When I was younger, I lived with my mother, sister, and my grandparents. My grandmother and I have many things in common, one being we share the same birthday, and the other, we both love scary movies. I didn’t realize this similarity before as I wasn’t too big of a horror movie fan as a kid. Still, my grandmother watched them all the time and somehow I would be roped into watching them as well. I’d walk into the kitchen, become terrified by whatever was on the screen, but for some reason I usually didn’t look away.
This happened once when my grandmother was watching The Birds, a 1965 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The movie is about a town that becomes infested with angry birds (not to be confused with the game) that peck people to death. Now there’s definitely one more reason to hate pigeons. The film centers around a woman by the name of Melanie Daniels and her love interest, Mitch Brenner. They both try to escape from the region of the birds and figure out what’s going on to stop it.
Besides the obvious creep factor of the movie, with deadly birds, there’s also a weird vibe coming from Ms. Daniels. She literally finds out where Brenner lives just to give him two love birds he tried to buy in her store, but they sadly weren’t there. Then, when she finally finds him, he’s meeting up with his mother. Oddly enough he practically forces Daniels to come to dinner at his house with his mother. Let me reiterate that they are COMPLETE STRANGERS. I guess in conjunction with the time period, it seems fitting that a relationship would form from this strange encounter…but I don’t like it, not one bit.
Additionally, adding to the creep factor, when I originally saw the movie it was in black and white. However, the only watchable version I found was in color. When I watched it as a child, what added to the fear was the dark colors. It made everything ten times more uncomfortable than it already was. I think the addition of colors takes away the overall unsettling feel that the movie had.
The movie ended with slight confusion, Daniels getting pecked by birds so intensely that she goes into a state of shock, and them driving away from the birds (not saying whether or not the bird murders would end or not).
Overall the movie was pretty strange and very boring in the beginning. However, it got an extremely high rating on Rotten Tomatoes. So, it must be good, right?
