Apocalyptic movies that came after the Birds really seemed to take a lot from this movie.
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Yes..Hitchcock referenced The Birds in some interviews as his "Judgment Day movie." On the other hand, in the 70s when disaster movies(The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake, The Towering Inferno) came out , Hitchcock said "I already made a disaster movie. It was called The Birds." Hitchcock went on to note that The Birds shared with other disaster movies "how suddenly the individual problems of people no longer mattered in the face of life-and-death disaster.
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Especially Night of the Living Dead. I wonder if George Romero mentioned it as an influence in any interviews?
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I don't know of any -- but the connection is clearly here. The 1968 reviews of Night of the Living Dead played up a review that said "the scariest movie since Psycho" -- but really The Birds was the big influence.
We are talking here of "the siege movie" -- a house under siege and the terrors affiliated with "outside menacers" breaking through to kill US. Terrifying. After NOTLD, a major "siege movie" was Sam Peckinpah's "Straw Dogs" (based on a novel called The Siege of Trencher's Farm) climaxed with Yank Dustin Hoffman and his British wife Susan George holding off a horde of thugs at their home.
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roger1 (3617)
6 days ago
Of course, NOTLD would pretty much create a whole horror subgenre.
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Aboslutely. Prior to the very graphic 1968 NOTLD, "zombie movies" were specific to the Caribbean on the screen (in some Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis movies for comedy) and the zombies were unmarked "natives" in a trance. The more grisly and gruesome NOTLD gave us rotted-out human corpses rising from their graves and eating human flesh and needing a bullet through the brain to be killed and turning OTHER people into zombies by biting them. And pretty much ALL zombie movies have a "siege" element. They raided a shopping mall in "Dawn of the Dead."
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roger1 (3617)
6 days ago
Maybe it'd be more accurate to say that the Birds heavily influence Night, which then influenced a lot of horror filmmakers who followed.
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And think that's accurate to say but -- Hitchcock has to be given his due. So OFTEN, he did movies that became "definitive" of their type. Psycho -- the slasher movie. The Birds...animals gone amok...sieges. The Man Who Knew Too Much (BOTH versions) -- the kidnapping of a child AND a "stop the assassination" plot. Etc.
One of the great "siege" scenes in movie history is done almost all JUST by sound in The Birds -- near the end. We only SEE a seagull break thorugh a window to peck Rod Taylor's hand(in close-up, doubled?) bloody.
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