Rating: B+
Ka-KAW!! Hitchcock created this enduring 1963 classic that is still quite scary by today’s standards. The action centres on the Californian town of Bodega Bay, whose residents find themselves being attacked by (spoiler alert) birds. It starts with people only being pecked by a few individual creatures - but escalates to gigantic coordinated flocks unleashing death and chaos.
Could it be that there is something biblical going on, or can it all be explained by science? Perhaps it’s about how people can’t expect to understand or control nature as much as they’d like? There’s a scene in a diner where the characters bounce around some theories as to what’s happening, but the movie doesn’t leave us with any definitive answers.
The movie’s visual effects are dated; there’s some blatant green screen, fake-looking blood and obvious bird-puppets. However, the sound design is incredible. There’s no musical score, just the sounds of what is happening within the story - and the largest-scale bird attack that occurs in the movie isn’t seen, only heard. In this scene, the protagonists have boarded themselves up indoors where they listen to the approaching avian hordes.
Hitchcock realised that children’s choirs can sound creepy as shit: probably the scariest scene in the movie is when the lead character Melanie Daniels (played by Tippi Hedren) is sitting outside a schoolyard, unaware of the crows assembling on the jungle gym behind her - all the while we can hear distant singing from the classroom. “knick-e-ty knack-e-ty now... now now...” *shudder*.
My enjoyment of the movie is now tempered somewhat by the knowledge of Hitchcock’s behind-the-scenes creepiness, and mistreatment of Hedren (he threw live birds at her and filmed her screaming and bleeding). But if we can take the movie itself on its own merits, it’s an amazing piece of work.