The Birds

I taught it for years, it never failed to unnerve the students, especially after a break when the seagulls descended on the playground to eat up the discarded bits of food!

I loved the Hitchcock version, with Tippi Hedron rowing a boat in high heels and a perfect hairdo!

I think it was just a short story originally - and set in Cornwall from what I remember.

The Hitchcock version was brilliant. I love Hitchcock films anyway.

We went for a walk on St. Abb's Head just after we had seen the film. Hundreds of gulls wheeling round. Terrifying!

I live quite near what was previously Gainsborough Studios, now converted to flats, alongside Regents Canal in London. There is a fantastic sculpture of Hitchcock within the complex, as the original power station subsequently became the birth place of Alfred Hitchcock as a film director.

Her scary short stories are really chilling. I remember one called The Blue Lenses - the heroine had had an eye operation and was fitted with lenses that distorted her world. And there was The Victorian Chaise Longue where a modern woman travelled back in time and found she'd changed places with a victorian woman who was dying of Tuberculosis.They were stories I only read once!

The film was superb. but I felt that its setting in California and not Cornwall, as per the book, removed the elemental factors which helped to create the original bleakness.

I read her short story before I saw the film. The short story really scared me - I could imagine the hopelessness of trying to avoid the attacks. Personally I've never found the film anywhere near as scary as everyone tells me it is. I agree with Deeda, her short stories are ones that shouldn't be read in the dark on your own