How terrifying is 'Bird Box'? Two scaredy-cats decide to find out
Netflix's new horror movie Bird Box has taken the internet by storm, which is a little surprising considering horror is really not for everyone.
It's especially not for us, two scaredy-cats who do not like to watch horror movies for the simple fact that we don't like to be scared.
But with so much fervor swirling around Bird Box (over 45 million users have watched so far), we decided to give in to the hype for the sake of all the other wimps out there and see if Bird Box is actually too spooky.
Here are our impressions of Bird Box, which we both watched on a bright Monday morning.
Proma Khosla, Entertainment Reporter: I don’t know that scary movies frighten me so much as that I just don't seek them out. I'm certainly intrigued by a good ghost story or something supernatural (torture porn can stay tf away), and I enjoy suspense — I loved Annihilation and Haunting of Hill House, which I quietly yelped my way through during office hours with the lights on.
Kellen Beck, Entertainment Reporter: I have seen basically no horror movies. I saw parts of The Sixth Sense when I was too young and it gave me nightmares. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was a little too spooky for me when I saw it at the age of 10. The last horror movie I watched was Halloween 8 but only because it had Tyra Banks and Busta Rhymes in it and I wasn't watching it alone. This genre is just not for me.
Bird Box is an apocalyptic thriller about mysterious and terrifying creatures that take over the Earth, causing anyone who looks at them to see their worst fears and die immediately by suicide. Sandra Bullock plays Mallory, a survivor who has learned to live indoors or blindfolded along with a dwindling group of companions.
For a while, the movie wasn't scary. It was tense and suspenseful, often punctuated with bad acting and a very forced sex scene early on (Proma's first authentic yell of fright during this viewing). But about halfway through shit started getting real, like when Mallory took the kids to the riverbank while she went to get supplies from the hospital:
We know Mallory is going to end up alone with two kids (called Boy and Girl) and that the Los Angeles house and its roommates are only temporary. The movie jumps back and forth between the past and the future at various points, each transition giving a nice little reprieve from the build-up in the last scene.
And then Tom Hollander shows up.
It turns out that certain people have seen the creatures and survived, but now they're traveling around trying to un-blindfold everyone else, which usually leads to death. Not cool!
From here, the stakes got higher, everything grew in intensity, and there was plenty of scary and horrifying moments to go around. Not really what we wanted, but it's what we expected.
Anyway here is how we fared through the entire climax of the movie, which involves Mallory and the kids navigating river rapids without looking and then stumbling through a forest full of these monsters (which we never see).
Kellen: Bird Box had its ups and downs but it certainly had me frightened thoroughly. The suspense was pretty consistent in how it built up, and there were a handful of pretty gory moments that I was not a fan of in the slightest. There's a lot of death and a lot of very gripping moments, but lucky for me the movie did not include my least favorite horror movie trope: jump scares. Bird Box is certainly scary, but it's not too scary, you know what I mean?
Bird Box is certainly scary, but it's not too scary, you know what I mean?
Proma: This was a lot for a Monday morning. Every time I Slacked Kellen "I'm terrified," I also said it out loud. This movie is scary in that you will watch in a state of near-constant tension (my mom calls these "backache" movies), so don't watch unless you are prepared to periodically hold your breath or clench your muscles while waiting for the other shoe to drop. People have already compared it to A Quiet Place and I'd say they're pretty equal in terms of scares and suspense.
Topics Netflix
