Fear Takes Flight: Adaptation, Paranoia and Punishment in The Birds

The source material for Hitchcock's classic tale of avian terror is a short story published a decade prior. Roger Stitson looks at the vast differences between the two texts and finds that while one tells us much about the era from which it emerged, the other tells us a lot more about the preoccupations of its famed creator.

Additional keywords: Middle years, senior secondary, Daphne du Maurier, adaptation, literary adaptation, World War II, World War 2, Second World War, Nazi Germany, McCarthyism, paranoia, Cold War, Russia, Tippi Hedren, femininity, misogyny, cinema history, Hollywood cinema, 1960s cinema.