While The Birds (1963) sounds like it should have been a B-Movie, the film was in fact a massive hit on the big screens. The plot itself is a pretty simple Nature Versus Man story; birds attack a town and violently kill a lot of people, without very good reason. One of the scariest scenes in the film is when one of the characters Lydia (played by Jessica Tandy) goes to visit a farmer to talk about the bizarre behaviour of his chickens. By this point in the film, there have been several bird attacks from seagulls and sparrows. Lydia enters the house which is silent; she spends two suspenseful minutes walking through the building which appears deserted. She reaches the farmers bedroom and enters. The camera pans over a chaotic scene, and a dead bird stuck in the window. And then BAM; audiences are hit with a shot of the farmer, who is dead, cut up by a bird attack - and his eyes have been eaten out. Here is a horrible corpse which was just waiting for spectators to scream loudly at the close ups of his empty bleeding eye sockets.
I love Stephen King and music festivals; I eat my toast upside down; I daydream about getting married probably a bit too much; and I wish every day for a pet sausage dog puppy (who never materialises – sob).
