ARE CROWS EVIL?

BY ANTHONY GARCIA

       

Imagine it’s a cold rainy Friday night, after a long day at work; all you want to do is relax. What a perfect night to snuggle up in some blankets, turn on Netflix and enjoy a scary movie. Before you decide what movie to watch, you go make some popcorn to get a feel for the movie theater atmosphere. After 5 minutes of scrolling through hundreds of movies, you decide to watch Jeepers Creepers. This film is a classic horror film that is scary enough to leave chills in your body for days. In the middle of the film, the protagonist and his girlfriend run into an abandoned church. As the scene progresses, you can clearly see and hear crows cawing, the music gets louder as if crows are supposed to be evil then all of a sudden you start seeing more and more crows. It turns out that there are dead bodies residing under the church. Wow who knew crows actually lived nearby abandoned churches with dead bodies.

This isn’t the only film that depicts crows as evil. This is clearly a misconception about crows in modern day Hollywood.  Crows are happy playful creatures. I have witnessed crows playing around in the snow. What’s so evil about that?  Here is my journal entry in which I observed the crows. 

Crows playing in the snow

I have yet to come across a film that depicts crows in a happy atmosphere, except for Dumbo. But even then, Disney decided to depict the crows as racist, can crows ever get a break? In the film industry, crows are considered as the scariest bird. The question is why? I think that maybe it’s because they were somewhat associated with the black plague, many cultures associate them with death. This misconception about crows is in fact a lie.

Crows like any other animal are not evil. They’re just birds, how can something so innocent be affiliated with darkness? It just does not make sense to me. That is why I decided to make a short documentary debunking misconceptions about crows. In our film we are proving many crow misconceptions wrong. The biggest misconception about crows, in my opinion, is that crows are depicted as evil in films and with the public. The reality is that crows are really intelligent and not evil. Crows are so smart that they can solve puzzles in order to get food. BBC, a UK television channel, made a short Youtube clip showing just how quickly and amazingly a crow solves an eight piece puzzle. You can watch that video here: http://youtu.be/AVaITA7eBZE

UW_Bothell crows

Our short documentary is going to consist of crows in their natural habitat, interviews on how the public sees crows, crows in films, myths, and misconceptions about crows. As real footage that we have taken is being shown on the screen, we are going to be talking explaining certain topics like you would see in a long documentary.

We will go more into depth about crows being depicted as evil in our film. Enjoy our movie trailer for our film: http://youtu.be/QUsB3htKsTw. This is only sample of what we have to offer, stay tuned for the actual film in the next few weeks.