The Birds by Daphne du Maurier
5/22/202620 min
Before Alfred Hitchcock turned birds into cinematic terror, The Birds was a bleak, intimate apocalypse story from author Daphne du Maurier. In this special Now Playing Podcast Book Review, Arnie looks at the 1952 short story that inspired Hitchcock’s classic film and finds something very different: a grim survival tale closer to War of the Worlds, I Am Legend, and Night of the Living Dead than the Hollywood thriller audiences know.
From post-war paranoia to unexplained cosmic dread, hear why this short story still works over 70 years later, why its ending hits so hard, and why Hitchcock may have only borrowed the premise while leaving most of the original story behind. Plus, how gulls attacking a farmer became one of horror’s most influential setups.
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsArnie· Host0:00
[birds squawking] Hello, Now Playing listeners. This is Arnie, and I'm here with another book review, this time looking at the short story The Birds. Now, yes, I know there's two more Devil Wears Prada books to go. My review of the next one will be out next week. I've read both. I'm ready to go with those. But I wanted to preempt those and do a review of The Birds today because today is the start of Now Playing Podcast's Platinum donation drive. We've been covering animal attacks all winter and spring with Anaconda, Lake Placid, and now we've reached the ultimate level, where we're going to be reviewing the two Birds movies. There's the Hitchcock original and then a '90s made-for-Showtime sequel, The Birds II, and then we're gonna be reviewing another Tippi Hedren animal attack movie called Roar. And The Birds is perhaps one of Hitchcock's most well-known films. It's the film he did immediately after Psycho, so anticipation was very high to see what he did next. And the same way Psycho was based on a previously written story, in that case Robert Bloch's 1959 novel that Stuart did do a book review of way back when we covered the Psycho films, The Birds was a 1952