“It’s the End of the World!”: The Influence of The Birds on the Evil Child Film

Alfred Hitchcock’s trailer promoting The Birds sees the director step once again in front of the camera to address audiences in his devilishly tongue-in-cheek fashion about “the birds and their ageold relationship with man.” Citing the numerous means by which humanity has slaughtered and exploited birds for fun, fashion, and food, the director presents various artifacts—a rifle, a feathered hat, a roast chicken—to illustrate his point. Hitchcock opens the trailer by describing his newest project in scholarly terms, dryly referring to The Birds not as a film, but a “forthcoming lecture” that “will be seen in theatres like this across the country.” The frivolous mood of the trailer is abruptly interrupted by Tippi Hedren’s panicked entrance. Barging through the door, she slams it behind her and gasps, “They’re coming!” as distant bird cries quickly intensify until they overwhelm the soundtrack. Robin Wood notes that the message Hitchcock is “at pains to encourage” in the trailer is that “birds are taking revenge for man’s persecution of them.”1 Although the film itself does not offer any clear motivation for the bird attacks, the theme of small harmless creatures taking revenge en masse against a common oppressor has nevertheless remained a popular interpretation.2 Andrew Tudor’s analysis of the film, for instance, maintains that The Birds has been a major influence on the subgenre of ecology-based “supernature” horror films that proliferated in the 1970s and 1980s in which creatures great and small take revenge against humanity’s destructive exploitation of the planet.3