Hitchcock The Birds Quotes

I have never known birds of different species to flock together. The very concept is unimaginable. Why, if that happened, we wouldn't stand a chance! How could we possibly hope to fight them?

Atticus, I think we're being stalked by the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock. First it was a Vulture adn now two giant ravens are coming our way." Oberon

It may not be clear now or ever, but take comfort in this, the Lord has your future and our family’s future in His hands,' Mama said, cupping Aria’s face. 'My little songbird. He treasures you far more than the birds of the air. Trust that He knows what is best.

Horror is a woman’s genre, and it has been all the way back to the oldest horror novel still widely read today: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, daughter of pioneering feminist author Mary Wollstonecraft. Ann Radcliffe’s gothic novels (The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Italian) made her the highest-paid writer of the late eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Charlotte Riddell were book-writing machines, turning out sensation novels and ghost stories by the pound. Edith Wharton wrote ghost stories before becoming a novelist of manners, and Vernon Lee (real name Violet Paget) wrote elegant tales of the uncanny that rival anything by Henry James. Three of Daphne du Maurier’s stories became Hitchcock films (Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, The Birds), and Shirley Jackson’s singular horror novel The Haunting of Hill House made her one of the highest-regarded American writers of the twentieth century.

book called The Birds, and it sounded just like mine. He was getting all worked up and cross, saying Hitchcock had taken the film from his, and not mine. Then he apparently took Counsel’s Opinion, who said it was no good him doing anything, so luckily he is not to go on with his claim, so-called. But at least three fools in America have made ‘claims’, saying they have written books or stories about savage birds, and my heart began to sink, in case some awful great Main case started up in the US (like that Rebecca thing) and I had to fly out, and give evidence. These brutes just do it for publicity and money, and film people like Hitchcock don’t care; it makes more publicity, and any claim always comes back on the author. There seems to be no protection for well-known authors when this happens, because after all it’s only one’s word against somebody else’s, that one has never read their stupid stories! And as these people are always insolvent, there is no hope of making a counter-claim against them, or getting them to pay costs if they bring a case. Actually, I don’t think anything will come from it all, but I can’t help remembering that awful Rebecca lawsuit. That person’s story was rotten, and not a bit like Rebecca at all, but they were still able to file a lawsuit, and one had to go to America, and do all that witness business.

Have you seen the ‘Birds’?” Appie shook her head. “That was one of Alfred Hitchcock’s wasn’t?” Drake nodded. “I’ve wanted to see it,” she continued as Drake still stood motionless. “Drake?

Bodega Bay was the same harbor where Alfred Hitchcock had filmed his 1963 horror classic, The Birds, the movie that made the world think twice about backyard feeders. Hitchcock knew the worst shocks came from the mundane, and few creatures were as widespread, and as taken for granted, as birds. So the great director had western gulls dive-bombing children at an outdoor birthday party, raspberry-dipped house finches pouring into a living room through the fireplace, and American crows slashing at Tippi Hed-ren while she cowered in a bedroom. Suffice to say, The Birds was not a popular movie with birders on board this tour boat. After lifetimes of weekends in the field, they knew birds didn’t attack humans. The only way Hitchcock had got ravens to chase actors was to sprinkle their hair with seed. Crows lurked on the gutters of the old schoolhouse because he affixed magnets to their feet. Children fleeing swarms of blackbirds in the movie were actually running on a studio treadmill with birds tied to their necks. It all seemed silly to Levantin. The only menacing thing birds ever did to him was poop on his patio.

Owls belong to the night world" as Hitchcock pointed out; "they are watchers, and this appeals to Perkins's masochism. He knows the birds and he knows that they're watching him all the time. He can see his own guilt reflected in their knowing eyes." This explains other avian imagery: the crucial shot of Perkins knocking over a sketch of a bird when (in his "son personality") he discovers the body of Janet Leigh—the last "stuffed bird" is, aptly, a woman named Crane, who came from Phoenix (a city named for the mythic bird that returns from the dead); and why, when Perkins suggested candy, Hitchcock insisted it be candy corn, a confection that resembles the kernels pecked by chickens. (As will become clear, everything about Psycho points forward to and aesthetically necessitates Hitchcock's next feature film, The Birds.)

There’s a famous Alfred Hitchcock movie called The Birds. It sounds like a documentary, but trust me, it’s not. In the movie all the birds in this small California town go all avian apocalypse and start attacking people—plucking out eyes, blowing up gas stations, pecking everyone to death—just about the same time that this one woman shows up. Whether or not she’s the reason the birds attack isn’t entirely clear. It could just be a fluke. Or maybe there is something about this lady that makes the birds batty. I watched the movie with Bench, who conked out about halfway through after muttering for an hour straight that any movie without at least one CGI character was bound to be boring. I watched to the end, though. I wanted to see if the woman was going to make it out of the town alive or if the birds would get her.