Queens Drive-In: Psycho + The Birds (Double Feature)

With Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, John Gavin. After stealing forty thousand bucks from her boss’s client, real-estate secretary Marion Crane (Leigh) high-tails it out of Phoenix. Guilt-ridden and tired, she makes the very big mistake of stopping for the night at the Bates Motel, where she befriends its seemingly benign proprietor, the mother-loving Norman Bates (Perkins). You know what comes next. If you don’t, then we won’t be the ones to spoil Hitchcock’s horror game-changer, a film of spare intensity, at once austere and baroque in style, and so shockingly perverse in its implications that it cracked cinema open wide forever after.

With Tippi Hedren, Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy. In Hitchcock’s masterpiece of avian horror, Hedren’s mod socialite Melanie Daniels (Hedren) descends upon sleepy Bodega Boy, California, to aggressively pursue her crush object, Mitch (Taylor). From there, Hitchcock puts her through the wringer, as she finds herself fleeing for her life from swarms of seagulls, jays, hawks, and sparrows gone curiously amok. One of Hitch’s scariest, The Birds, loosely inspired by Daphne du Maurier’s terrifying short story, is a wildly intense experience, enhanced by razor-sharp editing and a music-free soundtrack of bird calls and flapping wings.