What Are The Monsters In ‘Bird Box’?

Bird Box introduced a terrifying menace which caused the entire world to collapse but many are left asking… what is it?

Spoilers for Netflix‘s Bird Box movie follow. Major spoilers!

Within the movie itself, very little information about the monsters or creatures causing people who see them to immediately commit suicide was revealed. A mere drawing of what might be the creature itself was the closest the film’s final cut came to offering a look at them but it appears they take different forms for different people. So, what are the monsters in Bird Box?

“It was a green man with a horrific baby face,” Bird Box’s Mallory actress Sandra Bullock explained to BloodyDisgusting. “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.” Of course, the sequence Bullock is referring to was ultimately cut from the film, so whether or not this description holds up to canon can be debated.

With room for interpretation, the Internet volunteered to offer up an abundant amount of theories regarding these monsters, especially on Reddit.

“I imagined them as higher dimension travelers,” Reddit user theshriekingpines wrote. “Imagine the physical structure like a classical seraphim, mostly humanoid but several wings and extra limbs. However, they exist in more dimensions than us, so as they move in their higher dimensions, it creates kaleidoscopic distortions of how they appear in our.”

Others who watched the film pulled from a combination of other fictional and real-life scenarios to try to explain what the creature was and how it operated.” Think about epilepsy in which seizures are triggered by strobe lights – sight of creatures may have similiar effect – minds of (almost) all people just short circuit and they go on violent/self harm rampage,” rene76 theorized. “Check out Blindsight series (Peter Watts). It’s great sci-fi with load of mind hacking. For example ‘vampires’ (extinct race of humanoids praying on homo sapiens, bringed to life via genetic engineering) gets their brains fried on the sight of the cross (because ideal right angles doesn’t exist in nature vampires goes unchecked, until man-made structures appeared).”

Ultimately, Bird Box director Susanne Bier elected to keep the creature’s look and identity a secret intentionally — and some viewers are enjoying the mystery of it.

“It so easily becomes funny,” Bier said of showing the creatures. “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.’”

Not showing the creature can be added to the list of differences between Bird Box and A Quiet Place, which Bier insists are quite different and did not inspire one another, at all.

What do you think the monsters in Bird Box are? Share your thoughts in the comment section. Bird Box is available for streaming now on Netflix.