Hitchcock’s The Birds and the Effects of Marketing

WARNING: Contains major spoilers.

Nearly 60 years ago, audiences flocked to the theater to see Alfred Hitchcock’s latest thriller. Expectations were high, especially after the sensation that was Psycho three years prior. People couldn't wait to see what other horrors he had up his sleeve, and Hitchcock, being the consummate showman he was, delivered.

He premiered the trailer for his next motion picture shocker, in which he imparts to the audience the history of man's relationship with birds, as he shows off a room full of taxidermied birds and demonstrates the many ways in which man has mistreated the species, out of respect, of course. "We have honored our feathered friends in many ways, we cage birds and show them off proudly in most of our zoos, and the turkey is traditionally our guest of honor at Thanksgiving." He even tries to eat a baked turkey sitting on his desk, before losing his appetite.

Then towards the end of the trailer, we begin to hear some cawing sounds, Hitch looks up in confusion as to what in the bloody devil is going on. Then the door bursts open, and Tippi Hedren rushes in, yelling "They’re coming! They’re coming!" Cut to a montage of silhouetted birds flying towards the camera, with some text overtop, including a quote from Hitchcock, "It could be the most terrifying motion picture I have ever made!"

The message was pretty clear, the birds are striking back at man, as vengeance for how their species have been mistreated. The poster similarly conveys this message, with a painting of Tippi Hedren cowering in fear under the shadow of one of our feathered friends, with Hitch in the corner saying, "...and remember, the next scream you hear may be your own!"

This seems like the appropriate way to advertise a horror film. Get the audience all anxious for the adrenaline rush of fear they’re about to experience. And it worked, as you probably guessed. The film was a big hit, and to this day is remembered as one of the best horror films ever made.

However, what if this was the wrong approach to selling the film?

Imagine if you had stumbled upon this film one night, without seeing any footage or promotional materials or any word of mouth about it. Maybe you wander into a small arthouse playing it, or find it on late night TV while channel surfing. You've never heard of this film before.

The titles start up and you see a swarm of birds flying in front of the camera, with only the sounds of their cawing and wings flapping, with no music score over top. From the beginning, Hitch sets a foreboding atmosphere, implying that something, whatever it may be, is going to go horribly wrong.

In the first scene, Hitch justifies the title. We see our lead character Melanie Daniels shopping for lovebirds and meeting our leading man Mitch Brenner, who she develops an obsession for. So much so that she drives her car 60 miles to his hometown in Bodega Bay to find him, hoping to present her newly bought lovebirds to him. The audience can already see the significance of The Birds in the story.

Melanie meets a few other characters in Bodega Bay, including Mitch's family, his mother Lydia and little sister Cathy, and the local schoolteacher Annie. We learn of the messy (some might say toxic) relationships that Mitch has with Lydia and Annie. Lydia being the possessive, overprotective mother that doesn't want her son to leave her alone, as she's still distraught over the death of her husband Dan. Annie being Mitch's former flame who he had to break it off with because his mother couldn't stand seeing them together, and Mitch loves his mother too much to upset her so. But Annie decides to stay in Bodega Bay, still wanting to be close to Mitch.

Now that Melanie has ridden into town with her two lovebirds, now Lydia and Annie are both afraid that Melanie will take Mitch away from them. So they all make polite conversation with each other, all while masking their true feelings about each other. That's the theme of the picture, really. The happy faces we put on to not show the anxieties we harbor towards each other.

As this complicated romance unfolds, we are occasionally reminded of how strangely the local birds are acting this year. We're shown them flocking together en masse in the sky. Melanie is randomly attacked by a seagull. A bird flies straight into Annie's front door. These are strange occurrences, but they don't factor much into the story at this point. The odd behavior of the birds is meant to be symbolic, sort of a bad omen, a sign that things aren't going to end well for these characters.

However, an audience seeing these characters for the first time and getting engaged in this romantic melodrama would not suspect what comes next.

About 50 minutes in, we see a birthday party being held for little Cathy, and suddenly, the children are attacked by a flock of seagulls. The children are rescued by Mitch and the other adults and are brought inside. Annie then remarks, "That makes three times." This is the first truly horrific moment we see in the film, and it only gets worse from there.

We go from Melanie standing on a hilltop with Mitch, telling him about how her mother abandoned her, to ten minutes later, walking into a ransacked room, covered in dead birds, with a dead body sitting in the corner with his eyes gouged out.

Hitchcock’s previous film Psycho showed a sudden switch in its genre, beginning as a sort of film noir about a woman running away with some stolen money, before suddenly morphing into a murder mystery halfway through. A story of corruption becomes a story of violence. Most audience members would expect that to happen, just not in the way that it did.

The Birds shows an even more jarring transition, from a witty romantic melodrama to a violent, apocalyptic creature feature. Imagine if a Douglas Sirk picture turned into a zombie movie halfway through. It's probably the most shocking turn in Hitchcock’s entire catalog, and it was completely sabotaged by the marketing, and Hitchcock himself.

We see the birds in this film primarily attacking children, the most vulnerable of humanity, making it so much more horrific. This includes the film's most iconic scene, where the birds gather on a jungle gym next to the schoolhouse, waiting for the children to come out, before they strike. This sequence is particularly harrowing, seeing a crowd of screaming children in such peril.

The tension keeps mounting as we reach the best scene in the film, inside The Tides Restaurant. We have a colorful group of characters gathered together, discussing the newfound threat to the townspeople, as the panic and hysteria slowly simmers to a boil.

We meet an ornithologist, spitting out all her facts on these birds, and denying that they could ever attack humans, despite Melanie insisting she saw them attack the schoolchildren. There's a fisherman who claims that the birds attacked his boat, which the ornithologist disproves by saying they were after his fish.

There's the owner of the restaurant, Mr. Carter, trying to follow along with this conversation, and his wife (the charming Elizabeth Wilson) serving the customers, urging him to hurry up with those drinks. And there's the panicking mother with her two children, anxious to get out of town after hearing about the attacks, and desperate enough to hitch a ride with a drifter to San Francisco.

And, let's not forget the town drunk…

This sequence is a masterclass of building suspense, and it climaxes with another mass bird attack. A few swoop in and claw at a gas station attendant, causing him to drop the gas pump, which leaks gas across the street to The Tides parking lot, where our drifter tosses his cigarette.

Soon the street is set ablaze, and then the birds attack en masse. Melanie hides in a phone booth, and Hitchcock brilliantly shows us all the pandemonium that ensues from her point of view inside the phone booth, incredibly tense and claustrophobic. Soon the birds start kamikaze nosediving into the windows, and she is luckily rescued by Mitch before the glass is breached.

Mitch then escorts Melanie inside the restaurant, where everyone is cowering in the back hallway leading to the restrooms. Then, the panicked mother, in a fit of hysteria, blows up in Melanie's face, and shows her religious fever.

"Why are they doing this? Why are they doing this? They said when you got here, the whole thing started! Who are you? What are you? Where did you come from? I think you're the cause of all this. I think you're evil! Eviiiillll!!!"

(Side note: I hear this voice in my head on a regular basis.)

Soon, Mitch and Melanie find the mangled corpse of Annie, the schoolteacher, dead on her doorstep, and they grab Cathy from inside the house, taking her back home. Then they board up all the windows, and the film goes the full Night of the Living Dead in the last 20 minutes.

This last sequence is an edge-of-your-seat nail-biter, as the birds try busting through the barricaded windows and doors, and Mitch has to fight them off. Melanie hears some rustling in the attic and goes up to take a peek. Bad idea.

Then the birds stop attacking. Mitch goes outside to check, and the birds are all gathered en masse on the front lawn, sitting still and quiet. Mitch gently inches his way through the sea of birds to the car in the garage. Inside, he hears the local news report on the birds, where they say that they seem to have stopped for now, and that the army is being sent in. This news bulletin is, again, very reminiscent of Romero.

Mitch slowly drives the car towards the front door, and calmly escorts everyone from the house to the car. Melanie starts panicking when she sees the birds and yells, "No! No!", as she's still in shock from the birds swarming her in the attic. But then she gets in the backseat just fine, with Lydia by her side, who holds her tenderly as if she were her child.

So we see the car drive off into the distance, with all the birds crowded together on the lawn in the foreground. We don't know whether or not they'll strike again, or if Melanie and the Brenners will survive. But at least they seem to have reconciled their differences, brought closer together as a family before the end.

I don't know if Hitchcock was pressured by Universal to play up the horror of The Birds, but regardless, the film was done a disservice. It should've been sold as a romantic melodrama, and no mention of the last hour should've been uttered. Labeling it as a horror film removes most of its impact.

It's one of the best films to ever depict the shock of an apocalyptic event. The way this grounded small town story of a love triangle and a dysfunctional family morphs into a bloody tale of survival against an inexplicable force of nature makes this probably Hitchcock’s most disturbing film.

The lack of music was another brilliant choice by Hitch. This time, there's no booming Bernard Herrmann score to hold your hand and tell you how to feel. The silence of the soundtrack enhances the foreboding dread of the film. I tend to be a sucker for films that do this, such as many of Sidney Lumet's films, and the 1956 film Patterns. It's an effective way to build the tension.

If I were in charge of marketing, I would have designed a poster depicting a sky covered with birds, with the title overtop and credits at the bottom. It’s an image that doesn’t tell you what the plot is about, but is rather a vague symbol of the turmoil that will unfold in the lives of these characters, just like the title sequence. Take notes, Criterion.

If you’d like to read more about the phenomena discussed here, read this article from the Filmofile’s Hideout.