“I keep telling you, this isn’t a few birds. These are gulls, crows, swifts–” – Tippi Hedren, The Birds (1963)
It felt like a good time for a throwback horror film, so I decided to take on one of my favorite horror films by Alfred Hitchcock: The Birds (1963). The Birds is loosely based on a 1952 short story by Daphne du Maurier (author of Rebecca, which was also adapted by Hitchcock). In this classic by the auteur, a quaint California town becomes a site of unimaginable horrors. What are often seen as innocuous creatures become the stuff of nightmares.
The movie begins with Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren), a San Francisco socialite, going to a pet store to pick up a new pet bird. There is an issue with the delivery, and the clerk leaves the counter to make a call. Melanie is approached by a young lawyer (Rod Taylor). Melanie acts like she works there when he inquires about the birds in the store. It turns out the lawyer knows Melanie from seeing her in court. When she confronts him for pretending to shop for birds when he knew she did not work there, he shares that he was actually looking for birds for his younger sister’s birthday. Irritated but intrigued, Melanie uses her resources to find the man’s name and address.
Melanie arrives at the apartment of Mitch Brenner, the lawyer, with two lovebirds in a cage. She leaves the cage outside his door with a note. Another tenant informs her Mitch has left town for the weekend to be with his family in Bodega Bay, a small town sixty miles away. Melanie decides to make the drive and bring the birds to him that afternoon. Melanie asks around until she gets the location of the Brenner home. She meets Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette), a local schoolteacher, to get the name of Mitch’s sister (for whom Melanie purchased the lovebirds). After acquiring the answers she wants from the locals, Melanie takes a boat across the bay. She enters the Brenner house after finding the door unlocked and leaves the birds and note on a footstool. Mitch runs out of the house a few minutes later and drives to the opposite dock to wait for her. As Melanie returns to the dock, a seagull dives and strikes her on the head. This is the first of several seemingly unconnected incidents involving birds in Bodega Bay.
Melanie decides to stay in Bodega Bay as she gets closer with Mitch. Her stay is extended even longer than she plans. Over the next few days, large groups of several different species of birds descend upon the town. The birds fly directly at individuals, crash through windows, flood through chimneys, cause dangerous accidents, and even kill humans by attacking them. As the bird attacks become increasingly frequent and violent, Melanie and the residents of Bodega Bay fall deeper into a shared nightmare with no answers in sight.
The Birds is a perfect example of Hitchcock’s haunting style as well as the longevity of horror’s effect on those who engage with it. A piece of trivia I learned when rewatching the movie was that there is no musical score. The only sounds added to the movie are the sounds of birds. It was a detail I had never noticed before; it made the experience even more eerie. With violent, unpredictable creatures at its epicenter, The Birds belongs to the sub-genre of eco-horror. Eco-horror is horror rooted in nature, including dangerous plants, natural disasters, and attacking animals. I plan to take a closer look at eco-horror in a future post. It is a fascinating sub-genre that we encounter in so many different ways.
The collective antagonist of The Birds invites every single viewer to share in that “What if..?” feeling. Birds are part of our everyday lives, and there is no way around that. Furthermore, the movie never answers why the birds were behaving the way they were and attacking humans. The Birds reminds us real horror is always possible in the familiar parts of life, no matter how harmless they seem.
Until next time,
Jordan
By Night 