(Credit: Universal Pictures)

The Birds has to be among the most frightening of Alfred Hitchcock’s cinematic creations. This 1963 film takes a ubiquitous and apparently harmless element of our natural surroundings – small flying creatures with beaks – and turns it directly against us in a set of harrowing on-screen attacks.

As lead actor Tippi Hedron recalled in her memoir, Hitchcock used real birds in the cast to incite maximum fear in the audience, including during a scene where Hedron’s character was trapped in a bedroom. “It was brutal and ugly and relentless,” Hedron describes, of live ravens, doves and pigeons being hurled at her face over five days of shooting.

For many viewers, this film eclipses Hitchcock’s Psycho as his most terrifying, particularly given the everyday nature of a run-in with stray city birds. There are occasions in the movie when birds appear on screen seemingly from nowhere or fly directly at it as if coming for you, the viewer. The sheer scale and ferocity of the attacks fully justify the collective noun for a group of crows. Namely, a murder.

But one question remains. Why do these birds attack? What makes them swarm the townspeople of Bodega Bay, California, as they do, invading homes, attacking, and even killing? It’s not as though it’s just one species of bird, either. During the course of the film, we see seagulls, crows and even sparrows launch various assaults on unsuspecting humans.

So, is there a reason for the bird attacks?

The fact is, the movie never presents a clear reason for the bird attacks. They simply grow larger in scale and scope as it goes on. The first attack we see is a gull swooping down and drawing blood from the protagonist Melanie’s head while she’s taking a boat across the bay.

Then we see more gulls attacking before sparrows swarm the house when Melanie is staying and peck the eyes out of a neighbour. Before long, hundreds of crows and gulls are swarming the fleeing schoolchildren and townsfolk in an apparently coordinated attack. The attacks confound the town’s expert birdwatcher, Mrs Bundy, which only underscores their lack of a logical explanation.

The absence of an obvious cause or motive for the birds’ aggression is fundamental to the level of fear Hitchcock invokes. We’re left to imagine real-life birds acting in such a way at any time or place of their choosing without reason. It could happen in our own town, even our own homes.

Is there a true story behind the film?

Indeed, similar events did happen in real life, just down the coast of central California from Bodega Bay, in the town of Capitola, only two years before the movie’s release. The residents of Capitola really did experience “hordes” of birds “dive-bombing their homes, crashing into cars” and generally terrifying them out of their wits, according to the local Mercury News.

It was later discovered that the reason for the bird swarms in Capitola was a toxic type of acid produced by algae blooms that flocks of gulls had ingested via the fish they’d been feeding on. This toxin had made the birds delirious and sick, which explains why they tended to throw up all over the homes and cars they were bombarding.

Hitchcock was aware of this real-life event and used it as the basis for the film’s location and narrative arc, which he developed with screenwriter Evan Hunter. There is even a reference to what happened “last year” in Capitola during the movie.

However, Hitchcock deliberately avoids any scientific explanation that may have been given for the Capitola bird “attacks”. This is not only to accentuate the audience’s fear of the unknown capabilities of commonplace things such as birds but also for the allegorical meanings that could be read into the story.

What do the birds represent?

As well as literal agents of fear and aggression, the birds in the movie could be interpreted as metaphors. In the 1952 short story by Daphne du Maurier, on which the movie is based, it is quite clear that the birds represent deadly German bomber planes invading British airspace during World War II. Just as British civilians faced during the Blitz, the characters in The Birds are threatened by deadly winged attackers invading their towns, their homes and their lives.

Alternatively, we could interpret the aggressive, invasive behaviour of the birds as a representation of the actions of the characters in the movie. Hitchcock was typically interested in the psychological drama which lay beneath the interpersonal relationships in his films.

Perhaps the birds represent Melanie on some level, invading Bodega Bay and uprooting the uneasy social equilibrium that exists between Mitch, his mother Lydia and former lover Annie. It’s telling that the MacGuffin which gets Melanie to Mitch’s farm is the chance meeting in a bird shop, where Melanie purchases two lovebirds for the birthday of Mitch’s sister Cathy. At the end of the film, these two birds are the only ones still calm and unaggressive. Are they representations of Melanie and Mitch as they leave and abandon the town to its fate?

As always with Hitchcock films, there are many ways to The Birds. But only one way to react to it.

Related Topics