The raven is the most overworked prop in the horror genre. It’s on metal albums, in the Halloween aisle, on tattoo flash sheets, and countless paperback covers (usually accompanied by fog). By any normal rule of cultural taste, it should have gone the way of the plastic skull, beloved but more silly than terrifying. And yet put a raven behind an actor who hasn’t noticed it, and a room full of horror fans goes quiet.
I’ve spent a long while trying to work out why ravens and crows still land when so much of the decoration around it doesn’t. I think the answer is that these corvids’ folklore was never decoration: It was a field note.
The Bird That Came to the Dead
Before the raven was a symbol, it was a scavenger with a reliable schedule, and poets and historians knew exactly where it would turn up. In the poem on the battle of Brunanburh and in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (a compilation various scribes’ historical accounts of the battles fought from 9-12AD) there are records of the victors leaving behind “the swarthy raven with horny nib” to feed on what they’d done. Whereas in Beowulf, a messenger imagines “the wan-coated raven” telling the eagle “how he sped in the eating.” Scholars call this the Beasts of Battle motif. The raven, wolf, and eagle are always waiting. They do not cause the deaths, but they consistently arrive after.
Irish myth tightens the screw. In the death tale of Cu Chulainn, the hero straps himself to a standing stone so that he can die on his feet, and his enemies wait. Then the birds come and settle on his shoulder, and Lugaid steps in and takes his head. In a later telling the bird is Badb, a war goddess who comes in the form of a scald-crow (more commonly known as a hooded crow) to find out whether he’s really dead. The crow is the proof of his death and the cue for what follows.
Ordinary people outside of ancient poems and mythology also noticed ravens’ patterns. William Henderson’s 1879 collection of northern English folklore lists “ravens croaking on or near” your house among the “tokens of approaching death.” He also noted a commonly-held Swedish belief that ravens screaming by night in the swamps “are held to be the ghosts of murdered men.”
But as fascinating as ancient history and mythology is (did I mention that Odin, of Norse legend, also had two pet ravens?), let’s move forward in time a bit to a poem every true horror fan knows and how changing the type of bird turned it into an enduring horror classic over 180 years after its initial publication.
Edgar Allan Poe Almost Wrote “The Parrot”
It’s almost impossible to imagine, but the most famous raven in English literature didn’t start as a raven!
In The Philosophy of Composition (1846), Edgar Allan Poe walks through how he built “The Raven” and says that what he needed for the story was “a non-reasoning creature capable of speech.” His first thought was a parrot! Thankfully, as he states, the parrot “was superseded forthwith by a raven, as equally capable of speech, and infinitely more in keeping with the intended tone.” Read that sentence twice. He’s telling you the entire effect of using a raven for is tone. The bird is a delivery system for one word, and a parrot saying “nevermore” is a joke while a raven is HORROR.
Edgar Allan Poe had also read his competition. Charles Dickens kept a talking raven called Grip and put him in his novel Barnaby Rudge in 1841, where the raven says “Halloa, halloa, halloa! What’s the matter here! Keep up your spirits. Never say die.” Poe reviewed Dickins’ novel and complained that the corvid was wasted. “Its croakings,” he wrote, “might have been prophetically heard in the course of the drama.” So, in 1845, he published the raven he thought Dickens should have written. One with the appropriate tone of impending dread.
The Poe Society warns that the Philosophy of Composition essay is “part posture and possibly part hoax,” so we can likely take “The Parrot” as Poe telling a good humorous story about himself. However, I stand by his description of utilizing a corvid for “tone” and his overall story stands strong either way. Plus, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology notes that one captive raven has actually been taught to say “nevermore,” so at least that part was never fiction.
It’s Not Your Imagination: That Bird Is Watching You!
Here’s where the folklore stops being quaint: In 2006 John Marzluff’s team at the University of Washington were curious about crows’ abilities to recognize faces, so they trapped and banded crows on campus while wearing a visually unique mask. Afterward, people walking through campus in that same mask got aggressively scolded by the crows, and the crows continued to do so “for at least 2.7 years”.
A follow-up study found the grudge against the mask/face spreading through the crow population, doubling in frequency and traveling “at least 1.2 km from the place of origin over a 5-year period”. Crows that had never seen the original trapping were still scolding the face. Marzluff kept walking in the mask. According to press reports in 2024, a walk in the mask in 2023 drew no scolding at all, but it took seventeen years for the crows and their offspring to forgive the original insult.
It gets stranger. Crows gather around a dead crow and afterward avoid the spot, and they learn to scold any human they saw standing near the body after “only one training event”. They primarily look after their own, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t paying attention to how you treat other birds. A dead pigeon drew less scolding and no mobbing, but they did have something to say about it!
Ravens in a caching experiment hid their food faster and went back to improve their hiding places less often when a visible rival could see them through an open peephole, compared to trials with a hidden rival and no open peephole. The ravens were reasoning about what a bird they could not see might be able to see. A raven’s pallium holds about 1.2 billion neurons, “more than in the pallium of a capuchin monkey.” And forensic anthropologists reviewing real casework list crows and ravens among the animals “frequently involved in scattering and scavenging” human remains.
Reading through modern scientific studies, the folklore looks less like superstition and more like a first draft. The bird does come to the dead. It does watch individual people. It remembers, and it tells the others.
Every horror premise about a crow or raven is an only slightly exaggerated behavioral paper!
Crows and Ravens in Horror Films
Alfred Hitchcock understood corvids long before the research papers existed. The scene everyone remembers from The Birds (1963) has no attack in it. Tippi Hedren sits outside the Bodega Bay schoolhouse, smoking, while crows collect one by one on the climbing frame behind her. Nothing happens for a long time. The horror is being watched by something that hasn’t decided how it wants to treat you yet.
Daphne du Maurier wrote the original story, but Hitchcock knew exactly how to bring the terror to life. Whereas de Maurier lumps crows in with gulls, much like Poe critiquing Dickens, Hitchcock knew how to utilize the majestic black bird’s tone to invoke pure dread.
Other horror films cast the bird as a messenger. Spoiler warning for a 1978 sequel… In Damien: Omen II a raven visits a woman shortly before her heart attack, and later claws out a journalist’s eyes on a country road.
James O’Barr’s comic The Crow (1989) and the 1994 film adaptation make the earlier ideas of crows being connected to souls explicit. In Roger Ebert’s summary, the soul “is escorted to the next world (according to the narration) by a crow,” and when there is unfinished business “sometimes the crow will bring him back again.”
It’s slightly outside of the horror genre, but George R. R. Martin’s Bran from A Song of Ice and Fire dreams of a three-eyed crow. HBO renamed it to a “three-eyed raven.” My guess is that they did it for the same reason Poe did. Although both crows and ravens are widely used in the horror genre, and as a cultural shorthand for ominous outcomes, if you really want to up the dread, you choose the raven.
Why Crows and Ravens Never Go Out of Style for Horror Fans
Crows and ravens will always be a part of the horror genre because on a deep, almost unknowable level, they hold us accountable. They know us, not just as carrion after we’ve met our ends, but as living beings. They watch us through all walks of life, and they judge our character. For those committing horrors, that’s as good as a death sentence. For those merely watching? It’s unsettling to know that an icon of horror is watching you even more than you’re watching it.
I only touched upon European beliefs regarding crows and ravens, in this article, but they’re a part of ALL of our lives. And they always have been and always will be. Whether you’re a workman or royalty, the corvids are studying you. Did you know that there are always at least six ravens kept in the Tower of London? It’s been a long-held belief that “if the Tower of London ravens are lost or fly away, the Crown will fall and Britain with it.” The historical origin of that statement is debated, with most believing it cropped up in the 1940s while others claim it dates back to the Victorian era or beyond. However, it’s based in this truth: The Royals and people of London believe a raven is keeping score. And they’re right.
A raven on an album cover or used as a Halloween decoration fails when it’s a silhouette, a mere shape borrowed for mood with nothing to back it up. It works when the film or the page treats it as an animal with a memory as old as time. It doesn’t matter that they haven’t attacked you or the character on screen…
Crows and ravens are icons of horror because they know your face, and they know what you did. How will YOU be judged?
*This guest article was written by Vitaly M. You can read more about him in his author bio below*
Images for this article are primarily free stock photos from Pixabay of lovely crows and ravens. Despite their cemented place in horror, there’s no reason to be afraid of them. They’re very smart but also very sweet, so long as you are to them! Anyway, the other images in the ‘films’ section were purchased on CineMaterial (posters) and MovieStillsDB (movie stills).
