Movie fans often play the informal game of naming a director’s greatest consecutive four-picture stretch. Many point to Francis Ford Coppola’s 1970s sequence — The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, and Apocalypse Now — and it’s a persuasive case. My personal contender, though, is Alfred Hitchcock’s run from 1958 to 1963: Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds. Together they map Hitchcock’s range — from intimate obsession to showy invention to psychological brutality — and then arrive at The Birds, which occupies its own singular, unsettling place.
The Birds can feel like Hitchcock’s purest demonstration of cinematic cruelty. Based loosely on a short story by Daphne du Maurier, the film unfolds as an apocalyptic parable: ordinary seagulls, crows, and sparrows inexplicably turn on a sleepy Northern California coastal town and wreak escalating havoc.
Hitchcock eases the audience into that nightmare with a deceptively light opening. Tippi Hedren’s impetuous socialite Melanie Daniels visits Bodega Bay after a flirtatious, capricious encounter at a San Francisco pet shop with Rod Taylor’s Mitch Brenner. The director layers the set-up with suggestive family dynamics — especially Mitch’s tense, controlling mother (Jessica Tandy), who bears an uncanny resemblance to Melanie — and invites questions about motive and psychology even before the violence begins.
Image: Universal PicturesOnce the attacks begin, Hitchcock refuses neat explanations. A seagull’s beak draws a single, vivid line of blood across Melanie’s scalp; a bird slams into a door; flocks swarm a child’s birthday party; sparrows pour down a chimney; crows gather like an omen outside a schoolhouse; a farmer meets a grisly fate. The episodes accumulate as a series of escalating set pieces rather than as a puzzle to be solved.
Notably, the film contains almost no conventional musical score. Instead, Hitchcock employs dissonant, electronically processed bird sounds — most famously produced by Oskar Sala — with Bernard Herrmann advising on sound. Those layered clucks, shrieks, and squawks build into oppressive walls of noise, transforming ordinary avian cries into a mechanized, nightmarish chorus that amplifies the on-screen terror.
There’s something perversely elemental about the birds’ menace: they are blank, implacable, and beyond moral logic. They render human concerns trivial through sheer chaotic force, and Hitchcock stages their attacks with meticulous cruelty and editorial brutality. The film closes abruptly — one of cinema’s most ambiguous, doom-laden final images — leaving a lingering unease. The Birds is at once restrained and terrifying, absurd and profoundly disquieting: a consummate work of existential horror.
Where to watch: Available to stream on Shudder, or to rent or buy on Apple TV, Amazon, and similar services.
Polygon’s annual Halloween Countdown is a 31-day series of short recommendations highlighting the best horror movies, shows, TV episodes, and online specials to stream during the Halloween season. You can find the full calendar here.
Source: Polygon
