In Bird Box, people kill themselves after they see…something. We’re told each person sees their own deepest fear—but that fear presumably looks like something on its own. The finished film never reveals what that could be, but work was done on the subject.
“There was a point where we were like, ‘Do we need to [show] it?’” director Susanne Bier told io9. “We got beautiful, beautiful designs and then realised, ‘No. No we’re not going to do it because it’s not really about that.’”
Which it isn’t. It’s about the people, their relationships, and their struggle to survive, but we still can’t help but wonder…dammit, what were those designs?
SFX Atlas on Instagram posted the below photos of the work by KNB Effects that was done, but ultimately cut, from Bird Box.
That’s fucking terrifying. I’m kind of glad the film didn’t reveal that—but if it had, talk about nightmare fuel. They look like screaming, deformed, adult-sized babies. However, as you can read above from visual effects artist Howard Berger, “It’s always a big disappointing when so much effort goes into something that ends up [on] the cutting room floor, but I get it and it’s always what’s best for the final product.”
On a related note, when we spoke to Bier about the decision not to show the creatures, we also asked what the actors were told about what their characters were seeing. The answers apparently varied.
“Some of them asked about it,” she said. “Some of them would ask me and I would then suggest certain things, and some of them would just not say anything and just kind of see whatever they had in their mind and be equally terrified and distraught.” Which, she pointed out, is similar to what would have happened in Bird Box’s world. “Each individual would have a different perception than the other individual,” she said.
Basically, in the end it was settled that nothing is scarier than your own imagination. But weird man babies come close.
Bird Box is now on Netflix.
[H/T Birth Movies Death]