Despite being known for creating scary, suspenseful thrillers and adventure stories for decades, Alfred Hitchcock only started making straight-up horror movies at the end of his career, and really only did three of them. The first and third of these—1960’s Psycho and 1972’s Frenzy—were movies about serial murderers compelled by weird and creepy sexual hangups, but the one on the middle was Hitchcock’s lone monster movie, The Birds, in which a seaside town is beset by flocks of murderous birds, all working in concert despite the laws of nature. Now that classic story is being adapted as a BBC miniseries, according to Digital Spy (via Slashfilm).
The project is being spearheaded by Harry Potter film producer David Heyman and written by writer and playwright Conor McPherson, who in 2009 turned The Birds into a stage play. Much like McPherson’s play, the miniseries will follow the original 1952 novel by Daphne du Maurier much more than the Hitchcock film. While Hitchcock’s writers set the film in coastal California and made it very much a Gothic-style romance between a wealthy party girl and a playboy with a needy mother that ends in a bird attack, the novel had people in a farming community trapped in their homes and barns during a mysterious avian apocalypse.
The novel was an allegory to the Blitz in London during WWII, with farmers in Cornwall beset by birdie bombardment. The miniseries will keep the Cornwall setting and will probably feel very claustrophobic. McPherson’s stage play featured no actual birds at all, though we could see the BBC opting to at least recreate some of Hitchcock’s more chilling effects, like dozens of beaks pecking through a wooden door, or a couple of birds breaking through a window and needing to be batted back.
We’re not expecting the movie will play much of a role in the miniseries otherwise, but it is interesting to note that this miniseries is not the first time talk of revisiting the story has happened. For a long while, Michael Bay was attached to produce a big screen remake, and there was even a very bad 1994, made-for-TV sequel called The Birds II: Land’s End.
No word on when the BBC miniseries is set to premiere, but we’ll definite keep you up to date on any further seeds. Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
For more horror, check out a review of Slither, a conversation with writer-producer Mick Garris, and the Top 7 Horror Movie Heroes.
Images: Universal
Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!
