#770: The Birds

The Birds

Alfred Hitchcock
Initial release: March 28, 1963 (North America)

We call Alfred Hitchcock the master of suspense, and it's a deserved title. But most of his movies tended towards very human matters: serial killers, murder plots, spies and saboteurs. The Birds is something else entirely, a naturalistic horror film of the type almost entirely unseen up until that point (other than Arthur Machen's The Terror.) The premise is exceedingly simple: the birds in Bodega Bay, California, have gone berserk, and nobody knows why. That's it, that's the whole movie! Almost.

Of course, Hitchcock gonna Hitchcock, and the first half of the movie leans a lot on the noir tropes that Hitchcock has utilized throughout his career. The protagonist Melanie is a young socialite and media heir with something of a scandalous reputation and a habit of lying for fun. Visiting a San Francisco pet store to pick up a bird for her aunt, she decides to play a prank on another customer, Mitch, who so happens to know who she is but plays along just to turn the tables on her. Feeling slighted, but intrigued, she winds up tracking him down in Bodega Bay to deliver a gift of lovebirds, but for one reason or another winds up giving it to the man's much younger sister Cathy (it's implied that she is in fact his daughter, born out of wedlock, leaving his mother to raise her to avoid a scandal.) All this, of course, is just 45 minutes of character drama to justify getting the main characters out to Bodega Bay. In the meantime, increasing numbers of birds are flocking ominously in the background, with the first sign that something is amiss being a seagull randomly attacking Melanie. The following day, gulls swarm and attack Cathy's birthday party, presaging a series of bird attacks across town, and with that the back half of the film turns into a different movie entirely.

There's a really apocalyptic vibe to the film, one which almost seems to anticipate the zombie apocalypse genre five years before Night of the Living Dead. Birds viciously attack people out in the open; accidents lead to explosions. Our heroes board up the windows of their house, desperate to keep the birds out, only for them to peck and claw their way in. Characters discover their neighbor pecked to death, his eyes scratched out; the police, as yet unaware that there's a threat, attribute the death to a botched burglary. A news report suggests that the wider world is unaware or skeptical about what's going on in Bodega Bay. The characters eventually escape in a car, their fates left ambiguous. I dare you to prove me wrong: it's a zombie movie in all but name.

While the drama aspects are appropriately Hitchcockian, it's the latter half of the film that features the most memorable moments, such as the characters slowly wading through what appears to be a vast army of birds, all watching them, waiting for them to make one wrong move. In a lot of ways it's similar to the clear genre split of Psycho, with the first half of the film a pretty standard, if high-quality, 1950s-style noir centering around a young woman impulsively stealing from her boss, only for her sudden shocking murder to transition the film into horror and mystery.

The Birds isn't typically on most peoples' short lists of Hitchcock's best films. By some measures it's arguably a fairly pedestrian disaster film or monster film, of the kind that were increasingly common by the end of the 1960s. But I like it; I think it wouldn't be nearly as good without Hitchcock's talents. For proof, look no further than the Birdemic franchise, a truly brain-dead series of movies that tries to ape what made The Birds successful with an additional ham-fisted environmental message. The Birds is iconic, a film that helped a unique subgenre of horror take flight.

-june❤