Rent The Birds (1963)

Supernatural Horror. - The Birds review by Steve

Tippi Hedren and Rod Taylor meet cute and then fall in love against a background of an avian apocalypse. The people of Bodega Bay, lost in trivial diversions, are blind to an inconvenient truth. From being initially oblivious to the gathering danger they are finally overwhelmed by the sudden, inexplicable onset of war by all birds on humans.  

The Birds is full of great horror moments.  Including the flock of crows gathering at Tippi's back as she smokes a cigarette outside a school while schoolchildren innocently sing a nursery rhyme, which has some of the gothic frisson of Poe.

 Hitchcock's only science fiction film was a big box office hit and the spectacle of the attack of the birds is a triumph of set design and camera illusion. The soundtrack of bird sound processed through a synthesiser was innovative and powerful. Inevitably, the actors take a back seat to the effects but it's that kind of film.

The story lacks an ending and it would be nice if Hitch had done a little more with the theme of man at war with nature, but it is a one of the best of the end of the world films of the period. Each scene is imaginatively designed and assembled to set an eerie note of fear against an ominous symphony of catastrophe.

Iconic Horror Thriller - The Birds review by GI

A rather quirky film in Alfred Hitchcock's canon but probably one of his most famous. It has all his usual build up of tension and dread although it does veer into romantic melodrama for much of the first third of the film. However once it gears up into the main story it is impactive, exciting and at times quite scary. Former model Tippi Hedren, one of Hitchcock's famous blonde 'discoveries', plays rich San Francisco socialite Melanie who, on a whim, heads out to the remote seaside town of Bodega Bay searching for Mitch (Rod Taylor), a man she fancies and hopes to seduce. As they begin a romance of sorts, the town is struck by strange, at first isolated, attacks by birds. These grow in intensity forcing Mitch, Melanie, his mother (Jessica Tandy) and young sister (Veronica Cartwright) to retreat to their house where they face an onslaught from the murderous birds. There's some shocking scenes but the film excels in its ability to create a contrast of calm with a sense of dread throughout, aided by there being no musical score. Hitchcock's well known hatred for location shooting means that the edits to studio shots occasionally are a little too obvious and there's too much use of back projection but that said there's equally some highly memorable stuff on display here, an overhead shot of the town from the viewpoint of the circling seagulls for example. The story offers little, if any, explanation for the sudden bird attacks unless you choose to interpret the film's constant reminder that humans keep caged birds as a possible cause of the birds behaviour, or put simply are the birds taking revenge on humans? It's open to debate in any case. This an iconic horror film and one every film fan should make sure they see, it's a film that stays in the memory for sure.