OK I watched about 45 minutes of this in English lit
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This part of the OP's post is interesting to me. Hitchcock was, in his time, a "commercial filmmaker" whose work wasn't taken very seriously by many critics or the Oscar Academy but now...53 years later...The Birds is shown as part of a academic "English lit" course. Perhaps as much to illuminate the short story by Daphne DuMaurier("Rebecca") as the film that Hitchcock made from it?
It is my belief that Hitchcock's films will likely live on from now on AS academic teachings. In film classes and English classes and drama classes. The Hollywood Heavyweight now joins Dickens and Melville for study...
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and... the whole time I'm thinking this is no better than some ridiculous SyFy channel film with a ridiculous killer creature. How about the recent horror films with the killer sheep? Or mosquitoes? Seriously, this film is flawed to hell because of choosing birds as a threat.
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Well, in choosing the material, Hitchcock was adamant that the birds in question be "innocent" birds. No birds of prey like owls(the resident killer bird in "Psycho.") No hawks. No ravens(though the crows LOOKED like ravens and...what's the difference, anyway?)
Hitchcock delighted in giving his audiences a "newfound sense of menace in the everyday." You'd feel different about taking a shower once you saw Psycho. You'd feel different about a group of birds on a wire once you saw The Birds.
Also, keep in mind that Hitchcock's film came DECADES before all those Syfy movies and, in a certain way, inspired that ENTIRE CHANNEL. But with a much better cinematic flair(if, indeed, a flawed and slow script.)
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Ok, maaaaaaybe if these birds were massive. Maaaaaaybe if they were all eagles or something. But just generic birds.
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As noted above. Hitchcock WANTED generic birds to be the killers.
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I don't care how many... they are not that big of a threat.
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Sure they are. The film "pulls its punches" on the attacks except for the one scene where the farmer is found with his eyes pecked out. That's how the birds kill in the main(Annie's eyes are pecked out, too -- but Mitch covers them with his hand to block Melanie's view.) Though the climactic attic room attack on Tippi Hedren shows us how a hundred beaks tearing into a victim's flesh could probably kill the victim via shock and blood loss("A death of a thousand cuts.")
If birds came flying at humanity in waves, by the thousands, by the MILLIONS...no guns could stop them. No cannons could stop them. And though The Birds didn't have the budget to show this, birds attacking in waves by the thousands(millions?), could destroy all electrical towers, down airliners by clogging their jet turbines, poison water by filling reservoirs with dead birds...it wouldn't take long for nature to take back the world from humans.
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All that said, no, perhaps the birds aren't scary AS birds. "The Birds" was the next film after "Psycho" from Hitchocck, and it made less than half OF "Psycho" and one reason cited at the time was that the knife-wielding shower-killing psycho of "Psycho" was far more terrifying than...birds.
So I'll agree with you there. But The Birds isn't necessarily about shocks and terror...it is about the destruction of the world by a mass attack.
From unknowable sources. And for unknowable reasons.
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joystar5879
7 years ago
I first saw it at College, in a film class. (s). OP must be either very young, very lucky...OR BOTH,
Gulls and Blue Jays, in particular, can be very territorial. Jays can be much nastier, because they tend to be in suburban areas. A Blue Jay will "Dive Bomb" you just for the sheer joy of it. (When I was a kid, we called them "Kamakaze Jays".) Gulls are less likely to go after a person, because their nests are not as accessible.
JS (who has a Blue Jay Gouge on her arm, from just LOOKING at a fallen nestling)
I do hope he won't upset Henry...
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