This movie scared the stuffing out of me when I saw it as a youngster and it remains one of my favorite horror movies. After many years, I decided to sit down and read Daphne du Maurier's incredible novella again.
First published in 1952 by Victor Gollancz as "The Apple Tree: A Short Novel and Several Long Stories", du Maurier's idea for "The Birds" came to her when she observed a farmer being attacked by a flock of seagulls as he was ploughing his field (how's that for real-life horror?).
The tale is set on the post-WWII Cornwall coast in England, where a sudden cold weather snap appears to have turned all the coastal birds into a single-minded murderous frenzy set on killing the local human population. The plot centers on a farmer and his family who are forced to barricade their farmhouse in hopes of keeping the birds at bay. Mysteriously, the attacks only come at each turn of the tide. The creep factor is further turned up when they listen to a BBC radio station (which later eerily goes dead) that announces the birds are invading the entire country.
Intrigued with its cinematic possibilities, Hitchcock secured the rights for the story initially for television, but decided it would make a better movie. He seemed to be a fan of du Maurier's work as he had also filmed her novels "Rebecca" and "Jamaica Inn".
One of the most terrifying elements is the flesh-crawling sounds of the hordes of birds each time they attack. The sound design for this and the entire catalog of the film's sound effects was created by, of all things, an early experimental synthesizer called a Trautonium, as explained in the following article.
How the Bird Sound Effects in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds Were Created with a Pioneering Electronic Instrument, the Trautonium
By Colin Marshall | August 10th, 2026 | openculture.com
Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Special Effects, though viewers raised on more recent Hollywood spectacles would hardly find its mechanized and optically printed avian attackers convincing. Still, the picture as a whole has retained its eerie, ominous power over the last six decades, and a decent amount of the credit for that goes to an aspect that hasn’t dated at all: its non-musical “score” by the early electronic composer Oskar Sala. Many of the threatening bird calls on the soundtrack were actually played by Sala on a device called the Mixtur-Trautonium, a pre-synthesizer orchestral electronic instrument of which he wasn’t just the undisputed master, but the only player in existence.
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| The Mixtur Trautonium ca. 1952. |
After his acceptance into the Berlin Conservatory in 1929, Sala came into contact with the Trautonium, which had recently been invented by one Dr. Friedrich Trautwein. Inspired to more deeply understand the principles behind the nascent technology of electronic music, and to further it, he went on to study physics at the University of Berlin in the mid-nineteen-thirties.
This positioned him well to develop new models of Trautonium, a series that culminated in 1948 with the Mixtur-Trautonium, which, unlike Trautwein’s monophonic original, could sound multiple voices at once. The instrument proved versatile, and indeed commercial: any German who grew up in the nineteen-fifties will remember its sounds from television advertisements.
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| A Trautonium model built by Robert Moog, 1966-1968. |
The chance to work on The Birds, by far Sala’s most widely heard soundtrack work, “presented itself when a former classmate of Sala who worked at Universal Studios in Hollywood heard that Hitchcock wanted synthetically produced bird sounds for his next movie,” says Google Arts & Culture. “Hitchcock, who deliberately wanted to avoid creating traditional movie music, even flew to Sala’s recording studio in Berlin where he was impressed by the sounds made by the Trautonium, which ultimately produced all the movie’s sound effects.” In collaboration with fellow pioneering electronic composer Remi Gassmann, Sala produced a veritable storm of not just avian shrieks and cackles, but also the harsh swirl of the elements and the creaks and groans of failing man-made infrastructure. Or at least that’s what moviegoers may imagine hearing in a soundtrack that often verges on the otherworldly, even the abstract — and Hitchcock knew that the imagination is the place from which real fear arises.
THE BIRTHDAY PARTY ATTACK
THE SCHOOLHOUSE ATTACK
THE CHIMNEY ATTACK