The Birds, 1963
Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenwriter: Evan Hunter (based on story by Daphne du Maurier)
Music by: Bernard Herrmann
Photography by: Robert Burks
Genre: Horror
Main actors:
“Tippi” Hedren (Melanie Daniels)
Rod Taylor (Mitch Brenner)
Jessica Tandy (Lydia)
Veronica Cartwright (Cathy)
Melanie Daniels, young rich women of San Francisco, meets the lawyer Mitch Brenner in a bird shop and she feels attracted for him. Mitch wants to buy a couple of love-birds for his sister Kathy, but he recognizes Melanie from the press and decides to leave mysteriously. Melanie decides to go to Bodega Bay, where Mitch enjoys every week-end, to surprise him giving a present of two beautiful love-birds to Kathy. In the bay, the birds have an unusual aggressive behavior.
From the first frame of the movie there’s a strange, weird and indefinable atmosphere that saturates the locations in which the action takes place. “The Birds” have some perturbing elements, that don’t seem to come from a common reality and really terrifies the viewer. The master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, has the ability to transmit his personal fears to the story written by Daphne du Maurier about some birds that become nuts. It’s one of the most personal surrealistic films of the director.
The film is a representation of pure horror, but the horror doesn’t come from the killing birds or the blood; it comes from the unknown power of nature. There’s no answer about why the birds want to eat people, because sometimes the inexplicable happen and the chaos takes the control of some part of the universe. The inhabitants of the Bodega Bay seem small, useless, pathetic, a small toy for a huge plague of starving birds. They don’t believe that some birds could attack people, until they see it with their own eyes; the eternal human arrogance that think of the humankind as an omnipotent specie of the universe.
The attacking birds are sparrows, ravens and seagulls; the common birds of the area, nothing strange or unknown for the inhabitants. That’s why it is so horrifying because the birds are familiar for us. In 1963, the special effects weren’t technologically advanced enough, so the birds in the attacking sequences were drawn by specialist frame by frame (they spent 3 months for a 10 seconds scene) and the final result deserve big respect according to the time that was made. The final attacking sequence in Mitch’s house is a perfect metaphor of an exchange of roles between human and birds. Mitch’s family and Melanie are locked in the house, a claustrophobic big cage surrounded for hundreds of violent birds; the director maybe is suggesting the feeling of the birds in a pet shop.
All the characters hide something behind their fainthearted glance, some kind of an old pain, strange fears and worries about life that aren’t revealed in the film. Hitchcock reminds the audience that we doesn’t control our own life, we are exposed to the enigmatic rules of the universe. The birds symbolize the unknown fear of the humanity against fate, the inevitable mystery of death impossible to avoid for each person in the world.
Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenwriter: Evan Hunter (based on story by Daphne du Maurier)
Music by: Bernard Herrmann
Photography by: Robert Burks
Genre: Horror
Main actors:
“Tippi” Hedren (Melanie Daniels)
Rod Taylor (Mitch Brenner)
Jessica Tandy (Lydia)
Veronica Cartwright (Cathy)
Melanie Daniels, young rich women of San Francisco, meets the lawyer Mitch Brenner in a bird shop and she feels attracted for him. Mitch wants to buy a couple of love-birds for his sister Kathy, but he recognizes Melanie from the press and decides to leave mysteriously. Melanie decides to go to Bodega Bay, where Mitch enjoys every week-end, to surprise him giving a present of two beautiful love-birds to Kathy. In the bay, the birds have an unusual aggressive behavior.
From the first frame of the movie there’s a strange, weird and indefinable atmosphere that saturates the locations in which the action takes place. “The Birds” have some perturbing elements, that don’t seem to come from a common reality and really terrifies the viewer. The master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, has the ability to transmit his personal fears to the story written by Daphne du Maurier about some birds that become nuts. It’s one of the most personal surrealistic films of the director.
The film is a representation of pure horror, but the horror doesn’t come from the killing birds or the blood; it comes from the unknown power of nature. There’s no answer about why the birds want to eat people, because sometimes the inexplicable happen and the chaos takes the control of some part of the universe. The inhabitants of the Bodega Bay seem small, useless, pathetic, a small toy for a huge plague of starving birds. They don’t believe that some birds could attack people, until they see it with their own eyes; the eternal human arrogance that think of the humankind as an omnipotent specie of the universe.
The attacking birds are sparrows, ravens and seagulls; the common birds of the area, nothing strange or unknown for the inhabitants. That’s why it is so horrifying because the birds are familiar for us. In 1963, the special effects weren’t technologically advanced enough, so the birds in the attacking sequences were drawn by specialist frame by frame (they spent 3 months for a 10 seconds scene) and the final result deserve big respect according to the time that was made. The final attacking sequence in Mitch’s house is a perfect metaphor of an exchange of roles between human and birds. Mitch’s family and Melanie are locked in the house, a claustrophobic big cage surrounded for hundreds of violent birds; the director maybe is suggesting the feeling of the birds in a pet shop.
All the characters hide something behind their fainthearted glance, some kind of an old pain, strange fears and worries about life that aren’t revealed in the film. Hitchcock reminds the audience that we doesn’t control our own life, we are exposed to the enigmatic rules of the universe. The birds symbolize the unknown fear of the humanity against fate, the inevitable mystery of death impossible to avoid for each person in the world.
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