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A review by maryehavens
The Birds by Daphne du Maurier
3.0
The version I listened to was a BBC audio dramatization of the Du Maurier short story. It's less than an hour.
First: HUGE Hitchcock fan. It's very interesting to me how this story turned into the movie (I just looked up a bit about the screenplay and it makes sense).
While this story has many parallels to the movie, it's really it's own thing and almost difficult to make comparisons. There's the bird attacks but the setting of the story is hyper local to just a few farms. The characters reason that the birds are attacking all of Great Britain and are left to fend for themselves. There is much more of a focus on the darker side of humanity versus a focus on the birds themselves. The characters reference their survival tactics used during WWII and, apparently, the birds are an animal representation of the Blitz on London during that time.
Listening to the dramatization, I was a bit shocked at how dissimilar the two stories are. I prefer the movie, only because I am more familiar with it, and my apocalyptic meter is pretty full with slogging through The Stand (almost done!). The movie had a bit more hope or, at minimum, ambiguity that the birds were everywhere.
Still like the story - it was fairly horrific for such a short one!
First: HUGE Hitchcock fan. It's very interesting to me how this story turned into the movie (I just looked up a bit about the screenplay and it makes sense).
While this story has many parallels to the movie, it's really it's own thing and almost difficult to make comparisons. There's the bird attacks but the setting of the story is hyper local to just a few farms. The characters reason that the birds are attacking all of Great Britain and are left to fend for themselves. There is much more of a focus on the darker side of humanity versus a focus on the birds themselves. The characters reference their survival tactics used during WWII and, apparently, the birds are an animal representation of the Blitz on London during that time.
Listening to the dramatization, I was a bit shocked at how dissimilar the two stories are. I prefer the movie, only because I am more familiar with it, and my apocalyptic meter is pretty full with slogging through The Stand (almost done!). The movie had a bit more hope or, at minimum, ambiguity that the birds were everywhere.
Still like the story - it was fairly horrific for such a short one!