I am have been so busy with my graduate studies at seminary as the semester winds down and my writing projects need to be completed that I have not been able to devote nearly the attention to posting comments here on this blog. I’d like my posts to be substantial and academically sound, but in the interests of getting new content here I submit the following.

A couple of weeks ago my wife found a copy of Hitchcock’s The Birds at the library and she checked it out for me. We watched it later that day, and later I then watched the bonus materials that went behind the scenes. I was struck by two things. First, there is a shot in the film that comes toward the end after the birds have engaged in a city-wide attack against Bodega Bay. It is a wide angle shot from the air of the city and the birds, and one which many might describe as the proverbial “bird’s eye view.” However, Hitchcock said that this was an incorrect description, and he called it God’s view of the situation. I found this interesting especially if it is connected with the earlier discussion in the town’s restaurant and bar over why the birds (or if the birds) might be attacking. One gentleman in the discussion is an inebriated fellow who throws in the occasional remark that the attacks represent the end of the world and divine judgment, which he connects with a biblical reference.

As I watched the film I also noted that it came out in 1963, and while we had seen nature run amok films in the 1950s, these seem to be qualitatively different in that in the 1950s nature was usually influenced by the scientific and natural abuses of humanity or outside influences from outer space, and these films did not represent nature uniting against humanity.

As I watched the film with these two thoughts I wondered whether the film might be viewed apocalyptically in terms of at least a secular apocalypse via a revolt of nature, and secondly, whether this film might have provided the foundation for some of the nature horror films of the 1970s such as The Day of the Animals (1977). This may not be far-fetched in that some commentators trace the shift in horror from the more religiously-oriented Gothic to more of a nihilistic horror through Hitchcock’s Psycho (or some trace it to Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, although writers like Kim Paffenroth would challenge that Romero is necessarily nihilistic). Might Hitchcock have been influential in another area of cinematic horror?