The True Story Behind Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds
The Birds was different from most of Hitchcock’s work. For admirers of Hitchcock The Birds also raises disturbing questions about the director as a person. He was a complex and confusing character in many ways, and perhaps it’s not surprising that someone who built a career out of creating suspense and fear on screen might also have had some darker sides to his personal life.
Beyond the details of the story and how it came to be filmed, though, one of the most interesting questions about The Birds is why Hitchcock made it in the first place. It took its title from a short story by English author Daphne du Maurier, but beyond the basic idea of people being attacked by birds it didn’t take much else from it. The storyline was pure Hitchcock. So where did it come from?
It turns out that his inspiration was a strange and alarming incident that happened just a few miles from his home in California. This book uncovers the truth behind the plot as well as other factoids that fascinate any fan of the film.
Beyond the details of the story and how it came to be filmed, though, one of the most interesting questions about The Birds is why Hitchcock made it in the first place. It took its title from a short story by English author Daphne du Maurier, but beyond the basic idea of people being attacked by birds it didn’t take much else from it. The storyline was pure Hitchcock. So where did it come from?
It turns out that his inspiration was a strange and alarming incident that happened just a few miles from his home in California. This book uncovers the truth behind the plot as well as other factoids that fascinate any fan of the film.
Buy Now!
|
|
|
|
Excerpt
Chapter 1: Monterey Bay
The story of The Birds is at heart a simple one, and familiar to anyone who’s a fan of the horror genre. Particularly from the 1960s through to the early 80s, mass attacks by previously harmless or solitary animals have been a popular plot device for anyone who wants to give their readers or viewers a chill. Sometimes the villains are taken from news stories, like the “killer bee” panic that affected the USA in the 70s and 80s as Africanized honeybees spread north from Brazil through central and then North America.[1] Others play on ancestral dislike of real pests, like rats. Some films have parted company with reality altogether – piranha fish can be dangerous if you fall in the wrong river, but they have never evolved wings and invaded beach resorts.
As you’d expect from the subject matter many novels and movies about animal attacks have been aimed squarely at the low end of the market. There are exceptions though and The Birds stands out as one of the high points of the genre. Hitchcock brought all his artistry to bear on it and created some classic moments of suspense.
One question that many people have asked is, where did Hitchcock get the idea? Officially the movie is based on Daphne du Maurier’s short novel of the same name, but apart from the central idea of birds attacking people the connection is a loose one. In 2011 a team of environmentalists at Louisiana State University threw some light on the mystery by examining the stomach contents of marine animals caught in 1961. They found that a normally harmless type of marine algae had become toxic, and it affected the brains of seabirds off the coast of California – where the movie was set. For a short time that year residents of Monterey Bay were terrorized by bizarre incidents involving hundreds of sick, insane birds. The truth was a lot less frightening than Hitchcock’s film would be, but it was scary enough for the people caught up in it. It also provided a stark example of how small factors can have a serious – and sometimes dangerous – effect on nature.
California has been the most populous state in the USA for over 40 years, but it wasn’t always that way. When it joined the union in 1850 it was almost uninhabited, and most of the people who were there had arrived in the last few months to look for gold. Between 1849 and 1852 San Francisco expanded from a tiny settlement of 200 people around a mission station to a city of nearly 40,000. The gold rush faded out around 1855 but people kept heading to California; it was a great place for farming, and increasing trade with the Far East attracted sailors, merchants and dock workers. Ports grew up along the coast and created business for stores, saloons and transport companies. The population kept growing as the coastal towns expanded into thriving cities.
After the Second World War California had another surge in growth. As Americans got wealthier many of them were attracted to the state’s weather and its Pacific coast, but not all of them wanted to live in a big city. Small, pleasant coastal towns started to grow into dormitory suburbs, where people could have a good standard of living just a short drive from the cities and their jobs. With automobile ownership expanding rapidly it was ideal. Of course with the population growing so fast there was pressure on the supply of homes, so hundreds of thousands of new houses had to be built. Through the 1940s California’s population grew by over 50 percent as three and a half million new arrivals settled in. In the 1950s five million more joined them.[i] During the war and for two decades after it the whole coast of the state was dotted with construction sites, where tens of thousands of workers labored to put up new homes. Every one of those sites had rest rooms for the workers, and most of these discharged into hastily built septic tanks. Some of them had been built too hastily for safety and a constant trickle of raw sewage found its way into the sea.
When we think of sea life the first thing that comes to mind is usually fish, but in fact the most numerous life forms in the ocean are plankton. The most common plankton are algae, tiny, single-celled plantlike organisms that float in the surface water where they can take energy from sunlight. Most of them are microscopic, so they’re rarely seen except by scientists, but there can be millions in a single bucket of seawater. Algae are an essential part of the sea’s ecosystem – as well as providing food for many larger animals they break down carbon dioxide and produce oxygen, which either dissolves into the water or escapes into the atmosphere. Some of the most beautiful algae, if you have a microscope, are the large group called diatoms. These are encased in glassy cages of silica, a unique feature among algae, and they look spectacular in microscope images. Diatoms are also useful to scientists as a way of measuring water quality – they’re very sensitive to pollution.
Some types of pollution kill diatoms, but others can feed them and cause rapid population explosions. When that happens the result is what scientists call an algal bloom. Sometimes these happen naturally, but when they occur near the coast it often turns out that pollution was responsible. With many kinds of algae all that happens when they multiply is that marine animals have more to eat, but some species can rapidly suck all the nutrients out of the water and cause major environmental problems. The worst cases, though, occur when the algae are toxic. When that happens it’s called a harmful algal bloom, or HAB. There’s a more dramatic name for it, too – red tide.
Off the coast of California the most common toxic algae are the family known as pseudo-Nitzschia. Not all of these are toxic; some only are when conditions are right. When that happens, though, they produce a chemical called domoic acid. This is a neurotoxin – it attacks the nervous system. It’s been linked to many cases of human poisoning because it can build up to dangerous levels in shellfish that feed by filtering plankton from the water; if someone then eats the shellfish they can fall victim to amnesic shellfish poisoning, a nasty condition that causes a range of symptoms including nausea, dizziness, brain damage and memory loss. It can even be fatal; of 107 confirmed cases four victims died.
It’s not just shellfish that can collect a dangerous dose of domoic acid by feeding on plankton; some fish can too, including sardines and anchovies. These are small fish that swim in large schools close to the surface, so they’re often eaten by seabirds. Anchovies breed in huge numbers off the California coast, and they tend to congregate in and around Monterey Bay; the water is slightly warmer, so their eggs hatch more quickly if they release them there.[ii] The dense shoals of tiny fish attract sea lions, humpback whales, bottlenose dolphins – and birds.
The sooty shearwater is about the size of a gull, with a wingspan of over three feet and distinctive dark brown feathers. They only breed in a few places in the far south – New Zealand, the east coast of Australia, the very tip of South America around Cape Horn and on the Falkland Islands. They can be seen almost anywhere on the world’s oceans though because every year they make an amazing migration, flying almost to the edge of the Arctic Circle. Birds from the Falklands have been spotted in the north of Norway, more than 8,700 miles away. In the Pacific they may fly even further; there’s evidence that birds from New Zealand travel as much as 46,000 miles every year.[iii] These incredible journeys are made so the shearwaters can stay in summer weather all year round, taking advantage of the better food supplies found in warmer seas. For birds from New Zealand one stop on their long migration is the coast of California.
Shearwaters are well known to fishermen; they often follow fishing boats at sea, feeding off scraps thrown overboard. Fish and squid make up their normal diet and they’re very good at finding them. If necessary they can dive more than 200 feet below the surface to snatch prey but they prefer to catch food near the surface. They often follow large fish-eating whales, picking off fish fleeing from the huge animals. Of course small fish feeding close inshore are also a prime target for shearwaters. These fish follow the food sources, and that usually means currents. Ocean currents can move unimaginable amounts of water – often billions of tons a second – and a lot of food gets carried along with it. In the deep ocean currents flow slowly and steadily but close to shore they’re often disturbed by the coast or seabed, creating huge eddies where food is trapped. These are ideal feeding grounds for small fish like anchovies, and in turn that attracts shearwaters. Monterey Bay is 22 miles wide and cuts 16 miles into the coastline; tides and the currents flowing up the coast set up an enormous circulation inside it, creating a biological hotspot that attracts just about every link of the food chain.
When many birds migrate they do it in huge flocks. Shearwaters don’t – they set out as individuals. There are millions of them though – most estimates put the global population at around 20 million[iv] - and they all migrate at about the same time. That means huge flocks can temporarily form around popular feeding sites, and it’s not uncommon to see this happen off the coast of California. Sometimes the flocks are large enough to literally turn the sky dark as they fly overhead.[v] In Monterey Bay it’s not uncommon to see over 100,000 of them congregated together at one time.[vi] It’s an impressive sight and many bird watchers travel to the California coast every year to watch them, but having so many birds in one place means the results can be horrifying if something goes wrong.
[1] The “killer bees” finally reached the USA in 1985. So far they’ve killed rather less people than regular bees do.
[i] United States Census Bureau, State Population Estimates and Demographic Components of Change
http://www.census.gov/popest/data/state/asrh/1980s/80s_st_totals.html
[ii] The New York Times, Nov 24, 2013, With Extra Anchovies
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/25/us/with-extra-anchovies-deluxe-whale-watching.html?_r=0
[iii] Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, August14, 2002, Migratory shearwaters integrate oceanic resources across the Pacific Ocean in an endless summer
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1568927/
[iv] The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, Puffinus griseus
http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/22698209/0
[v] USGS, Mar 2013, Sooty Shearwater Migration on Display in Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary
http://soundwaves.usgs.gov/2013/04/outreach.html
[vi] trgeybirds.com, Sooty Shearwater, Puffinus griseus
http://tgreybirds.com/Pages/SootyShearwatersp.html
The story of The Birds is at heart a simple one, and familiar to anyone who’s a fan of the horror genre. Particularly from the 1960s through to the early 80s, mass attacks by previously harmless or solitary animals have been a popular plot device for anyone who wants to give their readers or viewers a chill. Sometimes the villains are taken from news stories, like the “killer bee” panic that affected the USA in the 70s and 80s as Africanized honeybees spread north from Brazil through central and then North America.[1] Others play on ancestral dislike of real pests, like rats. Some films have parted company with reality altogether – piranha fish can be dangerous if you fall in the wrong river, but they have never evolved wings and invaded beach resorts.
As you’d expect from the subject matter many novels and movies about animal attacks have been aimed squarely at the low end of the market. There are exceptions though and The Birds stands out as one of the high points of the genre. Hitchcock brought all his artistry to bear on it and created some classic moments of suspense.
One question that many people have asked is, where did Hitchcock get the idea? Officially the movie is based on Daphne du Maurier’s short novel of the same name, but apart from the central idea of birds attacking people the connection is a loose one. In 2011 a team of environmentalists at Louisiana State University threw some light on the mystery by examining the stomach contents of marine animals caught in 1961. They found that a normally harmless type of marine algae had become toxic, and it affected the brains of seabirds off the coast of California – where the movie was set. For a short time that year residents of Monterey Bay were terrorized by bizarre incidents involving hundreds of sick, insane birds. The truth was a lot less frightening than Hitchcock’s film would be, but it was scary enough for the people caught up in it. It also provided a stark example of how small factors can have a serious – and sometimes dangerous – effect on nature.
California has been the most populous state in the USA for over 40 years, but it wasn’t always that way. When it joined the union in 1850 it was almost uninhabited, and most of the people who were there had arrived in the last few months to look for gold. Between 1849 and 1852 San Francisco expanded from a tiny settlement of 200 people around a mission station to a city of nearly 40,000. The gold rush faded out around 1855 but people kept heading to California; it was a great place for farming, and increasing trade with the Far East attracted sailors, merchants and dock workers. Ports grew up along the coast and created business for stores, saloons and transport companies. The population kept growing as the coastal towns expanded into thriving cities.
After the Second World War California had another surge in growth. As Americans got wealthier many of them were attracted to the state’s weather and its Pacific coast, but not all of them wanted to live in a big city. Small, pleasant coastal towns started to grow into dormitory suburbs, where people could have a good standard of living just a short drive from the cities and their jobs. With automobile ownership expanding rapidly it was ideal. Of course with the population growing so fast there was pressure on the supply of homes, so hundreds of thousands of new houses had to be built. Through the 1940s California’s population grew by over 50 percent as three and a half million new arrivals settled in. In the 1950s five million more joined them.[i] During the war and for two decades after it the whole coast of the state was dotted with construction sites, where tens of thousands of workers labored to put up new homes. Every one of those sites had rest rooms for the workers, and most of these discharged into hastily built septic tanks. Some of them had been built too hastily for safety and a constant trickle of raw sewage found its way into the sea.
When we think of sea life the first thing that comes to mind is usually fish, but in fact the most numerous life forms in the ocean are plankton. The most common plankton are algae, tiny, single-celled plantlike organisms that float in the surface water where they can take energy from sunlight. Most of them are microscopic, so they’re rarely seen except by scientists, but there can be millions in a single bucket of seawater. Algae are an essential part of the sea’s ecosystem – as well as providing food for many larger animals they break down carbon dioxide and produce oxygen, which either dissolves into the water or escapes into the atmosphere. Some of the most beautiful algae, if you have a microscope, are the large group called diatoms. These are encased in glassy cages of silica, a unique feature among algae, and they look spectacular in microscope images. Diatoms are also useful to scientists as a way of measuring water quality – they’re very sensitive to pollution.
Some types of pollution kill diatoms, but others can feed them and cause rapid population explosions. When that happens the result is what scientists call an algal bloom. Sometimes these happen naturally, but when they occur near the coast it often turns out that pollution was responsible. With many kinds of algae all that happens when they multiply is that marine animals have more to eat, but some species can rapidly suck all the nutrients out of the water and cause major environmental problems. The worst cases, though, occur when the algae are toxic. When that happens it’s called a harmful algal bloom, or HAB. There’s a more dramatic name for it, too – red tide.
Off the coast of California the most common toxic algae are the family known as pseudo-Nitzschia. Not all of these are toxic; some only are when conditions are right. When that happens, though, they produce a chemical called domoic acid. This is a neurotoxin – it attacks the nervous system. It’s been linked to many cases of human poisoning because it can build up to dangerous levels in shellfish that feed by filtering plankton from the water; if someone then eats the shellfish they can fall victim to amnesic shellfish poisoning, a nasty condition that causes a range of symptoms including nausea, dizziness, brain damage and memory loss. It can even be fatal; of 107 confirmed cases four victims died.
It’s not just shellfish that can collect a dangerous dose of domoic acid by feeding on plankton; some fish can too, including sardines and anchovies. These are small fish that swim in large schools close to the surface, so they’re often eaten by seabirds. Anchovies breed in huge numbers off the California coast, and they tend to congregate in and around Monterey Bay; the water is slightly warmer, so their eggs hatch more quickly if they release them there.[ii] The dense shoals of tiny fish attract sea lions, humpback whales, bottlenose dolphins – and birds.
The sooty shearwater is about the size of a gull, with a wingspan of over three feet and distinctive dark brown feathers. They only breed in a few places in the far south – New Zealand, the east coast of Australia, the very tip of South America around Cape Horn and on the Falkland Islands. They can be seen almost anywhere on the world’s oceans though because every year they make an amazing migration, flying almost to the edge of the Arctic Circle. Birds from the Falklands have been spotted in the north of Norway, more than 8,700 miles away. In the Pacific they may fly even further; there’s evidence that birds from New Zealand travel as much as 46,000 miles every year.[iii] These incredible journeys are made so the shearwaters can stay in summer weather all year round, taking advantage of the better food supplies found in warmer seas. For birds from New Zealand one stop on their long migration is the coast of California.
Shearwaters are well known to fishermen; they often follow fishing boats at sea, feeding off scraps thrown overboard. Fish and squid make up their normal diet and they’re very good at finding them. If necessary they can dive more than 200 feet below the surface to snatch prey but they prefer to catch food near the surface. They often follow large fish-eating whales, picking off fish fleeing from the huge animals. Of course small fish feeding close inshore are also a prime target for shearwaters. These fish follow the food sources, and that usually means currents. Ocean currents can move unimaginable amounts of water – often billions of tons a second – and a lot of food gets carried along with it. In the deep ocean currents flow slowly and steadily but close to shore they’re often disturbed by the coast or seabed, creating huge eddies where food is trapped. These are ideal feeding grounds for small fish like anchovies, and in turn that attracts shearwaters. Monterey Bay is 22 miles wide and cuts 16 miles into the coastline; tides and the currents flowing up the coast set up an enormous circulation inside it, creating a biological hotspot that attracts just about every link of the food chain.
When many birds migrate they do it in huge flocks. Shearwaters don’t – they set out as individuals. There are millions of them though – most estimates put the global population at around 20 million[iv] - and they all migrate at about the same time. That means huge flocks can temporarily form around popular feeding sites, and it’s not uncommon to see this happen off the coast of California. Sometimes the flocks are large enough to literally turn the sky dark as they fly overhead.[v] In Monterey Bay it’s not uncommon to see over 100,000 of them congregated together at one time.[vi] It’s an impressive sight and many bird watchers travel to the California coast every year to watch them, but having so many birds in one place means the results can be horrifying if something goes wrong.
[1] The “killer bees” finally reached the USA in 1985. So far they’ve killed rather less people than regular bees do.
[i] United States Census Bureau, State Population Estimates and Demographic Components of Change
http://www.census.gov/popest/data/state/asrh/1980s/80s_st_totals.html
[ii] The New York Times, Nov 24, 2013, With Extra Anchovies
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/25/us/with-extra-anchovies-deluxe-whale-watching.html?_r=0
[iii] Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, August14, 2002, Migratory shearwaters integrate oceanic resources across the Pacific Ocean in an endless summer
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1568927/
[iv] The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, Puffinus griseus
http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/22698209/0
[v] USGS, Mar 2013, Sooty Shearwater Migration on Display in Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary
http://soundwaves.usgs.gov/2013/04/outreach.html
[vi] trgeybirds.com, Sooty Shearwater, Puffinus griseus
http://tgreybirds.com/Pages/SootyShearwatersp.html
