The Birds is based on a novella of the same name by Daphne du Maurier, which was first published in 1952. The story is set in Cornwall, in a seaside village on the southwest coast of England. In it, a farmhand and his family, as well as the rest of his community, are attacked by seabirds arriving from the east. It was written shortly after World War II, and the attacks, which it later turns out are happening all over England, are meant to represent the Nazi threat and the bombings of the UK. The novella was a relatively successful piece of short fiction and was read in several radio broadcasts before Hitchcock republished it in My Favorites in Suspense in 1959.
There are many differences between Hitchcock’s adaptation and du Maurier’s original story. First, Hitchcock moves the setting from England to California. Though one reason for this change may have been to remove the political undercurrent of the story (a fishing village in California in the 1960s would obviously not be interpreted as being under attack by Nazis), another major reason was an incident that occurred in a town near Bodega Bay called Capitola, in which birds called sooty shearwaters began crashing into the rooftops of houses and dropping dead from the sky in what would turn out to be a shellfish poisoning incident.
Also absent from du Maurier’s version is the love story and struggle with a maternal figure that Melanie experiences. Du Maurier’s story instead focused on a farmhand and his family, and did not have any such secondary conflict. Such a conflict is typical of films from that time in general, and Hitchcock’s in particular, who used actresses with sex appeal and romantic conflicts to sell the films.
Finally, the escalation and ending of du Maurier’s story is quite different from those of the film. Du Maurier’s protagonists learn earlier that their whole country is under attack, while the Brenners and Melanie struggle to get any real information from outside of the town until the very end of the film. Additionally, du Maurier’s protagonist finds nearly his entire town dead after a particularly brutal siege, and is forced to hunker down in his house for another, making it clear that he has resigned himself to die. The story then takes on a vastly different meaning from Hitchcock’s film: it was more intended to convey the hopelessness felt during the German attacks on the British, and the fear they caused, and the potential they had for total devastation.
