Tipi Hedren's pistachio green suit made The Birds such an iconic movie that it comes as an enormous surprise to movie goers that the story was in fact created by English writer Daphne du Maurier, and not by the undisputed king of horror, Alfred Hitchcock. In fact, du Maurier's short story first appeared in her 1952 collection of short stories titled "The Apple Tree". The Birds is the story of a farmer and his family whose community in Cornwall, in the south west of England, is attacked by flocks and flocks of murderous seagulls. The story is set shortly after the end of World War Two, the birds bringing an new aerial danger to the whole of England now that the aerial assault from the German air force has been vanquished. The story is thought to be a metaphor for the Blitz attacks in London during the war.
The release of the movie version of the story coincided with the reprinting of "The Apple Tree", which was re-titled The Birds and Other Stories.
Du Maurier was renowned for her gothic novelettes and she almost always drew inspiration for her work from the things that she saw all around her. One day she saw a man ploughing a field whilst seagulls flew overhead. She developed this image until the seagulls were twice the normal size, and determined to attack.
The collection includes five other stories; "Monte Verita" tells the story of a sect that live on an isolated mountain, and who entice young, pretty girls from the surrounding areas to come and live with them, never to be seen again. It is based on a real life colony living on Monte Verite in Switzerland who believe that man should live in harmony with nature.
In its original incarnation the collection was known as "The Apple Tree", and the title story of the first collection tells the tale of a man who neglects his wife, but after her death is sure that her spirit is occupying an apple tree in the garden. He vows to remove the tree, but never gets around to it, thereby neglecting her just as much in death as he did in life.
"The Little Photographer" is the story of a spoiled, rich Marquise who has an affair because she is bored.
The second story in the book to be adapted for the big screen is "Kiss Me Again, Stranger", a thriller that tells the story of a mechanic who follows a girl who works in a movie theater home, but ends up following her to a cemetery instead. This is one of the more gothic novel-esque stories in the book. The darker tone that has been introduced is continued with the final story in the book, "The Old Man", in which a neighbor tells of a father who kills one of his children.
The collection was not received particularly well, which is in some ways odd given that The Birds became a cult movie, but critics generally considered each of the stories to be too long, and not very original, following a rather generic, horror blueprint without developing any stylistic elements of their own. This reluctance by critics to take her work seriously was somewhat of a variation on a theme, because many of du Maurier's novels also garnered the same reception. Like her novels, du Maurier was rather preoccupied with the paranormal, and as her professional success and fame increased, she became increasingly mysterious and reclusive.
Du Maurier passed away in her beloved Fowey, in the south of Cornwall, at the age of eighty nine, having been awarded the honor of Dame of the British Empire.
