If You Love Bird Box, Take Off That Blindfold and Watch These 12 Movies

Enjoy watching Malorie overcome immense odds to keep her kids safe in Bird Box? Then you need to watch Alfonso Cuarón's critically acclaimed 2006 drama ASAP; it's a veritable dystopian masterpiece. It introduces us to a bleak, grey world in which infertility has threatened mankind with extinction. When the last child born dies, the world descends into chaos, and it's up to a disillusioned bureaucrat (Clive Owen) to save humanity by protecting a young, pregnant girl on a dangerous journey to safety.

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Evan Rachel Wood and Ellen Page play two sisters who decide to wait out an apocalyptic blackout in their remote, sprawling home in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, despite having barely any gas or water. (Note: fans of the Bird Box house will similarly fall in love with the home in this film.) Matters become even more complicated for the resilient twosome when threatening strangers discover where they are.

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"Zombie drama" is now a film genre that exists, and Here Alone is a perfect example. The movie stars Lucy Walters as a woman who's been living alone in the wilderness for years after the death of her husband and child, both of whom passed due to a brutal, inexplicable zombie virus. That makes her extremely wary upon encountering two uninfected people passing through. Will she learn to open up to them and rebuild her capacity for human connection, or live out the rest of her days in solitude?

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As usual, the apocalypse strikes at the most inopportune time for Will (Theo James), who finds himself extremely far from home and his vulnerable, pregnant fiancée when chaos strikes. As he travels thousands of miles to reach her with the help of her father, Tom (Forest Whitaker), both men are forced to fight for their lives. Without spoiling anything, I'll also note that the ending of this movie is WILD.

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A viral outbreak has decimated the world's population, leaving remaining survivors living in constant fear that the deadly virus will return. Now, 25 years after the illness first emerged, a young woman struggling to stay alive on her own encounters a mysterious, potentially lethal community.

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Like everyone you follow on Instagram, Bokeh's Jenai (Maika Monroe) and Riley (Matt O'Leary) go on a romantic holiday to Iceland. However, they wake up one morning and discover that every other person on Earth has suddenly disappeared. As they struggle to survive in unfamiliar surroundings and deal with the grief of losing their loved ones and old lives in an instant, the pair begin questioning everything they've ever known about the world.

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In this apocalyptic crime drama starring Guy Pearce and Robert Pattinson, society is in decline and laws have all but disintegrated. When Eric (Pearce) realises his car has been stolen by a gang, he forces an injured member of the crew to help him track it down.

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This Australian horror film is a slow burn, but it's worth the watch. When his wife succumbs to a zombie bite and he realises he's not long behind her, a father begins a desperate search for a safe place to leave his infant daughter in the outback before he dies.

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First things first: no, this isn't a movie about zombie hipsters, although . . . is it wrong I would totally still watch that? Bushwick stars Brittany Snow and Dave Bautista as people trapped in the NYC neighbourhood, which is taken over by militia forces when Texas attempts to secede from the Union and claim the city as its East Coast base. A total bloodbath erupts, leaving the two strangers to lean on each other if they want any chance of surviving their strange, murderous new reality.

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This is actually a pretty introspective and beautiful film, as far as movies in the zombie genre are concerned. That being said, watching a small group of desperate survivors attempt to navigate the aftermath of a zombie-like outbreak in rural Quebec still delivers plenty of nauseating scares. Its unique, out-of-the-box ending, however — which, for the record, I still haven't fully wrapped my head around months later — is what really solidified it as one of my under-the-radar horror favourites.

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Jeremy Saulnier's psychological thriller stars Westworld's Jeffrey Wright as retired wolf expert Russell Core, who receives a disturbing, desperate letter from a grieving mother (Riley Keough) who lives in a small Alaskan village, telling him her son Bailey was taken by wolves. Russell agrees to go to the village and investigate the boy's disappearance and soon finds himself tangled up in a web far more dangerous than he ever could have expected. Alexander Skarsgard plays the boy's father, and though he's clearly not involved in his disappearance, he doesn't seem to be trustworthy, either. There's also the matter of a masked killer who appears to be stalking the town — which is "scattered with bodies," one woman remarks — and who the villagers seem keen on protecting.

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If the mythology surrounding Bird Box's creatures left you captivated, give this downright horrifying film a try. While at first, the plot seems like it's yet another rehash of horror and sci-fi films we've seen before — a group of friends go on a hiking trip, and things take a very wrong turn — somehow it still breaks new ground. Tonally and narratively, it reminds me of 2015's The Hallow, which finds a family fighting to survive against an onslaught of demonic creatures that live in the woods behind their remote home in Ireland. The use of folktales about ancient evil is part of what elevates The Ritual past its run-of-the-mill premise, but it's the bond between the core friends that gives the film its depth.

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