She let the critter get away.
Ristle-tee, rostle-tee, hey donny dostle-tee,
knickety-knackety, retro-quo-quality, willoby-wallaby,
Now, now, now!
Back in 1952, English novelist Daphne du Maurier (aka Lady Browning) published a short novel and some short stories entitled The Apple Tree: One of the stories is a chilling tale called The Birds, an environmentally-conscious fable about a population of birds who start attacking humans after a harsh winter depletes their natural food supply.
Hitchcock read and liked the basic premise and wanted to put The Birds on film. However, his film would be far from a faithful retelling. Once Hitchcock bought the rights to du Maurier, he hired screenwriter Evan Hunter to pen a script. Hunter remembers Hitchcock wanted to rid of the original story and wanted the focus to be squarely on the birds attacking people.
The Birds (1963)
Visual Interpretation
At FH, Halloween and artist JayBee, (Frisky Frolic) go hand in hand. JayBee's imagery helped inspire my annual Halloween themed posts after I first discovered his incredible imagery over 12 years ago. Since then, his costumed hotties, his witches, his ghosts, and now his crows have been apart of almost every FH Halloween celebration since.
There were over 3000 birds trained for the making of the movie. Most of birds were wild-caught crows, ravens, seagulls, and sparrows. Through a meticulous positive reinforcement process, animal handler Ray Berwick trained hundreds of live birds for use in Hitchcock’s movie.
Berwick oversaw an entire bird-wrangling team whose members spent a huge amount of time corralling their feathered co-workers between takes. Berwick thought that the ravens were the cleverest, and the seagulls were the most vicious. The crows however, were the birds most remember, especially from that chilling scene in the school yard.
Crows are a rare breed of bird that have actually managed to changed their reputation over the years. Once thought of as mostly annoying scavengers, animal research has taught us how intelligent crows actually are. In addition to having excellent memories, crows have also been observed using basic tools to aid in accomplishing their tasks.
Crows are also the the bird most closely associated with witches, with evil and with deathcr. This of course makes crows the perfect avian for All Hallow's Eve. When I asked JayBee if he'd ever shot anything Hitchcock related, he remembered a shoot in his archives of a model in a crow themed costumed he shot a few years ago. JayBee had a hard time finding the images in his extensive archive, but even though crows are also associated with bad omens and bad luck, JayBee managed to find his feathered friend just in time for Halloween!
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