2. The Birds (1963)
It’s aged a bit worse than other Alfred Hitchcock classics, but perhaps it’d seem a bit less goofy today if more people knew that, in 1961, birds in the coastal town of Capitola, California, really did turn against their human superiors. Poisoned by toxic algae, flocks of normally mild-mannered seagulls began crashing into homes and cars and vomiting up half-digested food. It took decades for scientists to figure out the cause, but only two years for Big Al to turn the incident into an allegory for man’s increasingly fragile peace with the natural world – and maybe also female sexual frustration.
