Release Year: 1963

Genre: Horror

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Writer: Evan Hunter, Daphne du Maurier (story)

Stars: Rod Taylor, Tippi Hedren, Suzanne Pleshette

Okay, let's get this out of the way right now:

Angry Birds.

We know you were thinking it.

Yes, the birds in Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 horror classic The Birds are angry. Murderously angry, in fact. But this movie ain't about pigs or birdcages or fried chicken or habitat destruction or … whatever is going on in that game.

In The Birds, for completely unexplained reasons, the feathered friends of Bodega Bay suddenly turn … bad. They wreak havoc on the town and, in the process, derail the budding romance of a couple of meet-cute San Franciscans.

Hitchcock, already an uber-famous and influential director, was fresh off the success of 1960's Psycho when he decided to make his first foray into the pure horror genre. How did he go about it? By using a short story by Daphne du Maurier about a flock of nasty birds that attack a small English village. He'd also read about an incident in the beach town of Capitola, California, where residents found birds dropping out of the sky and suicidally banging into their rooftops. Apparently, poisoned shellfish was to blame.

Put the two together, and you've got a Hitchcock-ready story.

Hitch imagined the visual possibilities of crazed birds terrorizing a town, and he set off to make a film that would tax the technical genius of an army of animators, bird trainers, and special-effects wizards. It would be his most technologically complex film ever. Oh, and it would scare audiences silly.

Critics didn't quite know what to make of the film. Was it a love story? Why do we have to wait 45 minutes for the first bird attack? Why are these birds attacking in the first place? The film doesn't provide any set answers, a fact that put off early reviewers in 1963. Still, The Birds was a modest box-office success upon its release and scooped up a number of accolades, including an Academy Award nomination for Best Special Effects and a Golden Globe for Tippi Hedren for New Star of the Year.

Since then, The Birds' reputation has, uh, taken flight.

It's now considered one of Hitchcock's masterpieces of suspense and a horror film classic. It's been analyzed to death by philosophers, psychoanalysts, and feminist thinkers, all trying to figure out the relationship between the attacks and the tangled relationships in the film.

Here's the thing, though: audiences don't care. For us, it's all about the suspense and the mysterious, gruesome attacks. Basically, Hitchcock frees the birds and puts us in the cages.

In the man vs. nature conflict in The Birds, nature gets the win. So, you'd better bring in the bird bath and bird feeder, as The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther suggested in 1963. And, the next time you see more than a few birds perched on a telephone wire …

Run.

Studying any Hitchcock film is like taking a crash course in cinema with the best professor you ever had. Hitchcock's mastery of suspense and his innovative camera techniques inspired generations of directors from Francois Truffaut to Steven Spielberg.

You get an especially big bang for your buck by studying The Birds. Why? Because if you pay attention, you'll be able to see its DNA in loads of other films.

Let's give the mic to film critic Matthew Steigbigel for a sec:

Hitchcock [challenged] himself and movie audiences alike by undertaking to film what turned out to be one of the first global apocalyptic horror movies, and one that has influenced every monster movie since The Birds premiered on this day in 1963. Hitchcock showed future filmmakers how to take the incredible power of the natural world and bend it to his will in order to terrify.

Translation: it's the mother of all movies where nature goes mad and where our usual natural world is suddenly turned upside down.

The Birds has lots of offspring, but probably its most famous grandchild is Jaws. The shark attacks in Jaws have all the hallmarks of Hitchcock's bird attacks: they're random, they're irrational, and they're unexplained. They build on one of Hitchcock's favorite themes: ordinary people forced into extraordinary circumstances. In creating Jaws, Spielberg admitted, "I threw out most of my storyboards and just suggested the shark. My movie went from William Castle [low-budget horror director] to Alfred Hitchcock." (Source)

Spielberg's shark was only onscreen for about four and a half minutes, but we were scared out of our wits for two hours. We saw that shark on the movie poster and knew that something terrible could happen at any moment. That suspense was a page right out of The Birds' playbook: we saw the bird attacks in all of the movie promos and were just waiting for 'em to happen. As Hitch (apparently) said and Spielberg knew: "There is no terror in the bang, just in the anticipation of it" (Source)

Our critic Steigbigel sees The Birds' fingerprints everywhere:

Hitchcock's classic can also be sourced in films that took his premise—nature gone mad—and placed it on other planets, underground, or, brilliantly, in our world but one in which nature itself has been perverted. Think Alien, international hits like The Descent, District Nine, and The Host, and certainly […] the current AMC-TV zombie hit The Walking Dead. (Source)

Hey, Steigbigel, we'd put Cujo on that list, too.

Sure, The Birds' special effects might look primitive from where we sit today, and the violence might be less nonstop and grisly than we're used to seeing in modern-day horror flicks. But Hitch knew that it didn't take buckets of blood to really scare audiences. No need for aliens or monsters.

It's the stuff that could believably happen in this world that's truly terrifying.