What is The Birds About and Why Should I Care? And, the next time you see more than a few birds perched on a telephone wire … So, you'd better bring in the bird bath and bird feeder, as The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther suggested in 1963. nature conflict in The Birds, nature gets the win. Basically, Hitchcock frees the birds and puts us in the cages.

For us, it's all about the suspense and the mysterious, gruesome attacks. Here's the thing, though: audiences don't care. It's been analyzed to death by philosophers, psychoanalysts, and feminist thinkers, all trying to figure out the relationship between the attacks and the tangled relationships in the film. It's now considered one of Hitchcock's masterpieces of suspense and a horror film classic. Since then, The Birds' reputation has, uh, taken flight. Still, The Birds was a modest box-office success upon its release and scooped up a number of accolades, including an Academy Award nomination for Best Special Effects and a Golden Globe for Tippi Hedren for New Star of the Year. Was it a love story? Why do we have to wait 45 minutes for the first bird attack? Why are these birds attacking in the first place? The film doesn't provide any set answers, a fact that put off early reviewers in 1963. Oh, and it would scare audiences silly.Ĭritics didn't quite know what to make of the film. It would be his most technologically complex film ever. Hitch imagined the visual possibilities of crazed birds terrorizing a town, and he set off to make a film that would tax the technical genius of an army of animators, bird trainers, and special-effects wizards. Put the two together, and you've got a Hitchcock-ready story. Apparently, poisoned shellfish was to blame. He'd also read about an incident in the beach town of Capitola, California, where residents found birds dropping out of the sky and suicidally banging into their rooftops. How did he go about it? By using a short story by Daphne du Maurier about a flock of nasty birds that attack a small English village. Hitchcock, already an uber-famous and influential director, was fresh off the success of 1960's Psycho when he decided to make his first foray into the pure horror genre. They wreak havoc on the town and, in the process, derail the budding romance of a couple of meet-cute San Franciscans.

In The Birds, for completely unexplained reasons, the feathered friends of Bodega Bay suddenly turn … bad. But this movie ain't about pigs or birdcages or fried chicken or habitat destruction or … whatever is going on in that game. Yes, the birds in Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 horror classic The Birds are angry. Okay, let's get this out of the way right now:

Stars: Rod Taylor, Tippi Hedren, Suzanne Pleshette Writer: Evan Hunter, Daphne du Maurier (story)

The birds by daphne dumaurier