The Birds

Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds is a horror film classic. Loosely based on the short story of the same name by Daphne du Maurier, The Birds was known for innovating the “revenge of nature” type scenarios in film and used special effects and a unique soundtrack to provide atmospheric terror for its audiences. The Birds differed from many films of its era in that it didn’t have a conventional soundtrack, nor did it feature a clear-cut ending. Instead, the film is guided largely by sounds and dialogue and features an ending which provides more questions than answers.

The Birds follows the story of a 1963 version of Paris Hilton, as socialite Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hendren) meets Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor). She begins to slowly and reluctantly fall for Brenner and winds up heading to his home in the quiet coastal town of Bodega Bay, where Brenner spends his weekends with his mother and incredibly younger sister. As Melanie arrives in Bodega Bay, strange incidents begin to snowball involving the birds of the sleepy town and, eventually, all sorts of feathered hell breaks loose.

The Birds works because it is an absurdist horror tale from Hitchcock. It isn’t particularly frightening, with a few exceptions in which the silly looking birds actually did get to me, but more or less bases its notions of terror on the ideas presented and not merely the execution of the ideas. Certainly the sight of all of the birds represented some legitimate fright in 1963 for audiences, but I feel the film ages tremendously well given the overall sense of claustrophobia and inherent terror presented through the idea of the film itself. Even now as I hear a crow cawing outside, I feel a slight chill.

What makes The Birds more special in terms of filmmaking is some of the backstory to the film. Putting Hitchcock’s film in the light of context certainly makes the achievement seem even more remarkable, especially given the sacrifices that some of the performers made for the film. Hendren, for example, was told that she would be working with mechanical birds for the brutal and chilling attic scene. As it turned out, live birds were thrown at her by prop people for the shoot of the scene, which lasted for over a week. By the conclusion of the shoot, Hendren was nearly gouged in the eye by a bird and became hysterical. When Cary Grant visited the set one day, he praised Hendren as being “one very brave lady.” Watching the scene again given this knowledge adds new depth to her remarkable performance. Hendren’s daughter, actress Melanie Griffith, was given a doll by Hitchcock that apparently looked exactly like Hendren. Eerie, huh?

The soundtrack is another element of The Birds that adds to the overall creep factor. Instead of using a typical film soundtrack to drive the action, Hitchcock had Oskar Sala, an early German pioneer of electronic music, create birds sounds on his trautonium (a monophonic electronic musical instrument) and use them to construct the soundtrack. No natural bird sounds were used in the film. Also, there is a very high-pitched soundtrack of electronic noise utilized throughout the film that adds to the general feeling of building tension. Much of the noise is actually inaudible for the most part, merely providing a background to the rising sense of disquiet coming from the film’s events.

The Birds works because it relies on buildup to terror more than terror itself. When the birds attack, they attack characters we know and we relate to in some fashion. They attack unrelentingly, too, attacking children and all sorts of people from various walks of life. This legitimate terror is ingrained in the very soul of horror films, as the notion that the action can occur to any “regular person” is the glue that holds the better films of the genre together. With The Birds, Hitchcock has crafted that sort of terror. To temper it with a greater and broader sense of filmmaking, Hitchcock also utilizes various broad strokes of humour and irony to guide the story. This completes the tale with a marvelous edge and closes a wonderful experience. The Birds is coming!

Trailer: (this trailer is just priceless, watch it!)