The Birds (1963) - Hard to sum up what I just watched, but I liked it

I watched the classic Alfred Hitchcock horror film 'The Birds' a few years ago and I only remember that I enjoyed it (and the final shot in the movie).  The rest of it I had completely forgotten.  Now I've seen it again I can sort of see why.  It's a difficult film to do justice when trying to - properly - sum it up.

It would be easy to say that it's a horror film where birds start to attack humans.  Yes, that's an adequate summary, but the film is so much more than that just saying it like that.  The first half is primarily build-up, where a well-to-do socialite decides to follow a man she only just met to his secluded home town in order to play a practical joke on him.

Maybe I'm just looking at it through '2023 eyes,' but it all just seems rather odd.  I would call these actions 'stalking a stranger the woman had only just met' yet it's all presented as rather harmless and even romantic.  But then again perhaps that's the point?  This is a horror film after all and this could well all be part of creating a particularly unsettling atmosphere where things all feel a little bit too unreal to be true.

It's not until about the halfway mark where all the family parties take a backseat when Woody Woodpecker and his hordes of mates start trying to take a piece of flesh or two out of our human protagonists.  The effects do feel a little dated compared to today's standards and they haven't held up that well, but, if you believe what you read on the internet, it wasn't just overlaying footage of flying birds over the humans, but the producers actually trained birds to peck at the actors.

It's hard to say whether I should recommend this film or not.  I certainly enjoyed it both times I watched it.  Hopefully it will stick in my head a little longer after this viewing.  There's certainly elements of conventional horror in there, but it's the weird sub-plots that seem to give it whatever 'charm' as made it the classic it is.

8/10 The Force is definitely strong with this one