Birds are not scary.
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LetThemEatCake01 — 9 years ago(August 26, 2016 12:46 AM)
That may be so but the film is still scary. I saw it recently and the attack on the house near the end of the film is unnerving to say the least. Even if it's not scary anymore it's still a masterpiece and so well done you never get bored.
I think you are right about The Happening. -
robbystoner — 10 years ago(December 28, 2015 05:58 AM)
"Ok, maaaaaaybe if these birds were massive. " I think the whole point of the film is that Hitchcock made a monster movie using regular birds as the "monster" this time instead of what people were accustomed to seeing on screen as "the monster". Meaning not a frankestein, or dracula, or weird alien blob looking creature but regular birds that people see every day all the time.
I think the challenge was can you create a film to entice fear in an audience by just using birds. I think he achieved that quite well.
This isn't my favorite Hichcock film and I did film it sluggish at times, but its a very well made and craftily made film and the film still does being out fear in an audience today. The scenes towards the end where Rod Taylor is walking amongst the birds to get the car and he and the audience don't know whether the birds will start to attack them again or not works very very well.
Can this really be the end..to be stuck inside of mobile
with the Memphis blues again. -
cokezero99 — 10 years ago(December 29, 2015 01:06 PM)
I think the challenge was can you create a film to entice fear in an audience by just using birds. I think he achieved that quite well.
I have to severely disagree with this. The problem of the birds could have easily being dealt with. Not even necessarily guns would be needed. This is going to my point again. Birds are not scary. -
robbystoner — 10 years ago(January 03, 2016 08:32 AM)
yes. exactly. thats part of the appeal of "why do bad things happen?"
sometimes there is a reason. neighbor get into argument and someone gets violent.
but other times, there seems to be no reason. Person walks out into a mall and someone starts shooting and they die. Family mours dead person. No one can have a good explination of why it had to happen on that day to that person.
Can this really be the end..to be stuck inside of mobile
with the Memphis blues again. -
joe_538 — 9 years ago(September 03, 2016 09:00 AM)
He sure looks scared:
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/05/19/article-2327212-19D6C9A8000005DC-611_634x360.jpg -
Eve_of_Destruction — 9 years ago(September 24, 2016 05:43 AM)
I have parrots and believe me, some people are very frightened of birds. I am always surprised when even in their cages some visiters won't step in the room. BTW my 2 parrots are not huge Macaws. They are small.
I agree it's not scary..to some of us..but there is a boat load of people who would be frightened. I would not want to be pecked to death. It is painful. -
shadowangel-599-184270 — 10 years ago(December 30, 2015 02:43 PM)
Simply more proof, that the youth of today is simply too retarded to understand anything, gets "bored" by everything that isn't CGI and Explosions and have their brain only so their upper head isn't completely empty.
A common, but still sad sight you are, cokezero. -
Ray_BLOODY_Purchase — 10 years ago(January 24, 2016 07:23 PM)
I wouldn't accuse all youth of being so abysmally afflicted. It's just people with bad taste; I'm sure they existed when this film originally came out, just as they exist to-day. They just didn't have the internet around to show off their negative qualities and subpar breeding/upbringing.
It's me.Barait's always bloody Bara!
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ecarle — 10 years ago(January 19, 2016 06:52 AM)
OK I watched about 45 minutes of this in English lit
This part of the OP's post is interesting to me. Hitchcock was, in his time, a "commercial filmmaker" whose work wasn't taken very seriously by many critics or the Oscar Academy but now53 years laterThe Birds is shown as part of a academic "English lit" course. Perhaps as much to illuminate the short story by Daphne DuMaurier("Rebecca") as the film that Hitchcock made from it?
It is my belief that Hitchcock's films will likely live on from now on AS academic teachings. In film classes and English classes and drama classes. The Hollywood Heavyweight now joins Dickens and Melville for study
and the whole time I'm thinking this is no better than some ridiculous SyFy channel film with a ridiculous killer creature. How about the recent horror films with the killer sheep? Or mosquitoes? Seriously, this film is flawed to hell because of choosing birds as a threat.
Well, in choosing the material, Hitchcock was adamant that the birds in question be "innocent" birds. No birds of prey like owls(the resident killer bird in "Psycho.") No hawks. No ravens(though the crows LOOKED like ravens andwhat's the difference, anyway?)
Hitchcock delighted in giving his audiences a "newfound sense of menace in the everyday." You'd feel different about taking a shower once you saw Psycho. You'd feel different about a group of birds on a wire once you saw The Birds.
Also, keep in mind that Hitchcock's film came DECADES before all those Syfy movies and, in a certain way, inspired that ENTIRE CHANNEL. But with a much better cinematic flair(if, indeed, a flawed and slow script.)
Ok, maaaaaaybe if these birds were massive. Maaaaaaybe if they were all eagles or something. But just generic birds.
As noted above. Hitchcock WANTED generic birds to be the killers.
I don't care how many they are not that big of a threat.
Sure they are. The film "pulls its punches" on the attacks except for the one scene where the farmer is found with his eyes pecked out. That's how the birds kill in the main(Annie's eyes are pecked out, too but Mitch covers them with his hand to block Melanie's view.) Though the climactic attic room attack on Tippi Hedren shows us how a hundred beaks tearing into a victim's flesh could probably kill the victim via shock and blood loss("A death of a thousand cuts.")
If birds came flying at humanity in waves, by the thousands, by the MILLIONSno guns could stop them. No cannons could stop them. And though The Birds didn't have the budget to show this, birds attacking in waves by the thousands(millions?), could destroy all electrical towers, down airliners by clogging their jet turbines, poison water by filling reservoirs with dead birdsit wouldn't take long for nature to take back the world from humans.
All that said, no, perhaps the birds aren't scary AS birds. "The Birds" was the next film after "Psycho" from Hitchocck, and it made less than half OF "Psycho" and one reason cited at the time was that the knife-wielding shower-killing psycho of "Psycho" was far more terrifying thanbirds.
So I'll agree with you there. But The Birds isn't necessarily about shocks and terrorit is about the destruction of the world by a mass attack.
From unknowable sources. And for unknowable reasons. -
joystar5879 — 9 years ago(November 16, 2016 01:51 PM)
I first saw it at College, in a film class. (s). OP must be either very young, very luckyOR BOTH,
Gulls and Blue Jays, in particular, can be very territorial. Jays can be much nastier, because they tend to be in suburban areas. A Blue Jay will "Dive Bomb" you just for the sheer joy of it. (When I was a kid, we called them "Kamakaze Jays".) Gulls are less likely to go after a person, because their nests are not as accessible.
JS (who has a Blue Jay Gouge on her arm, from just LOOKING at a fallen nestling)
I do hope he won't upset Henry -
joe_538 — 9 years ago(September 03, 2016 09:19 AM)
I've seen more than one article about gulls attacking people. It seems like it would be scary enough to have one or two of those swooping at you, let alone a flock.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2352277/Postmen-refuse-deliver-seaside-road-risk-dive-bombed-seagulls.html
