'The Birds' by Alfred Hitchcock

                                                 'The Birds' by Alfred Hitchcock

'The Birds' is a thriller film by Alfred Hitchcock which is about how a wealthy San Francisco socialite called Melanie pursues a potential boyfriend to a small Northern California town that slowly takes a turn for the bizarre when birds of all kinds suddenly begin to attack people there in increasing numbers and with increasing viciousness.

This film isn't an archetypal thriller at all as this time the external threat is from nature, as oppose to man kind as it has always been in other thriller films. This marks a new era of thriller film making as it opens a metaphorical door that makes it okay for villains of a Thriller films to be something other than human. Since the film 'The Birds' came out in 1952, it has allowed other thriller film directors such as Chuck Russell to produce such thriller films like 'The Blob' in 1958:which was about a strange life-form that consumes everything in it's path as it grows and grows. This isn't exactly a threat from nature, however, it also uses the same idea used by Alfred Hitchcock in ' The Birds' that a villain can be anything animated other than a human.

Thriller films are normally characterised by fast pacing and frequent action. This keeps the audience interested and as Alfred Hitchcock said "allows you to dip your toe in the lake of fear". in 'The Birds', there was a constant recurrence of action. for example, in the scene where Melanie was about to drop the love birds off at her potential boyfriend's house, while she was on the boat, she was spontaneously attacked by the Gull for the fist time in the film; this tells us that this is the beginning of many attacks.

Thriller films contains a resourceful hero who must thwart the plans of more powerful and better equipped villain. in this case, in 'The Birds' the villain is more powerful as there is thousands of the birds and they can easily overpower the characters. In addition, devices such as suspense, red herrings and cliffhangers are used extensively. for example, in 'The Birds', in the scene where Melanie went into a room on her own and got attacked by birds, when she entered the room: no music was playing, all we could hear was the flapping of the bird's wings which creates suspense. there was a cliff hanger at the end when all the characters got away at the as when didn't know what happened next in the town.

A thriller has a villain driven plot, whereby he presents obstacle the hero must overcome. in 'The Birds' the birds drive the plot as the whole storyline depends on what the birds are going to do next. The birds themselves are the villains as the are killing and harming people. A MacGuffin is a plot element that catches the viewer's attention of drives the plot of a work of fiction. in another word, it is the story that links everything together. The MacGuffin of Alfred Hitchcock's 'The Birds' is the relationship between Mitch and Melanie.

Fun Facts about 'The Birds' by Alfred Hitchcock
Did you know that............

• The scene where Tippi Hedren is ravaged by birds took alone took a week to shoot
• The birds  were actually ties to Tippi Hedren by bits of nylon in the scene she got ravaged by birds
• when the film came out in 1952, outside the cinema Alfred Hitchcock had set out speakers  that play sound of birds: so when the viewers  come out of the cinema, the are frightened by the strange sound of thousand of flapping birds as the film is an unending terror!
• in the scene where Tippi Hedren was ravaged by birds, she wasn't fully aware that hundreds of birds were going to be in the room, so the performance we saw of her on camera as genuine and real and she was actually physically and psychologically injured in that scene.
• the film 370 effect shots. the final shot is a composite of 32 separately filmed elements.
• A number of endings were being considered for this film. One that was considered would have showed the Golden Gate Bridge completely covered by birds.