Since the Sandra Bullock horror film Bird Box was released on Netflix on Dec. 21, it’s become the talk of Twitter.
According to Netflix, 45 million accounts watched the film in its first week, and while it’s likely no one truly understands the meaning of it, viewers are still searching for answers.
One of the movie’s main unsolved mysteries was what the heck the monsters, or dark creatures responsible for the worldwide mass suicide, looked like. And while we can’t show you, in an interview with Bloody Disgusting, the cast describes the creatures perfectly.
According to screenwriter Eric Heisserer, the monsters were almost shown on screen, but the decision was ultimately made to exclude them.
“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,” Heisserer said.
And Bullock, who played Malorie, explained what exactly made them so terrifying.
“It was a green man with a horrific baby face,” she said. “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.”
“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,” director Susanne Bier added.
“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,'” she went on.
In fact, Bier said the “monster” was so ridiculously comical that they’re “going to deliver it to Saturday Night Live.”
And though John Krasinski chose to show the monsters in his horror film, A Quiet Place, which is being compared to Bird Box as a result of some similar plot lines, Bier thinks the Bird Box team made the right call in keeping the creatures off screen.
“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,” she said.
(Excerpt) Read more in: Mashable