Bird Box – Trailer Talk

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It’s Halloween. I’m sure at this very moment most people are out organising dress up parties with their friends and thinking about what their costume should be for the spookiest night of the year. Myself though—I’ll just be scrolling through Netflix as I try to decide what horror movie I should watch. There are plenty of choices, including a good amount of Netflix original content (they have really been pumping out a lot of horror stuff lately). The trailer for their newest horror flick Bird Box just dropped, and I’m a tad disappointed they didn’t time the release of this film to satiate my Halloween-scrolling. It’s coming out in December—at a time everyone will be looking for tinsel and carols, not spooks and scares.

The first thing you will notice about the trailer for Bird Box is that Netflix’s ability to provide star power is still growing with everything they put out. This time, they’ve managed to snare Sandra Bullock. Throughout the trailer, she looks to be providing the general Sandra Bullock performance audiences are used to, so nothing special or new. The trailer is structured well enough; it opens in typical horror trailer fashion with an out-of-context psychological horror scene before flashing back to before whatever apocalyptic disaster has occurred. While in hospital, Sandra Bullock’s character starts to see some weird shit go down and ends up in a car crash before we cut to the future where the premise for the film is explained. Society seems to have crumbled because of an entity that takes on your worst fear when you see it. To avoid it, citizens must always leave the house with a blindfold on. The trailer does it’s best to make this premise seem interesting and engaging, but for me, the rest of the trailer just seems to come across as a clone of John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place. The trailer goes on to show the characters having to make a journey through the woods whilst blindfolded. Now, I get the point of the blindfolds, but how are they going to know where they are going if they can’t see? Do they only put them on when they know the monsters are around? I’m sure the actual film will clear this point up, but for the moment, I’m a little perplexed. The best scene in the trailer is where the core group of characters are all trapped inside a car with covered windows but functioning sensors—technology really being explored here in an interesting, tense way.

In the end, the trailer for Bird Box is a straight-forward horror trailer. It shows us some scary scenes, introduces the characters and sets up the premise. I do like that the monsters aren’t revealed at all in the trailer, and none of the worst fears of our characters are shown either. Showing anything in too much detail would render watching the movie entirely useless. However, being released so shortly after A Quiet Place, yet so long after Halloween, the film seems at worst a knock-off, and at best, a misjudged scheduling error.

Watch it here:

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