Legendary director Alfred Hitchcock's followup to his epochal and groundbreaking PSYCHO (1960) is one of the more interesting and enigmatic end of the world narratives. In a nutshell, THE BIRDS chronicles horrifying attacks on the people of Bodega Bay, California, all with zero explanation given, while a budding romance collides with family dysfunction born from a mother's jealousy over the women in her adult son's life.
I first saw THE BIRDS during a TV airing when I was about ten years old, after having heard about it for years and how terrifying it was, but when I saw it for myself I must admit that I was disappointed. I tuned in expecting wall-to-wall avian mayhem and violence, but what I got instead was a character study on the aforementioned meet-cute love story trying to blossom under the interference of a jealous, insecure mother. At age ten I did not appreciate such narrative nuance, but I sure do now, considering that my own mother did her level best to sabotage any relationships I had with the girls I brought home. (That started when I was an adolescent and it lasted until I stopped bringing girls home, because I was tired of my mother's rudeness to said girls, plus her serial attempts at infantilizing me around them, so I have not brought a paramour home since 1984.) But a distance of fifty years can lend one a different perspective, and upon seeing THE BIRDS for the first time since 1975, I finally got it.
The look of the film possesses the aesthetic artificiality common to many films of the early 1960's, what with some rather egregious blue screen shots that looked super-fake even back then. (It was similar to such process shots as seen in the early James Bond films, which were also products of that era.) But the sequences featuring the savage bird attacks are truly the stuff of nightmares, as a seemingly endless amount of winged assailants throw themselves bodily at human, shrieking and clawing and pecking, and some of the images of dead victims creeped me the fuck out when I was a kid, and they are no less effective today, particularly the sight of a dead Suzanne Pleshette, and one victim whose eyes have been pecked out. I would have loved to have seen the audience's reaction to that one back in 1963, an era when American horror didn't deploy much gore. If you wanted that sort of gruesomeness, you had to rely on British imports from Hammer Studios.
I have not broken down the film's plot because it is best experienced cold, much like PSYCHO, though, unlike PSYCHO, THE BIRDS has not had its signature set pieces and visceral horror diluted by over six decades of endless references and parodies. Yes, there's been some of that, but nothing like what happened with PSYCHO, and THE BIRDS does not have any crazy reveals at the end, so its ambiguous climax can still allow the audience to draw its own conclusion. Will the end of humanity be wrought by torrents of screeching feathered fiends? Who can say, but the ride this movie takes grownup audiences on should be experienced as least once.
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