Oscar Horrors: Bringing "The Birds" to Life

Oscar Horrors continues...

Here lies...The Birds, whose only Oscar nomination for Visual Effects were shot down by Cleopatra. The birds themselves are just resting, waiting to come back and haunt us all.

Amir here. Few horror films have had the long lasting effect of Hitchcock’s The Birds on my life. As a child – and I shamefully admit, well into my teenage years - I used to get scared really easily in the theatre. I’d turn all the lights in my house on after a horror film, just in case something was lurking in the dark. But I’d sleep on it and the morning after, I’d forget all about whatever it was that scared me: the serial killer, haunted toys or ghosts.

Thanks to Hitchcock's classic however, however, to this day I’m terrified of birds. I hate the way they strut around, looking at us with their soulless eyes. Some time in my childhood, it was The Birds that forever etched this frame in my memory.

Such is the power of cinema!

Like most Hitchcock films, The Birds doesn’t rely so much on the actual birds to scare us, but on the psychological horror that comes with the idea of the town’s takeover; the impending sense that at any minute another attack might start. But in those small bursts when we see the attacks, Hitchcock knocks it out of the park.

He used a combination of elements, from real birds on the set to archival footage, and from invisible nylon threads to yellow screen superimposition to achieve the effects that he wanted. The crew insisted on avoiding mechanical models for the most part and chose to use trained birds wherever possible. The result of the prolonged shooting period and the complex post-production is nearly impeccable. The birds look as alive and vicious as any animal I’ve seen on the screen.

Needless to say, almost fifty years later, some of these effects look a bit aged, but the impact they leave is still the same. The claustrophobic terror they inject in us is still as intense. And I’m sure there are other kids out there who think of Tippi Hedren’s helplessness in that attic every time they see a crow on the wire or a flock of gulls by the water.

Other Oscar Horrors...
Rosemary's Baby - Best Supporting Actress
The Swarm - Best Costume Design
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane -Best Actress in a Leading Role
The Birds - Best Effects, Special Visual Effects
The Fly -Best Makeup
Death Becomes Her -Best Effects, Visual Effects
The Exorcist -Best Actress in a Supporting Role 
Rosemary's Baby - Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium
Beetlejuice - Best Makeup
Carrie - Best Actress in a Leading Role
Bram Stoker's Dracula - Best Costume Design
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Best Actor in a Leading Role
King of the Zombies - Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic Picture
Poltergeist - Best Effects, Visual Effects
Hellboy II: The Golden Army -Achievement in Makeup
The Silence of the Lambs -Best Director
The Tell-Tale Heart -Best Short Subject, Cartoons

Roland Emmerich, Anyone?

File under: Things I Never Thought I'd Be Doing

...interviewing bombastic disaster movie king, Roland Emmerich!

And just when the interview was getting good, it ended! I had a million more questions I wanted to ask him like: Does Vanessa Redgrave even breathe dramatically when the camera is off?; Were all those male royals and their bastards in Tudor England really full lipped ginger pretty boys or was that just a casting preference for Anonymous (I couldn't tell them apart!)?; 10,000 BC ....what the hell?; Why have I never been invited to the über gay parties at your LA estate?; Was directing 90s muscle hunks Dolph Lundgren and Jean Claude Van Damme in Universal Soldier (1992) on set as fun as watching them be brain-dead super soldiers onscreen? (Hey, it was fun in 1992. Don't judge!)

P.S. I know that you're not supposed to like Anonymous, but I had fun watching it. Sometimes big bold cheesy underlining, playing to the balcony if you will, is JUST right for ridiculous conspiracy theories like "Shakespeare never wrote a word!". Sometimes you just want to hiss at hunchback villains dressed in black and swoon with lusty queens who go weak at the knees for poets.

Complete the Sentence. "The Last Thing I Watched..."

The last thing I watched was ____________  and it was _____________. I would have loved it / hated it more if ______________ . 

London: Early One Morning, Snowtown and Last Screening

Craig here (writer of Take Three) reporting for Nathaniel from the BFI London Film Festival. Today's round-up features three dark explorations into violent minds. Perfect for Halloween week then!

If disquieting French drama Early One Morning were a comedy it would need to hijack the title of another recent office-based film: Horrible Bosses. The financial suits upstairs are the cause for middle-aged everyman-exec Paul’s (played to fraught perfection by Jean-Pierre Darroussin) consternation in Jean-Marc Moutout’s film. What a total bunch of bankers! But Paul takes matters into his own hands in an explosive, very personal way. It starts with a coldly curious, matter-of-fact sequence: Paul gets up and ready for work, kisses his wife, gets on a bus and arrives at the office. The immediately perturbing vibe suggests that something terrible is inevitable. As it turns out, he shoots his bosses dead and then sits down at his desk. The film then flashes back to an earlier time to try and work out why Paul goes full nutjob with a handgun. It's clear from the finger pointing at the highly unsporting, self-regarding pair of CEOs (one played with pompous relish by Xavier Beauvois, the director of Of Gods and Men) and the hot potato topic of the recession that the film is trading on being a seasonably pertinent and bold exploration of current themes people will feel a kinship for. The film’s drastic actions are worrying, but maybe the Pauls of the world need a vicarious fictional mouthpiece to do the undoable acts on their behalf. After all, we like a David vs. Goliath tale. This one just goes one furious step further and attempts to annihilate its Goliath for all previous unfair dismissal. Early One Morning is mostly gripping viewing. Best avoided by those who’ve just been fired, mind. C+

The terrible bursts of violence in Early One Morning came fast and furious, but that’s nothing compared to what we get sporadically, intensively and with gut-churning abstraction throughout bold Australian drama Snowtown. [More after the jump.]

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Five Linky Pieces

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• Towleroad Ryan Gosling and Justin Timberlake's Mouse Club years by way of Ellen Degeneres chat .... shades of Drive?
• Tom Shone saves you time in reading about In Time with a 361 word review that I feel safe in assuming is ten times more insightful than most reviews three times its length will be. Did that sound fannish? Guilty!