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The Birds

1963 · Film · 119 min

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

HorrorThriller

Thousands of birds flock into a seaside town and terrorize the residents in a series of deadly attacks.

2 positive23 neutralfrom 25 commenters

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25 comments on Hacker News

  1. NeutralDocTomoeDec 1, 2025

    Any movie with this kind of premise needs to make clear how it is not "The Birds" (which does, in fact, include a murder by a murder of crows) of Hitchcock fame.

  2. NeutralprerokAug 22, 2025

    Mice? No, too many predators. Now, crows that would be a different matter. Already seen in the movie "Birds" ;)

  3. NeutralhosejaJul 14, 2025

    Well so is "Birds" a dinosaur movie then.

  4. NeutraltmtvlJul 8, 2025

    Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds is technically a dinosaur film.

  5. NeutralderbOacMay 9, 2025

    I share your perspective; my guess is if it was copyrighted it probably would have had the same status. My guess is it would have been distributed relatively cheaply with the same outcome.

    However, I also think it's reasonable to posit it might not have attained the same status had it not gone out of copyright. Easy access can really affect awareness and buzz around films, especially in certain genres like horror.

    Horror films were already shifting in tone by 1968. Psycho was a 1960 release, for example, and The Birds was released in 1963. Carnival of Souls has a similar aesthetic as Night of the Living Dead and was released in 1962.

  6. NeutralwebdoodleMar 14, 2025

    Dolphin's were trained to bypass enemy underwater defenses to plant explosives on enemy ships while they were in there home port. They were also used to find mines and other underwater devices to be disarmed.

    Most birds just aren't big enough to do real damage to barbed wire or razor wire defenses. Now if you could somehow train the birds to harass a herd of cattle into running down the fence, that might work. Sort of like the Hitchcock movie The Birds.

  7. NeutralabruzziMay 2, 2024

    Kind of off topic, but my pet parrot (a Mitred Conure) gets off-the-hook loud whenever I try to watch Hitchcock's The Birds. The movie has a lot of bird noises (and strangely enough an electronic music score thats not really audible as a score--it just makes the squawks denser) but I don't know if he's trying to engage or mimicking.

  8. Positivethrowawayyy9237Apr 15, 2024

    So many great movies mentioned here, I won't repeat them.

    I'll just add Hitchcock's The Birds.

    I saw it as a kid and it made an impression on me on several levels. For instance, a scary movie doesn't have to be about monsters. And made me realise that other living beings aren't in this planet just to be either food or pets, they're our neighbours.

  9. Neutralbuck746Apr 8, 2024

    It lost because there were only 3 prisms made. It also required a lot more lot as running thru an optical splitter means at least half of your light was lost, it's not a big issue today. Modern cameras are insanely more sensitive than film was at the time. Alfred Hitchcock used this on "The Birds". In the YouTube video they got a great result even with a smaller studio than would have been used on Mary Poppins. The trick needed the screen as far back as you could get it to minimize the chance of spill, that used to be normal on blue screen before the software improved.

  10. NeutralnyolfenJul 16, 2023

    as far as i can tell, every part of this comment is fabricated. grackles are not invasive in texas, nor have they driven other birds to near-extinction, neither were they brought in by hitchcock, neither was the film produced in texas. where did you get this idea?

  11. NeutralRecycledEleJul 16, 2023

    When Alfred Hitchcock filmed "The Birds" in Texas, his production company brought in grackles. These are the black birds in that movie. They promised to clean them up afterwards, but grackles are birds and can get away. Grackles are an invasive species in Texas, and have almost exterminated our native bird population.

    I blame Hollywood, not warming for bird extinctions.

  12. NeutralameliusJan 27, 2022

    Reminds me of a Hitchcock movie ...

    Now it is clear that those birds were trained by some AI to solve some problem.

  13. NeutralkleibaNov 15, 2021

    I don't remember whether I noticed it or not when I saw the movie, but I'd like to believe I would have. It reminds be a bit of the final scene of Hitchcock's "Birds":

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULxw4UDY5g8 (up until 0:35)

  14. NeutralsilisiliOct 29, 2021

    Price has never been a limiting factor in TVs. People will throw down thousands each year for the big new 8k. Or projectors. 3D tvs just weren't popular because people didn't like them. It was the first 'major' TV advancement I ever watched fall on its face, and get swept under the rug like it never existed.

    I'm not sure the general public at large will like VR, either. It's disorienting. And if strip mall Lasik wasn't enough to tell, we don't like wearing things on our face. That will -never- change.

    I remember going to a real 3d movie as a kid, but I forget where. Some movie studio park, probably. It was only 10 or so minutes of Hitchcock's 'The Birds', but wow was it amazing. Too amazing. I remember feeling real fear to where I'd take the glasses off for a few seconds, people were screaming, many took off their glasses before it was over.

    Not sure if this relates to the metaverse, just sharing an anecdote.

  15. Neutralm-i-lOct 16, 2020

    Isn't there a risk of amnesic shellfish poisoning[0] in that area? Looking at the wikipedia page for domoic acid[1] Pismo Beach is even mentioned by name. Could that be part of the reason why there's an abundance of shellfish on that beach, i.e. because people leave them alone rather than risk permanent brain damage? I'd read it is a likely explanation for the incident that influenced Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds[2].

    Don't want to spoil the article's analogy, although you could perhaps make a new one connecting abundance to toxicity.

    [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amnesic_shellfish_poisoning

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domoic_acid

    [2] https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/mystery-behind-hitchcocks-birds-is-solved-at-last-6282470.html

  16. NeutralbigiainJul 22, 2020

    BRB. Going make a cinema-focussed remake of Hitchcock's "The Birds" that _relies_ on a few bags full of moths being released during each screening...

  17. NeutralrectangletangleOct 18, 2019

    >Well you can add that to my list of horrifying potential outcomes of being human.

    Pretty much, fortunately it's very rare. However you shouldn't eat sport caught shellfish without first checking for local warnings regarding harmful algal blooms.

    At least in the US/Canada all store bought Seafood is thoroughly screened for this specific problem, because ASP was discovered in Canada after a mass poisoning event in the late 1980s.

    Alfred Hitchcock's film The Birds was loosely based on an invasion of tens of thousands of delirious seabirds thought to be suffering with ASP in Santa Cruz in 1961.

  18. NeutralmannykannotSep 13, 2017

    Do you think there is any significance to this choice of pseudonym (unless the author's name is Mitch Brenner or Rod Taylor?) I cannot think of one, but I don't know the film well.

    Under 'Reception and Interpretation', the film's wikipedia entry says

    "Humanities scholar Camille Paglia wrote a monograph about the film for the BFI Film Classics series. She interprets it as an ode to the many facets of female sexuality and, by extension, nature itself. She notes that women play pivotal roles in it. Mitch is defined by his relationships with his mother, sister, and ex-lover – a careful balance which is disrupted by his attraction to the beautiful Melanie."

    which isn't leading me anywhere (other than to think this analysis tells more about Ms. Paglia's interests than the movie.)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birds_(film)#Reception_and_interpretation

  19. NeutralandaiSep 13, 2017

    From jaclaz comment higher up:

    > Just for the record "Mitch Brenner" is the name of a character in the Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds", and the photo in the profile is of the australain actor that played it, Rod Taylor.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birds_(film)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Taylor

  20. NeutraljaclazSep 13, 2017

    Just for the record "Mitch Brenner" is the name of a character in the Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds", and the photo in the profile is of the australain actor that played it, Rod Taylor.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birds_(film)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Taylor

  21. NeutralgorkonsineJul 10, 2017

    >I understand piracy more when it's literally impossible to make a legal purchase of something; I get it. When it's merely a matter of spending less money, I have a lot less sympathy for the copyright infringers.

    What if the work is old? Do you think it's wrong to make an unauthorized copy of Shakespeare's works, or Beowulf? So why should I have to pay someone for a copy of, say, a Hitchcock movie like "The Birds"? That movie is over a half-century old now, and if the copyright laws hadn't been changed, it'd have been in the public domain for the last 30 years. So why should I feel guilty if I download a copy of it? Why should I be obligated to spend money to some rights-holder who bought out the rights to a work where everyone involved in its production is now dead?

  22. NeutralJoeSlothOct 24, 2016

    I thought the last episode was great, although maybe slightly long. It was a good example of how a seemingly good piece of technology can be disastrous if a back door is put into it. Also it was a decent nod to Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds"

  23. PositiveforgetsusernameMar 16, 2016

    >No Psycho by Hitchcock but 3 other movies by him?

    Not like my opinion matters (nor does Mr. Lee's, in the grand scheme of things), but Psycho probably isn't in my top 3 Hitchcock films, either.

    Vertigo, The Birds, Rear Window for me. Consider Notorious, North by Northwest, Strangers on a Train, Dial M for Murder...there are quite a few permutations, taste dependent.

  24. Neutralnextweek2Oct 30, 2015

    Hitchcocks The Birds was: http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0056869/

    Scary isn't what you see on screen, it's what you carry with you the rest of your life. I still stiffen up every time I area flock of birds gathering on telephone wire. If the birds turned on us, we'd be dead.

  25. NeutralethankSep 5, 2011

    Cuts are not a bad thing though. They are a part of the rhythm of the narrative and when a movie is edited properly they are a device that binds and moves things.

    Dissecting a movies cuts is always fascinating though. One of the Film Studies 101 exercises is to story-board the gas station explosion in The Birds. I like doing cut analysis on animated films, because they have to be so deliberate. Films are edited in a winnowing approach, but animation (because of the cost per frame) is edited first, then filled in second.

    When I was doing a lot of editing in school my approach was to use markers first to set a beat for the mood of the piece (sometimes relating to music, a presence track or even just a bpm/heartbeat), and edit to that.

    If you want to read about editing:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_Effect

    The original experiment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gLBXikghE0

    A case study in editing: The Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potempkin - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps-v-kZzfec

    The Birds gas station scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-HYj5cLfEI