A favorite game among movie nerds is “Name the best four-film run by any of the great filmmakers.” The consensus winner tends to be Francis Ford Coppola’s 1970s: The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, and Apocalypse Now. That’s hard to argue with, but my personal pick is Alfred Hitchcock’s sequence of four strikingly different masterpieces between 1958 and 1963: Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds. These films give you Hitchcock at his deepest, then his most flamboyantly entertaining, and then his sickest. And then there’s The Birds.
The Birds might be the purest expression of the peculiarly sadistic mastery of Hitchcock’s film craft. Loosely adapted from a Daphne du Maurier short story, it’s an apocalyptic monster movie in which flocks of birds — ordinary seagulls, crows, and sparrows — begin to terrorize a small coastal town in northern California for no discernible reason.
That really is all there is to it, but of course Hitchcock delights in toying with this simple premise. The film sidles slowly up to its topic with a story about impish San Francisco socialite Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren), who travels to Bodega Bay on a whim to play flirty mindgames with Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) after a meet-cute in a bird shop. Hitchcock — who at this point in his career is well aware that French film buffs, if nobody else, are psychoanalyzing his every move — offers up some juicy Oedipal misdirection in the form of Mitch’s uptight mother (Jessica Tandy), who happens to look a lot like Melanie. What’s going on?
Nothing, it turns out; when the film proper begins and the birds strike, there’s no analyzing it, rationalizing it, or explaining it at all. A seagull pecks Melanie on the head, drawing a single line of brilliant red blood. Another smashes itself into a door. A flock terrorizes a children’s birthday party. A blizzard of sparrows flies down a chimney. Crows assemble ominously outside the schoolhouse. A farmer meets a grisly end.
All of this unfurls without any music; instead, The Birds has an almost avant-garde electronic soundtrack of distorted bird noises by Sala and Remi Gassman, with Hitchcock’s usual composer, Bernard Herrmann, acting as sound consultant. The echoing clucks and layered shrieks give the film an astonishingly eerie atmosphere, and swell into unbearable walls of sound during the movie’s crescendoing bird attacks. These are staged with all of Hitchcock’s devious genius, and edited with pulverizing force.
The birds’ blank malevolence might make them the ultimate Hitchcock antagonist. It is pointless to try to understand or resist them; they reduce the vain preoccupations of humanity to nothing. They shriek and flutter and peck until you can’t stand it any more, and then the film suddenly ends, on one of the most memorable and ambiguously doomy closing shots in cinema history. The Birds is a flat but terrifying film, silly but profoundly evil — a masterpiece of existential horror.
Where to watch: Available to stream on Shudder or to rent or buy on Apple, Amazon, and similar services.
Polygon’s annual Halloween Countdown is a 31-day run of short recommendations of the best horror movies, shows, TV episodes, and online specials to stream for the Halloween season. You can find the entire calendar here.
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