A Turn for the Worse

When I watched the first portion of The Birds, I thought that it was going to be an easygoing movie. Coming from horror movies such as Psycho and Alien, I was worried that this movie would be boring for me. It seemed so low-key compared to these two previous films at the beginning, so unexciting and uninteresting. But as the movie progressed, tensions began to rise, and I began to retract on my comparison of this movie to Psycho, which were both made by Alfred Hitchcock. Initially, the two films seemed like polar opposites, but they drew closer and closer to each other as time went on. Hitchcock definitely had an affinity for strange, unusual films that include an unexpected plot twist. I love it.

Yesterday, we started off with the scene in which Melanie headed to the schoolhouse. All seemed sane and ordinary, but a concerning sight caught her attention: a massive group of black birds ominously sat on the school's playground. They were nearly motionless, all starting at Melanie as she was smoking her cigarette. She quickly and quietly went inside, shut the back door, and alerted the teacher. She told her students to act as if they were having a fire drill. Knowing that all of those birds were waiting outside, and the fact that they could travel much faster than humans, I wished that the teacher hadn't chosen to evacuate the students. They would've been safer inside, but no one knows how long they would've potentially stayed there. As soon as the birds heard everyone run out of the building, they rushed to attack the young children.

The birds in this film are not your average flying feathers. Usually, birds run away from humans, but this time, they came as close as possible, pecking at their heads and even knocking a girl over. Shortly afterwards, Melanie went into the diner, where everyone was talking about the attacks of the birds. An elderly woman doubts that these birds are even capable of such an attack, but she ends up being horribly wrong. A few birds knock over a man pouring gas in his car, leaving the gas nozzle to stream gas all over the ground. A man lights his cigar, even as everyone in the diner tells him not to, and he ends up causing a massive explosion at the gas station. Now, people are beginning to panic.

Just a short while after, Melanie and Mitch head to the schoolteacher's house, in which they find her lying on the front steps, dead. The birds killed her, which left his sister Cathy hysterical. They all headed back to Mitch's house, where he readied for another enormous attack. He boarded up every single window and door, just as if there was going to be a hurricane. Foreshadowing came into play here, because there was a huge swarm of birds flying around the mainland of San Francisco. Uh oh.

Within a few hours, when everyone was inside of the fortified house, the birds came. They pecked at the windows and boarded up door, fighting Mitch to get inside. It was clear that they would stop at nothing to attack Melanie, Mitch, Cathy, and Lydia.

My biggest question, however, is why? Why did they attack to begin with, and why did they follow Melanie? At the diner, a woman had accused her of being the cause of the bird attacks, since this was never a problem before she came to Bodega Bay. How did they even know where she was? It was as if they had planted a tracking device on her. Everywhere she had gone, they attacked. This gave me the same feeling as with Psycho: I was a little freaked out, and confused at the same time. You've done it again, Hitchcock.