Monday, October 10, 2011

Thriller #7 - The Birds (1963)

So The Birds is an Alfred Hitchcock movie about all of the birds attacking people. Why? We don't know! It makes for a very bizarre movie. It's actually really creepy - You'd think that a movie about birds attacking people would be horrifying and hilarious, but it's not. It's just horrifying. It's not so much the bird attacks that are scary - because of the old technology they are a little bit amusing, and the phone booth scene is distracting because the set is obviously larger than a real phone booth (Gasp! It's a phone booth that's bigger on the inside! Of course a time machine would protect her from seagulls!). But the other scenes - The birds flocking and hitting doors and sitting around watching people - those are really creepy. Shockingly, this Alfred Hitchcock film is very suspenseful.

The Birds doesn't have any music in it - just a carefully composed set of sound effects - which really helps the atmosphere, I think. It makes it seem more realistic - That's what makes most of the movie so scary, actually. Birds won't just start attacking people, but they could. And what would we do? There are all kinds of birds out there - It would be the Bird Apocalypse! That's really scary!



The movie stars Tippi Hendron and Rod Taylor, who I think looks just like Cary Grant even though nobody else sees it, and they're very good. Alfred Hitchcock is in it at the very beginning, and apparently owns poodles, which makes sense, really. I really liked The Birds. It was really pretty scary, and it was well-done, and I've been watching the birds for signs of conspiracy ever since, so it was obviously effective. The acting is sort of outdated though, so seems kind of stiff, and it really needs to be restored. There are all sorts of little blips in the film and the color is really uneven from one scene to another. But boy is it scary.

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