Fright or Flight

Alfred Hitchcock and Evan Hunter on the set of The Birds

Hitch may have been the master of suspense, but he was also a master of marketing. A promotional tagline for his 1963 film The Birds read simply, "The Birds Is Coming!" Four little words, amusingly awkward to the tongue, but harmless enough, right? Yet so much is said -- or rather, left unsaid. You don't know just who these birds are, or what their intention is, but if Hitch is announcing their arrival, you know you'd better be scared. Those four little words go right to the core of Alfred Hitchcock's wicked genius: The idea of something can be far more terrifying than the something itself.

Although The Birds is one of the director's few outright horror films (it followed Psycho, both chronologically and thematically), the real horror is in the wait, the tease. The opening credits roll in a fractured font -- a forewarning, perhaps, of the shattering one's nerves are about to receive -- framed by the silhouette of birds flapping and scored to the sound of birds squawking. And then they're gone, mostly silent for another 20 minutes, until that first angry gull sideswipes Tippi Hedren. The birds are still there, of course, lurking in the background, on a street post, in the San Francisco pet shop where our heroes Mitch Brenner and Melanie Daniels first meet, and where Melanie purchases a pair of lovebirds for Mitch's younger sister. She should have gone for a puppy, or maybe a nice bunny rabbit. That at least would have spared filmgoers the next 40 years of flinching whenever more than a half-dozen of our feathered "friends" congregate.

And how is it, nearly a half-century later, that the film -- and its titular leads -- can still inspire such dread, such awful, delicious dread? Evan Hunter had a lot to do with it -- he wrote the screenplay. The now 76-year-old screenwriter and author (of the popular 87th Precinct crime novels, written under the pseudonym Ed McBain) is polite and engaging over the phone; there's no hint of malice to his voice, no suggestion that he is one-half of a team that forever sullied birds' good name. He'll be in town this weekend for a screening of The Birds at the Paramount Theatre (sponsored by Barnes & Noble and the Austin Film Festival), so maybe he can provide a few answers. But frankly, Hunter seems a bit befuddled himself over the film's continuing stranglehold on viewers and, especially, on critics and scholars. Overeager film school students gather to pick apart and put back together the picture, attempting to root out the meaning behind the seemingly meaningless, a practice Hunter finds a little bit ridiculous.

"I went down to Pace University where they were doing a class on Hitchcock, and the instructor invited me to come. I just sat at the rear of the room. ... And they were going though stuff: 'Did you notice how Hitchcock in the schoolroom put a map of the world on the board there, and this was to indicate that the birds were going to take over the world.' It was just so far out! There was a map of the world because that's what you find in a schoolroom! It was all stuff like that, where they were reading into the film things that Hitch and I had never discussed, and if they were there, they were there unconsciously on both our parts."

Hitchcock began each brainstorming session with Hunter by instructing his writer to "tell me the story so far." Hunter insists it really was just a story, and that the director never demanded the inclusion of any issues or psychological implications -- surprisingly, considering how strongly the Oedipal complex figures in The Birds and in so many more of --

" -- his films? Probably in my work. Probably in any man's work," Hunter interjects. "Don't you think Mom is always hovering?"

He especially scoffs at academics' attempts to theorize the meaning of the birds and their unprovoked attacks. (Making the list: an allegory for nuclear devastation, a cautionary tale of man's abuse of nature, or a misogynistic morality play in which Hitch's favorite whipping post, the icy blonde, nearly gets her eyes pecked out -- take your pick.)

"It really is absurd to examine the film as if it's War and Peace or Hamlet. It's not," Hunter counters modestly. (Fellini called it a "poem," and his favorite Hitchcock film.) "It's not that important a film in the history of moviemaking. It's a good film. But to try to make more out of it than that is really ridiculous."

Still, it's the most natural of instincts, to try to identify, analyze, academize that which terrorizes us, to try to give shape and name to that which goes bump in the night. Maybe then the bump wouldn't be so damned terrifying. Hitchcock and Hunter gave the bump a name, but not a reason for being.

"We discussed that. We decided we were going to leave it alone. We were not going to try to explain it. There are any number of explanations we could have given for the birds attacking, but it would have seemed like either science fiction or fantasy, and we didn't want to do that. We just wanted to leave it alone, and let the people figure out for themselves why the birds were doing it."

They probably wouldn't have agreed anyway. Although Hunter called his working relationship with the director good -- and certainly fruitful enough to serve as the basis of his 1997 memoir Me and Hitch -- The Birds was their only project together. (Hunter did work on Hitch's next film, Marnie, but was taken off the project due to creative differences.) And in their sole feature film collaboration, the writer and the director came to the script with perhaps conflicting intentions.

"We had two sort of different agendas, I think. I was looking to write a movie that would scare the hell out of people. Hitch was looking to do a movie that would gain him respectability. He never told me that," Hunter laughs. "I could have done some other things than I had done."

And yet, they both seem to have gotten their way. The film, along with the rest of Hitchcock's body of work, is now awarded an artistic credibility those "popcorn" pictures failed to garner at the time of their release, and The Birds is on heavy rotation on college curricula. And, well, it's still scaring the pants off of people, too. Just watch as audience members file out of the Paramount on Saturday night. Look for a certain spring to their step as they hurry to cars, and more than a few furtive glances skyward.