14. THE BIRDS IN THE BIRDS (1963)

Proving that there’s strength in numbers, the titular hellraisers in Alfred Hitchcock’s horror standard decimate a quaint California town with extreme prejudice. In real life, the worst a seagull could do is drop a deuce on your head or steal your sandwich at the beach. Hitch took it many steps forward, though, adapting a short story by author Daphne Du Maurier into an assaulting siege film, similar to alien invasion flicks but with birds replacing CGI-made E.T.’s. And these gulls are seriously pissed off, leaving a trail of corpses and ultimately winning. In Hitchcock’s world, there is a fate worse than combing seagull shit out of one’s hair.