Still Scary After All These Years

Rating: 9/10 (3 May 2008)

This movie is rather an odd-man-out amongst Hitchcock's genre. For the most part, his movies feature horrors of a human nature. The two that come first to my mind are 'Psycho' and 'Rebecca.' 'The Birds' has a more Steven King style of story-telling, in which something otherwise innocuous quite unexpectedly goes berserk. As he himself once explained; 'the familiar fabric of life can come unravelled with shocking suddenness'.
During the first part of the movie, we are treated to a comedy of manners amongst sophisticated individuals. Tippi Hedren plays 'society girl' Melanie Daniels, out to score flirty points off an upstart lawyer, acted rather oleaginously by Robert Taylor.
She pays a clandestine visit to his mother's country house out in the coastal boondocks called Bodega Bay. And it's here that Mr King appears to take over the script. Beginning with a few isolated attacks, 'The Birds' descends into a truly horrific idea. They have all become organised and cooperative. And they want us dead. The attack scenes quite beggar belief. These aren't special-effects or CGI; these are real birds. Big, dangerous ones like crows and gulls. And although they were trained to their task, it didn't stop one of the girls (I believe it was Ms Hedren) being pecked so badly that she was actually scarred.
The caws and shrieks are loud and aggressively modulated to highlight their new-found ferocity. Even today some of the scenes of bloodied victims struggling under multiple attack are shocking. Hedren's character shelters in a telephone box whilst rabid birds hurl themselves at the windows, shattering them in death. A man staggers up, his face a ripped, red mask, unable to think under the onslaught let alone see.
Then the raid abates, and the dazed community try to make sense of the impossible thing that just happened.
All of the characters are extremely plausible and accurately represent the social and sexual politics of the day (1963). Modern feminists might find the strident hysteria and sal-volatile weepiness of their gender portrayal a little hard to stomach today; well - I'm sorry girls - but that's more or less what we blokes had to put up with back then. In a crisis, men not only did everything; they were bleeding expected to do everything. You don't know how grateful we are for Ellen Ripley.
As other commentators have mentioned; if you like explanations and nice neat denouements, this movie isn't for you. The subjects just go quietly into the night, leaving the theatre to the birds. You don't even know if they make it or not. They disappear into the distance with the harsh braying of crows sounding almost like victory jeers.
Modern horror movies like 'Aliens' and 'Species' have raised the shock threshold way beyond this now, but for those of us who saw this frightener during the 60's, our feathered friends have never seemed quite the same. And they are right here, with us. 'Aliens' are just a remote fantasy. Remember that, next time you're out in the countryside, away from any protection, and a big mob of crows begins quietly looking you over...