Why the old-school horror of The Birds speaks to 21st-century anxieties
'There's something open enough that it can meet the moment of crisis that you're in,' says academic Lynn Kozak
*Originally published on September 6, 2023.
"Humans are being wiped out by birds, but what have humans done to the birds to make them function in this way?"
Catherine Wynne is not talking about the latest conspiracy theory.
A specialist in Gothic literature at the University of Hull, she is reflecting on a 1952 short story: The Birds, by Daphne du Maurier.
Like the Alfred Hitchcock movie thriller that it inspired, du Maurier's apocalyptic tale of mass bird attacks contains echoes of both ancient and contemporary anxieties.
In this 60th anniversary year of the film, IDEAS looked into how this narrative around avian violence against humanity took flight — and how it retains its unlikely power.
Birds as a war metaphor
"What interference has led to the birds becoming militaristic, to the birds attacking, to the birds, acting out of nature?"
Daphne du Maurier's tale sees common birds unite to relentlessly divebomb, maim, and kill humans. Wynne says it's significant to note that du Maurier wrote The Birds in the years following the Second World War.
Aerial bombardment had been a wartime reality in the novelist's native England. But in Japan, death from above was of another magnitude: the unprecedented horror of atomic bombs detonated in two cities, by the United States.
Wynne says The Birds is haunted by "the legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, how that changed the world. And [how] we're not going back from that point."
The central figure in du Maurier's version is Ned Hockin, a war veteran turned farmhand.
His insight into both war, and nature, permits his family to become the last survivors in their bird-obliterated community in rural Cornwall. Yet there are hints in the story that the bird attacks are worldwide, and unstoppable.
"Daphne du Maurier obviously was writing within her time. It's infused with all this imagery of war, ideas of siege," said Wynne.
Birds as a psychological metaphor
Alfred Hitchcock took quite a different approach.
"The Birds is a Freudian three-ring circus."
So says College of Charleston historian and horror scholar Scott Poole, speaking of the cinematic adaptation of the du Maurier story, released in 1963.
If du Maurier looked outward at the fragile state of the post-war world, Hitchcock "took things in a psychosexual direction," said Poole.
The Hollywood director set the story in a coastal California town in the early 1960s. There, adventurous socialite Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) pursues a handsome stranger.
She is thwarted, at first by Mitch's jealous mother, and then by an invasion of inexplicably murderous birds.
Birds as female rage
Still, the town's women turn on Melanie, blaming her for bringing chaos.
"It's almost as if [the birds] are a concrete expression of her desire for Mitch, her desire for independence, possibly her anger at a [male] world that is marginalizing her," said Poole.
But this potentially feminist reading is halted, he notes, after the point in the film where Melanie is viciously attacked by the birds. With parallels to alleged offscreen behaviour by her director, Hedren's Melanie is stripped of her agency and her voice.
She becomes a stock figure.
"The female character in every horror movie that was made before John Carpenter's Halloween," said Poole
Birds as female desire
Lynn Kozak, who uses the pronoun they, researches horror and tragedy in ancient literature and contemporary media at McGill University. They suggest another path.
Kozak believes viewers are free to read different meanings into The Birds.
Despite Hitchcock's visual control, they see subversive potential in what remains a female-centred story.
For instance, the dependent relationship that evolves between Melanie and Mitch's mother might ultimately prove healthy for both. And the friendship between Melanie and Mitch's ex-girlfriend is more richly portrayed than that of Melanie and Mitch.
Sixty years on, viewers can say, "I am the audience, and I have power in terms of how I receive this text," said Kozak.
Birds, ancient and modern
In both the movie and the story, the motivation for the bird attacks remain a mystery.
Poole agrees with film critic Robin Wood, who wrote of the birds that "they are a concrete embodiment of the arbitrary and unpredictable."
Contemporary horror director Jordan Peele has lauded The Birds as the ultimate siege movie, and Poole says that audiences today might feel parallels with "their experience of a global pandemic, their fears and anxieties about the world."
Kozak sees parallels between the fatalistic horror of the narrative and perennially relevant Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex.
"There's something unsettling and open enough that it can meet the moment of crisis that you're in."
For Wynne, the original du Maurier story is both of its time, and chillingly prescient about our own.
In detailing an apocalyptic vision of the natural world, "what she's describing with the birds is what we are living through environmentally today. There are changes in nature. The birds are not attacking us. The birds themselves are being obliterated by us."
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*This episode was produced by Lisa Godfrey.
Guests in this episode:
Lynn Kozak is an associate professor in history and classical studies at McGill University. They are a part of the FQRSC-funded research team CORÉRISC, and editor of Scapegoat Carnivale's Tragic Trilogy, with McGill Queen's University Press.
W. Scott Poole is a professor in the department of history at the College of Charleston. He teaches and writes about horror and popular culture. His most recent book is Dark Carnivals: Modern Horror and the Origins of American Empire.
Catherine Wynne is a reader in English, and an Associate Dean for Research and Enterprise at the University of Hull. Her most recent book is on the war artist, Lady Butler. She wrote about The Birds for The Conversation, and is writing a book on Daphne du Maurier.
