“Like a Zombie Story”: High-School Girls Find a New Kind of Fear in Hitchcock’s The Birds | A Mini Theater with a Café and Bookshelves #2

“It’s like a zombie story.” “It’s kind of like vampires, too.” Starting from how today’s high-school girls react to Daphne du Maurier’s original story “The Birds,” Tadashi Koyama, filmmaker and mystery scholar, rereads Hitchcock’s classic as “eco-horror” in the second installment of his series. (From “A Mini Theater with a Café and Bookshelves,” Hon no Machi, June 2026 issue)

Classic though it is, it is an old film. It would be no surprise if you wondered, “Why The Birds, and why now?” That is the question the article opens with.

What High-School Girls Saw in The Birds

By way of a fun aside, the author introduces Volume 8 of Bernard-jo Iwaku (Miss Bernard Said; by Yuki Shikawa, Ichijinsha, 2026), a manga in which book-loving high-school students discuss literature from every era and corner of the world. In one scene, the characters read Daphne du Maurier’s novella “The Birds,” the source of the film, and gleefully share their impressions.

“It’s like a zombie story.” “It’s kind of like vampires, too.”

Huge flocks of birds hurl themselves against the doors and windows of the house where a family is hiding; masses of dead birds are described in gruesome detail; and like vampires, the birds attack at night. It really is a zombie novel, or a vampire tale, the author agrees. Manga or not, if it is a hit with today’s high-school girls, du Maurier’s story must have a universality that transcends time and place.

An “Eco-Horror” Perspective

The original story never explains why the birds attack people. Hitchcock’s film adapts it into something that feels all too plausible, yet it, too, gives no reason or background for the attacks. And that, the author says, is exactly what makes it so eerie.

As a way of rereading that fear for our times, the article then turns to Horror Literature Through History: An Encyclopedia of the Stories That Speak to Our Deepest Fears (edited by Matt Cardin, Greenwood Press, US, 2017). This encyclopedia places the film The Birds under the entry “eco-horror,” as one of a group of stories in which animals turn against humans as a warning about environmental destruction.

Watch The Birds alongside Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and an entirely new view opens up. The second half of the article goes on to explore the pleasures of that rereading.

The full article is available in the June issue PDF.

Tadashi Koyama
Filmmaker and mystery scholar. He writes about the territory where mystery fiction and film intersect. He writes the series “A Mini Theater with a Café and Bookshelves” for Hon no Machi.

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This article introduces installment 2 of “A Mini Theater with a Café and Bookshelves” by Tadashi Koyama, published in the June 2026 issue (Vol. 14) of Hon no Machi, the community salon magazine of Kanda, Ochanomizu and Jimbocho.

▶Read the June 2026 issue of Hon no Machi (PDF, in Japanese)

Founded in 1980, Hon no Machi brings you the latest from Book Town every month, together with Jimbocho’s bookstores, publishers, cafés and galleries.

▶ For other installments of “A Mini Theater with a Café and Bookshelves,” see All installments

日本語で読む — Read this article in Japanese