Screenshot: Universal Pictures
The horror genre loves punishment. Daphne du Maurier’s famous 1952 short story “The Birds” is hardly alone in unleashing a judgement upon the whole human race, but it delivers its damnation with a distinctive, deftly mysterious economy. Set in rural Cornwall, the narrative follows part-time farmhand Nat Hocken, who hears strange sounds from his children’s bedroom one winter night. Entering, he sees the window is open, and the next moment realizes his boy and girl are under assault by apparently crazed birds. Things escalate rapidly from there, and soon the country, and apparently all of civilization, have collapsed beneath a blind but determined onslaught of beaks and talons wielded by thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of sparrows, gulls, finches, gannets, all seized not so much by madness as by a blank determination to exterminate.