10 Horror Movie Monsters Who Make You EAT Your Words

3. The Birds -- The Birds (1963)

The early sixties are when Hitchcock made his most important contributions to the horror canon, introducing approaches, techniques and templates that are still mimicked in cinema today. While Psycho always gets top billing for its audaciously transgressive subject matter, The Birds doesn’t have quite the same fallback or selling points. Rather than isolated young man loses grip and slays his motel’s patrons dressed as his mother, we’ve got: birds go nuts on people for no reason.

The Birds is in fact an adaptation of gothic writer Daphne du Maurier's novel (the director never wrote his own films) and places us down in a world almost identical to our own, where people go quietly about their business. Until they don’t. Flocks of birds menace the backgrounds and skies of every scene, until the critters come screeching and flapping down upon their unsuspecting victims, pecking them to death in relentless and seemingly inescapable attacks.

What should be daft turns out to be haunting. The very fact of real birds being used – their varieties all those we see in our day-to-day lives – makes the terror of their violence all the worse. And, as a result, generations of happy-go-lucky filmgoers have been prompted to look twice every time they see a flock taking wing.