At least part of my fear and distrust for birds can be traced back to a 7th grade sleepover party where we watched the Hitchcock classic The Birds. I didn’t really understand who Hitchcock was at the time, beyond Psycho, and The Lady Vanishes, which I used to catch on late night cable. But I remember being glued to the screen, unable to look away, even as I felt more and more uneasy. Even now, as a huge Hitchcock fan (I’ve seen every film that’s possible to stream at least once), this movie stands out for me as one of his creepiest. This video from Popular Science uncovers the facts behind the film’s fiction. Worth watching if you, like me, can’t quite place the source of the movie’s unique magnetism
LIKE, THIS REALLY HAPPENED. Alfred Hitchcock’s classic THE BIRDS is, in part, inspired by a very real phenomenon that occurred in Santa Cruz, California in 1961. One night, inexplicably, thousands of sooty shearwater birds lost their minds, dive-bombing into homes and even biting people. But, for 50 years, no one knew why… That is, until Dr. Sibel Bargu Ates connected dots throughout history through meticulous (and rather imaginative) archive specimen research. This is a Hitchcockian mystery wrapped in a scientific paper—a biological whodunnit.
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