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In Birdbox there is a scene where one of the characters looks outside the house using the CCTV system it has.

The man is looking through an LCD screen and nonetheless,

he gets affected by the vision of those entities and suicides

What's a possible explanation for this scene?

The camera takes light and converts it to a digital signal that then gets processed by the screen that lits the pixels to reproduce the image. You are not looking directly to the real image, just some "light bulbs" that try to reproduce it.

Would that happened even if the screen was at a very low resolution, say, 200x200 pixels?

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    It doesn't matter....if you can't suspend belief to appreciate that any sight of the entities infects people then perhaps the movie is not for you.
    – Paulie_D
    Commented Jan 6, 2019 at 12:16
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    I had considered this, too. What if they looked at a thermal imaging camera, or some other non-visible spectrum? Could they have just looked through a smartphone camera with some distorting filter on there? #nofilterkills Commented Jan 7, 2019 at 16:14
  • Should have smoothed the image with a mean filter a couple of times first. Commented Jan 8, 2019 at 11:55
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    The same is true of one's own visual apparatus. It just takes light and converts it to a signal, right? Clearly, an artificial means of "seeing" the creatures is close enough for the magic. They're still there...you're still getting visual perception of their movements.
    – Obie 2.0
    Commented Jan 12, 2019 at 2:45

1 Answer 1

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The movie never explains why looking at the creatures causes suicide, just that if you see one you will do it. e.g. it never gives the impression that it has to be direct line of sight, or that it's a psychic thing transmitted through the air only, just that you have to see one of them.

If you take that as plausible then there's no reason why looking through a CCTV screen would be any less plausible.

As for questions about the minimum resolution or specific conditions, I wouldn't get too bogged down about things like that - the premise of the movie is just, "If you see it, you will commit suicide". But anyway, after seeing what happened to Greg after he looked at the CCTV, I wouldn't say the others were willing to experiment with other ways of trying to "cheat" the creatures' effect, would you?

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