimately, director Susanne Bier wisely decided to scrap the idea of seeing the creature and instead rely on the viewer’s imagination to conjure up the horror of what several of the characters witness.
“It so easily becomes funny,” she explained. “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.'” After seeing how goofy this thing looks, it’s obvious she made the correct decision.
Meanwhile, after Netflix released viewing numbers that crowned Bird Box as the Netflix Original film with the most total views in its first seven days on the streaming service, Nielsen (the company famous for tracking television viewership) is here to provide its own set of numbers about the film’s performance. The Wrap says Nielsen found that the movie “was watched by nearly 26 million unduplicated people over its first week,” putting it second only to Stranger Things 2. They also discovered that 36% of viewers were millennials, 57% of viewers were female, and 46% were either African American or Hispanic, the latter of which marks “the highest concentration Nielsen has observed across the Netflix originals it analyzed.” Make of that what you will!
Bird Box is streaming now on Netflix.
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