The Birds: Hitchcock's Macabre Masterpiece

In 1963, Alfred Hitchcock faced the biggest cinematic challenge of his career.

How to top the critical and commercial success of his first horror film, Psycho (1960). To prepare, he took the biggest break of his career between pictures—and it paid off.

With an unknown actress, no musical score and thousands of birds, Hitchcock created his most unconventional film, The Birds. And it’s the perfect example of why he’s crowned the Master of Suspense.

Hitchcock’s style of suspense is potent because he places ordinary people in extraordinary situations.

Here he has a San Francisco socialite, Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren), who has a flirtatious experience with a handsome man named Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor). After they meet, she follows Mitch to the picturesque coast of Bodega Bay to give him two pet love birds. It’s a seemingly innocent setup. The small town is sunny and serene, one of those places you never expect anything bad to happen. But once Melanie arrives, darkness slowly sets upon Bodega Bay, gradually growing more oppressive and omniscient with each passing day.

Hitchcock takes birds, animals that live with us in harmony, that we don’t even realize are there most of the time, and turns them into aggressive attackers. The concept of our feathered friends waging a war against humanity seems pretty preposterous, but that’s where the horror lies. The idea of something we don’t even notice suddenly becoming malevolently malicious.

Hitchcock knew how to create palpable tension with silence and uncertainty. And that’s what suspense is all about. He used the camera to imitate a person’s gaze, forcing viewers to be in the moment as the event is unfolding, while maximizing the audience’s anxiety and empathy.

For example, when Melanie is sitting outside the schoolhouse, Hitchcock switches the camera shots between Melanie sitting on the bench and the jungle gym across the way. With each switch, the jungle gym slowly fills up with more birds until it’s ominously covered. You feel the fear before Melanie even realizes what is happening.

His shooting style paired with the terrific visuals and special effects, especially for that time, creates a gripping and unnerving experience. Although his movies were known for their musical scores, The Birds is without one. Instead, he relies on a mix of birdcalls and the power of silence punctuated by noisy violence to distress the viewer.

When you watch Hitchcock’s movies, you can’t help but think he was a little mental. And, in fact, he was. Hitchcock had an inner psycho. One that Tippi Hedren was unfortunately a victim to.

When Hedren caught Hitchcock’s eye in a television commercial, he requested her for the role of Melanie. It was a dream come true for the young newcomer to be working with the Master of Suspense in her first picture.

But Tippi’s dream soon became a nightmare. Hitchcock developed a crazed obsession with her, and when she rejected his sexual advances he made her life a living hell on and off the screen. But Hedren continued to resolutely do her job with grace and dignity.

When Hedren signed on to the do The Birds, she was told that the birds used in the final attack scene wouldn’t be real. But when the day came to shoot it, Hitchcock insisted on having real gulls be thrown at her, a plan he had from the start. He even demanded they be attached to her costume. The harrowing scene runs about a minute on screen. It’s the vertiginous crescendo of the picture and Hedren is utterly remarkable in it.

The scene was only supposed to take a day to shoot. Instead, Hitchcock had the chaos go on for a week, unaffected as the birds bloodily pecked Hedren apart. On the last day of shooting, a gull clawed her eye. She broke down in tears, collapsing to the floor, having to be carried off the set to a doctor. She was ordered to take a week off much to Hitchcock’s dismay. When she returned to work, she entered with a crow on her arm. She refused to be broken by him.

Much like Hitchcock, The Birds is a puzzle without an answer. Why did the birds attack Bodega Bay? Was it Melanie or was it something bigger than that?

Was it the desire to destroy beauty?

Hitchcock definitely wanted to destroy what he desired most. In fact, he did professionally destroy Hedren.

After The Birds, she was Hollywood’s new “it girl." All the top directors wanted to work with her. But because she wouldn’t consent to Hitchcock’s personal demands, he kept her under contract for seven years, slowly demolishing her career.

Despite his dark side, you can’t take away his cinematic genius. The Birds is still a thriller in a league of its own. And although the circumstances during the making of the picture were terrible at times, it still stands as some of the best work of Hitchcock's and Hedren’s careers.

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