10 Everyday Things Horror Movies Have Made Terrifying

A good comedian can make the phonebook funny and a good director can make birds the scariest thing in the world.

Some view birds as a welcome guest in their garden, even laying out food to lure them in. Others look at crows and pigeons simply as pests, urban avians that simply live off trash. Nobody though will ever be able to think of them the same way after watching Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece, The Birds.

As the title suggests, a swarm of predatory crows and gulls terrorize the city of San Francisco. Their threat was pervasive and persistent, making even just a cursory walk outside a matter of life or death. No one had any trouble understanding why a group of crows was called a murder after that.

Even just in terms of setting, birds, in particular, corvids like ravens and crows, have been used in a plethora of films as the finishing touches on haunted or abandoned houses. Their echoing calls and caws break through the silence as they sit on their perch, constantly watching people as they to about their day. That gaze can make anyone feel uncomfortable after seeing The Birds, almost like they're being sized up, and the flock is just deciding how many of them they'll need before they swoop in to make a meal out of someone.