‘Bird Box’ Deleted Scene Actually Showed the Mystery Creature

Netflix’s Bird Box has been scaring viewers all across the world for the past few days, and it sounds like the film almost got a little bit more terrifying.

In a recent interview with Bloody Disgusting, the cast and crew for Bird Box discussed the elusive monster, which is never shown throughout the entirety of the film. As it turns out, there was almost a sequence that revealed what the creature looked like, which was ultimately filmed but left on the cutting room floor.

“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 [Sandra Bullock’s] Malorie experiences one in that house,” screenwriter Eric Heisserer explained.

So, what exactly did the monster look like?

“It was a green man with a horrific baby face,” Bullock explained. “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.” director Suzanne Bier added. “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.’”

“I’m so sorry you had to shoot that,” Heisserer added.

As Bier goes on to point out, it ultimately proved to be better for the creature to not be shown in the film, as it let audiences draw their own terrifying conclusions.

“We’re going to deliver it to Saturday Night Live,” Bier joked. “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 is now available to stream on Netflix.