The movie features 370 effects shots. The final shot is a composite of 32 separately filmed elements.
The production design makes much use of the color green.
The scene where Tippi Hedren is ravaged by birds near the end of the movie took a week to shoot. The birds were attached to her clothes by long nylon threads so they could not get away.
The schoolhouse in the film is the Potter Schoolhouse, which served Bodega, California, from 1873 to 1961. The building is now a private residence.
The schoolhouse, in Bodega Bay, California, has also been known to be haunted, even back during the filming. According to Tippi Hedren, the entire cast was spooked to be there. She also mentioned how she had the feeling, while there, that "the building was immensely populated... but there was nobody there." When Hitchcock was told about the schoolhouse being haunted, according to Hedren, he was even more encouraged to film there.
The sound of reel-to-reel tape being run backward and forward was used to help create the frightening bird squawking sounds in the film
The use of standard blue screen techniques for doing matte shots of the birds proved to be unacceptable. The rapid movement of the birds, especially their wings, caused excessive blue fringing in the shots. It was determined that the sodium vapor process could be used to do the composites. The only studio in America that was equipped for this process was the Walt Disney studio. Ub Iwerks, who had become the world's leading expert on the sodium vapor process, was assigned to this production.
There is no musical score for the film except for the sounds created on the mixtrautonium, an early electronic musical instrument, by Oskar Sala, and the children singing in the school.
This was not the first dramatization of Daphne Du Maurier's short story. It was previously adapted for radio at least twice, once starring Herbert Marshall, and again in 1954. Furthermore, it was adapted by writer James P. Cavanagh for a half-hour episode of the TV series Danger. Cavanaugh also wrote at least five episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, including two directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and was the first writer to adapt Robert Bloch's novel of Psycho for Hitchcock's production. However, his script was jettisoned in favor of the Joseph Stefano adaptation.
This was the first film to carry the Universal Pictures name after dropping the Universal-International name.
Voted seventh-scariest movie of all time by a poll carried out on the British public by Channel 5 and "The Times" in 2006.
When audiences left the film's UK premiere at the Odeon, Leicester Square, London, they were greeted by the sound of screeching and flapping birds from loudspeakers hidden in the trees to scare them further.
When Lydia discovers Dan Fawcett, on the wall behind her is a drawing of the gas station explosion by Albert Whitlock.
When the children are running down the street from the schoolhouse, extra footage was shot back on the Universal sound stages to make the scene more terrifying. A few of the children were brought back and put in front of a process screen on a treadmill. They would run in front of the screen on the treadmill with the Bodega Bay footage behind them while a combination of real and fake crows were attacking them. There were three rows of children and when the treadmill was brought up to speed it ran very fast. On a couple of occasions during the shoot, a number of the children in the front fell and caused the children in back to fall as well. It was a very difficult scene to shoot and took a number of days to get it right. The birds used were hand puppets, mechanical and a couple were trained live birds.
When the film was aired on NBC-TV in the USA on 6 January 1968, it became the highest rated film shown on television up to that time. The record held until Love Story overtook it on 1 October 1972.