Differences Between the Birds the Movie and the Birds Short Story

The Birds

The Birds, the movie was directed by Alfred Hitchcock and was based on the short story "The Birds" written by Daphne du Murrier. If you would have read the book and then watched the movie, you would see that very few things are the same. In both the short story and the movie flocks of gulls, robins, crows, and sparrows join each other. This is really weird because different species of birds never work together. The story and the film both have the same climate. It is cold and chilly; "the ground is frozen and it will be a black winter." The climate gives the versions of the story a creepy and suspenseful feeling.

Each version also has the main characters boarding up the windows. Anyone who thought the birds won't attack are usually found dead, but in the movie they are found with their eyes pecked out. Also, both the story and the movie have REALLY bad endings! They aren't very similar, but they both leave you hanging. When you see a movie or read a book you want to know what happens to the main characters. In these two, you didn't get an ending. They left you hanging and for some people that ruins it all.

The birds attack in the same way also. They come through the house, peck at the windows, and try to come through the doors. They succeed in coming through upstairs in both the film and the short story.

The short story and the film have the same plots and the same conflict of man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs. society, and man vs. the supernatural. In either version it wasn't really explained why the birds had waited 154 million years to start attacking humans. Is Melanie or the lovebirds really evil in the film, or in the story is it just the black winter and the tides?

The short story and the film have differences too but none of these differences really affected the main plot. The short story's setting is placed just south of London, England right after World War II. The films setting is in Bodega Bay just a little ways away from San Francisco and takes place in the 1960's. In the film a mad woman accused Melanie of bringing "evil" and causing the attacking of the birds. In the story birds attacked when the tide came in and in the film the birds attack at different times, over and over.

The characters are totally different in the two versions. The short story's main characters are a family;