Last weekend, I watched Bird Box on Netflix, which I'd heard a little bit of buzz about and which looked interesting. At first, it reminded me of what I'd heard about A Quiet Place, which at the time, I had yet to see but watched afterwards, and The Happening (which I had to look up the title for, since in my head it's that kind of bad M Night Shamilan movie with Markie Mark.) In that film, humans start mass suiciding (I think it's something with the trees.) In A Quiet Place, the cute guy from The Office struggles to survive with his wife and family in a world where the slightest noise draws monsters. These versions of the apocalypse reminded me of some really good indie films I'm seen in recent years about the end of the world, including Perfect Sense, H, and 4:44 The Last Day on Earth. In all of these, the end comes not with zombies or explosions, and climactic events, but slowly, creepingly, on a more human scale.
The monsters in Bird Box, unlike A Quiet Place, are unseeable, unless of course you actually look then feel a sudden need throw yourself in front of garbage truck. I spent my time watching it frozen in suspense, and that I think is the power of letting the imagination create it's own monsters (and this is where A Quiet Place could have learned a trick or two. Many people didn't like the film Monsters, but I thought it was brilliant in never showing us what we were supposed to be afraid of. The unseen is always scarier than the seen. The goal of any apocalypse creature movie is finding a way to get away or outsmart the threat, our continual what if you do x, or y? Think of how in Cloverfield they hide in the subway only to find that big mama monster has baby spider monsters attached to her. In other movies, people are able to escape and survive due to some inconsistency or imperfection in the threat.
The saddest thing of being raised in the Cold War and seeing The Day After on TV was always that I decided early on I'd rather be killed in the blasts than have to survive underground and surely eventually die painfully and lengthily of radiation. If we managed to destroy ourselves with fire, I really didn't want to survive the aftermath of that. Pretty much any apocalypse scenario (except maybe zombies which I weirdly want to see), I'd want to be out in the first wave. The indie movies and things like Bird Box, are even more terrifying in that the threat is tougher to outsmart, or sometimes impossible. Perfect Sense is one that had me in a fetal position by the end with hopelessness--a villian you can't outsmart or hide from. Bird Box is a little more uplifting at the end. A Quiet Place also ends on a delightfully feminist upnote. I also appreciated how both films don't go very far in explaining how the apocalypses came about or why.
Aliens. zombies, nukes, monsters--all scary, but much scarier the apocalypse we don't even see coming.
