Melanie and the Brenners barricade themselves in the family house and endure wave after wave of attacks. During a lull in the assaults, Melanie ventures upstairs alone, where sounds seem to be emanating from the attic. She enters the room and sees that the house’s roof has been partly pulled away. Immediately, in the film’s most hair-raising attack, the birds swoop down, a coup de theatre equivalent of the shower scene in Psycho. It’s a remarkably sadistic sequence, and also masochistic: as the birds peck Melanie into unconsciousness, she moans the name “Mitch” repeatedly, almost ecstatically. Hedren believed that Hitchcock used the scene to literally punish her after she rejected his physical advances, the culmination of a long campaign of harassment on and off the set. Hedren’s startling ordeal was ultimately revealed in her autobiography as well as in the HBO film The Girl (2012), starring Sienna Miller as Hedren and Toby Jones as Hitchcock.

When The Birds was first released, audiences were puzzled over its inconclusive ending, but mostly by the lack of any explanation of why the birds turned on the human race in the first place. Everything about the film’s publicity suggested a revenge-of-nature story along the lines of the 1950s big bug invasions, but The Birds did not fit easily into any category or critical container. Attempts to read the story as an allegory of environmentalism fall flat; the idea that the birds reflect and channel the emotions of the central characters, especially repressed and unconscious feelings, makes a good deal more sense. In any event, the world’s master manipulator of movie audiences wasn’t trying to sell a subtext; rather, Hitchcock may have accomplished the greatest feat of his career by holding an audience riveted and breathless, through the sheer imposition of cinematic will and technique, with a story that can never be rationally explained. Someone asked him during the filming of The Birds why on earth Tippi Hedren goes up to the attic alone. “Because that’s where I want her to go,” he replied. It’s an answer that explains a lot.

Birds attack the children at Bodega Bay school.

Melanie’s fateful trip to the attic

Jessica Tandy, Tippi Hedren, and Rod Taylor