Irish playwright Conor McPherson’s 2009 psychological thriller bears little resemblance to Daphne du Maurier’s 1952 short story that inspired it, and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 film adaptation. The story's single constant is the deadly bird attacks that coincide with the tides, but the location is moved from du Maurier’s Cornwall, England and Hitchcock’s Bodega Bay, California to New England, and the focus is narrowed to three strangers who take shelter in an abandoned farmhouse. Much like George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, a film that McPherson was a fan of as a kid, his adaptation leans less into the chaos happening outside, and more into the resulting friction that mounts among these survivors as their confinement and dwindling resources take a psychological toll.
