Still creepy after all these years
When I was a college freshman, my roommate had a blue parakeet. On occasion, the bird would escape the cage and fly around our tiny dorm room and I would hide under the covers until the bird was safely back in the cage. I realized back then that my fear of free flying animals was likely based on my childhood viewing of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. I didn’t consume a lot of horror as a young child and I actively avoided graphic slasher films. The idea of scaring myself intentionally was limited to intense amusement park rides, not scary movies. As a result, much of what I saw in the horror genre were reruns of old black-and-white film classics that felt more like melodramatic gothic stage theater rather than being actually terrifying. However, one day, while flipping through the channels, I came across an old movie called The Birds, and I couldn’t look away. There are movies that will stay with you for various reasons, and not always because they are particularly well made or well acted. I was riveted by scenes of little children, my age, being attacked and wounded. And I was particularly creeped out by the attacking “monster” being something I walked by, or beneath, every day on my way to school. Without my realizing it, The Birds changed my brain chemistry when it came to the chirps and birdsong of sweet flying creatures with claws and beaks.
The story follows Melanie (Tippi Hedren), an impeccably dressed, pampered socialite whose minor hijinks periodically land her in trouble, but without lasting consequences. At a bird shop in San Francisco, Melanie and a charming young lawyer named Mitch (Rod Taylor) mutually prank each other. Determined to get back at Mitch, Melanie buys a pair of lovebirds and drives up to the seaside town of Bodega Bay to sneak them into the house which Mitch shares with his uptight, widowed mother (Jessica Tandy) and his cheerful, school-aged younger sister, Cathy (Veronica Cartwright). Melanie is helped and reluctantly befriended by Annie (Suzanne Pleshette), a cynical young woman who is Cathy’s teacher and Mitch’s ex-girlfriend. However, a series of isolated, strange bird encounters gradually escalates into swarms of massive, coordinated attacks and lethal carnage in the little town.
The Birds did a great job of creating a fear of the ordinary which, at least for me, can be far more scary than fantastical monsters or creatures. The birds in the story aren’t radioactive, alien, or super-enhanced in any way. They are just ordinary birds, en masse, and very angry at people. This is one of the early films I had seen that used the idea that any small thing, in sufficient numbers and fury, can kill you. This concept has been played out with ants, spiders, piranha, and young children, in other horror stories I saw later in life. I didn’t really worry about sharks or piranha in my home town, but birds were a regular presence in my life. I would see them massed on telephone lines or flying in formation in the sky. After the gory scene where Jessica Tandy finds a friend dead with his eyes gone, I had a new respect for birds.
The Rewatch
As part of our Déjà Boo series, I recently did a rewatch of The Birds to see how it compared to my childhood memories. Despite some dated acting and special effects (that make it sometimes drift a little towards campiness), it’s still creepy after all these years. There were things I noticed on my grownup watch that I didn’t catch or think about when I was a child. First of all, there is no music. Most films, especially from the 1960s, have jaunty background tunes or suspenseful music to set the emotional tone of the scene. In The Birds, music is absent, so there is only the natural sounds of the birds. Even in the most terrifying and violent scenes, there is only the flapping of wings and screeching of the birds and the cries of the victims.
Another thing I noticed is how slow and ordinary the start of the film is. There is no dramatic opening, chase scenes, jump scares or other intensity. Almost the first third of the movie is Melanie figuring out how to prank Mitch with the lovebirds. Even after she gets to Bodega Bay, she is still chatting with and manipulating the locals to complete her prank. I love how polished she is with lying for this small, petty thing, and I was intrigued by the way the small conversations gradually reveal the various characters’ inner demons long before they are hacked at by birds. The slow creep of the story prior to the pivotal action scenes and the lack of dramatic music created a feeling of vague, impending dread while still making the intense physical attacks sneak up on you.
The third thing I noticed on my rewatch was, well, the birds themselves. This may seem obvious, but as a child I was just freaked out by the massive amounts of birds attacking children my age. Watching this as a grownup, my brain was thinking about logistics. How did they get so many birds? How did they get them to swarm? I went down some unverified internet rabbit holes and read that most of the birds were real, but some were mechanical (which on second viewing you can sort of see when a child is pinned to the ground by a persistent bird). I also read that Tippi Hedren was surprised on set by the unexpected use of real, rather than mechanical, birds attacking her in a pivotal scene.
The final element I noticed during my rewatch were the philosophical conversations between the various characters, including several of the side characters. There are multiple times where a victim reports an attack and is disbelieved, not because they are untrustworthy, but because the listener doesn’t want to believe it could be true. There is a great scene in the town’s diner where Melanie reports that there was a bird attack on the school children, and an elderly woman who is a bird expert explains that a coordinated bird attack couldn’t happen, even though it clearly has. Another customer at the diner doesn’t want to hear the information because it will scare her two children. When the birds swarm the area around the diner, the customers stare at Melanie in the aftermath and one says that Melanie must be to blame. It’s an interesting reminder of toxic group conversation dynamics that continue to exist in our current day.
The Birds may seem tame by contemporary standards, but as a child I was riveted by the bird attacks, especially since children were often the targets and they were being attacked by real-life creatures that I regularly encountered. While the gore was mostly kept to a minimum, there were several jump scare scenes with an eyeless corpse or a man engulfed in flames or a child with a bird pecking at her neck. These scenes were enough to leave an indelible imprint on my young thoughts. As a result, The Birds remains a memorable experience as one of my first horror films.
Highlights:
- No music, so many birds
- Jump scares
- Kids always in peril
POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.
