The Birds by Daphne du Maurier

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Venganza Media, Inc.

Tv & Film:film Reviews, Film Reviews, Film Interviews, Tv & Film, Film History

4.5 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 22 May 2026

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Before Alfred Hitchcock turned birds into cinematic terror, The Birds was a bleak, intimate apocalypse story from author Daphne du Maurier. In this special Now Playing Podcast Book Review, Arnie looks at the 1952 short story that inspired Hitchcock’s classic film and finds something very different: a grim survival tale closer to War of the Worlds, I Am Legend, and Night of the Living Dead than the Hollywood thriller audiences know. From post-war paranoia to unexplained cosmic dread, hear why this short story still works over 70 years later, why its ending hits so hard, and why Hitchcock may have only borrowed the premise while leaving most of the original story behind. Plus, how gulls attacking a farmer became one of horror’s most influential setups.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello now playing listeners. This is Arnie and I'm here with another book review, this time
0:10.7	looking at the short story, The Birds. Now yes, I know there's two more Devil Wears
0:17.0	Prada books to go. My review of The Next One will be out next week.
0:21.2	I've read both.
0:22.0	I'm ready to go with those.
0:23.7	But I wanted to preempt those and do a review of the birds today.
0:28.4	Because today is the start of now playing podcast's Platinum Donation Drive.
0:33.4	We've been covering animal attacks all winter and spring with Anaconda, Lake Placid, and now we've reached the ultimate level where we're going to be reviewing the two birds movies.
0:49.2	There's the Hitchcock original and then a 90s made for Showtime sequel, The Birds 2.
0:56.5	And then we're going to be reviewing another tippy Hedron animal attack movie called Roar.
1:02.4	And The Birds is perhaps one of Hitchcock's most well-known films.
1:07.6	It's the film he did immediately after Psycho, so anticipation was very high to see what
1:14.2	he did next, and the same way Psycho was based on a previously written story, in that case,
1:20.9	Robert Block's 1959 novel that Stewart did do a book review of way back when we covered the
1:27.2	Psycho Films,
1:28.5	The Birds was a 1952 short story by English author Daphne Dumarier.
1:35.5	Hitch was familiar with Daphne's work and planned on adapting the birds not to a movie,
1:42.4	but as part of his Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV show.
1:45.7	But he had looked at a film called Marnie to do next.
1:49.5	It didn't work out.
1:50.9	Stewart talks about that in our Birds movie review.
1:53.8	He would end up making Marnie, but just not immediately.
	...

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