31 Days Of Horror: Day #29 - THE BIRDS

"Don't they ever stop migrating?" - Annie Hayworth

The Birds, (1963), Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Grade: A -

Vertigo is this blogger's favorite Hitchcock film.  Psycho is the movie most associated with horror when this director's name is mentioned.  However, The Birds holds a certain certain bizarreness that makes it a conversation piece and brashly gives new meaning to a horror film with its "(Wo)man vs. Nature " elements.

It's Hitchcock's monster movie.  Except there are thousands and thousands of monsters, all striving for the same goal, which is to kill.  And their reason for killing is left unexplained, which adds to the element of terror.  Do we have to be spoon-fed everything?  Not really, it's a known fact that Hitchcock liked to unnerve his audience.  He was once quoted, "I enjoy playing the audience like a piano."

For the uninformed, Melanie Griffith's mom Tippi Hedren takes over for Hitch's cool blonde actress extraordinaire Grace Kelly in the heroine role of Melanie Daniels, a socialite who follows young attorney Mitch Brenner to Bodega Bay, California and delivers his sister a pair of lovebirds.  Afterwards, unending attacks by seagulls, crows, and other ornithology specimens ensue.

While many may find The Birds a tedious exercise, (continuous attacks over and over) it is nevertheless one of Hitchcock's greatest achievements, both from technical and suspense standpoints.  Of course, this was all before CGI and Lucasfilm FX, so Hitch had to use storyboards and matte backgrounds to plan out the elaborated scenes of the town of Bodega Bay being overrun.  For its time, this was a masterful achievement, and one of the reasons the film works so well.  Hitch feeds on our emotions, not just with the birds themselves invoking fear into the stomachs of the townspeople and the movie audience, but also with the uneasiness of the human characters within the movie.  Rod Taylor's Mitch, Tippi's Melanie, and Jessica Tandy's Lydia all form an army of sorts against each other, with Lydia offended by the ever-beautiful Melanie, with fear that Melanie may take her son Mitch away from her and leave her as a scared, lonely old woman. Fear is also invoked within Mitch's younger sister (Veronica Cartwright) who perhaps does not understand the nature of the horror being played out in front of her, with the birds and her siblings. And then there's Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette), a schoolteacher with a crush on Mitch, who also becomes offended early on by Melanie's presence.

All this leads up to a climatic scene within the confines of the Brenner home, with the massive amount of birds evoking their mass havoc.  While Hitchcock certainly knows that at some point we've come to have some sympathy of sorts for these characters, his known sense of black humor, and unrelenting power to scare and unease comes to the forefronts within the film's final moments.

This blogger picked The Birds for today's post because of its undeniable scare factor (although many will disagree), but then sometimes the simplest of nature's creatures can have just as much impact as a maniac in a butcher apron and skin-mask wielding a chainsaw.