The tension, like the birds' presence, is masterfully built through careful accretion. Later that evening, tucked up in bed next to his sleeping wife (nameless throughout), he is filled with a sense of apprehension and foreboding, like John at the beginning of Don't Look Now, suddenly 'aware of misgiving without cause'. 'Make haste, make speed, hurry and begone,' he thinks to the birds, in an ominous line straight out of a Grimms' fairytale. Campion in bloom yet in the hedges, and the air mild.' But Hocken, a man of the soil, alive to the fickleness of nature, senses that the weather is about to turn, that winter is coming and that it will be a hard, black one.

'No wind, and the grey sea calm and full. Nat Hocken, a part-time farm labourer, is eating his lunch (a pasty, naturally) on a cliff on the Cornish peninsula, watching the restless birds gathering in the autumnal skies above him and enjoying the last glow of the sun. And there is no place for the icily immaculate Tippi Hedren, fresh from the city, in Du Maurier's vision: as in Don't Look Now, the story is narrated entirely from the perspective of the male father figure – both stories deliberately set the rationality of their outlook against the irrational goings-on around them. In transposing the action to the tamer shores of northern California (no wonder Du Maurier was miffed), the film loses some of the elemental potency of the tale. Environment is everything in Du Maurier's fiction, from the sinister alleyways of Venice in Don't Look Now, to the wilderness of her beloved Cornwall, where, like nearly all her most famous work, The Birds is set.

Deeply unsettling as these films are (a line of birds on a climbing frame, or a glimpse of a little girl's red coat), the stories can be equally chilling on the page – if not more so.ĭu Maurier's are not supernatural tales (she doesn't do real ghosts, so to speak) what could be more unnerving than nature behaving unnaturally? Not in the form of apocalyptic diseases, or storms and floods, but wreaking havoc through something as everyday and unthreatening as hedgerow birds. (Du Maurier hated the former, apparently, disapproving of the many liberties Hitchcock took, but gave her blessing to Roeg's more faithful version of her later story). Bearing out the perceived wisdom that short stories – in particular, scary stories – make the best films, these short masterpieces are better-known today as the movies they inspired: Hitchcock's infamous 1963 avian thriller and Nicholas Roeg's darkly erotic 1973 Don't Look Now. Despite her reputation as a 'romantic novelist', a label the author herself always chafed against, Daphne du Maurier wrote two of the most menacing tales of 20th-century fiction – The Birds and Don't Look Now.

The birds by daphne dumaurier