Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
Director: Philip Kaufman
Screenwriter: W. D. Richter
Starring: Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Veronica Cartwright, Jeff Goldblum, Leonard Nimoy

This film is about aliens. Technically. But also, it isn’t.

This is the second adaptation of “The Body Snatchers” by Jack Finney (following the 1956 Don Siegel adaptation, also titled Invasion of the Body Snatchers). It follows roughly the same plot, where strange, plant-based life forms come to Earth after travelling across the stars, where they grow replicas of human beings in huge pods, each identical save for the removing of emotion (and so no war, no pain, no love). Their infiltration of the community they find themselves in is the scene of paranoia, of the discovery of a conspiracy, of the terror of realising that your family members may look and sound the same, but that they aren’t actually them. A small band of survivors must battle the odds when the system has been infiltrated and turned against them. The novel and original film, taking place in the midst of 1950s Red Scare McCartheyism, is as thinly veiled an allegory for America’s fear of communism as you can get, though Finney denied this throughout his life (movies such as The Thing From Another World and It Came From Outer Space also follow the trend). Both of those texts are also seminal sci-fi horror reading/viewing. The question, therefore, is how does this version stack up?

Part of the genius of this interpretation is the decision to move the action from the small town of Santa Mira (in the film)/Mill County (in the book) to downtown San Francisco. The added chaos of urban life gives a sense of menace to the spreading contamination. The allegory here is of corporations turning people into shells of their former selves, and of the destruction of the natural world – a kind of capitalist updating of the red weed from H. G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds”. Roger Ebert commented that it might also be influenced by the Watergate scandal, with tapped phones and wires. Whilst this is a possibility, those features were always elements in the novel and the first film. What is certain, is that by putting this viral personality takeover in the middle of a city, the danger is far more immediate. With the first film, if it gets out of the small town, there’s still a chance. There’s a larger civilisation out there to help. Here, if you’re dead in the city, with all that manpower and all those connections, with all that modernity, there’s not much chance that anywhere else is going to last. Along with this updating, the pod-people in their growing stage are much more organic, more tissue-like, adding to the ecological themes. It isn’t as strong a body-horror shift, but perhaps comparable to the way in which the 1958 version of The Fly (starring Vincent Price) was updated for modern audiences: a reimagining rather than a remake, as directed by David Cronenberg in 1986 (ironically, also starring Jeff Goldblum).

The air of being hemmed in is all around. The buildings impose, the close proximity that everyone is to each other (and in some sequences having several of the characters together in every shot one after the other), makes the idea that the people next to you aren’t who they say they are even worse. The main cast is terrific, bringing sufficient weight and drama to a terror slowly building up as the horrific realisation of what is going on dawns on them. The little things occurring in the background add to that paranoia, and is something Edgar Wright specifically mentions as an influence on the background details for Shaun of the Dead in his DVD commentary (ironically, Wright’s body-snatching film The World’s End actually has the ending of the original novel, in which the invading force realises humanity will never be converted, which is something no actual novel adaptation has kept). The occasional shots of the garbage compactors crushing the husks of used pods comes back time and time again unmentioned but always there, and when you realise what they are, by then it’s all too late. Everything’s already over.

Speaking of endings, Kevin McCarthy (who played Dr Miles in the first film) has a cameo in this one, playing very much a similar character (but not the same), slamming on Donald Sutherland’s car and screaming ‘You’re next!’, much like his famous ending to the first film. Even if it’s not Dr Miles, it gives the impression that Miles has been wandering for years warning us of the oncoming apocalypse. It’s so iconic an original ending that one wonders how this film could possibly one-up it. And yet it does, in an ending reveal burned into the public consciousness with just sound. Sound that has drained from the world as the film runs on, with characters fleeing through the streets, their feet slamming against the road. Somehow that’s the most disturbing thing of all. The takeover of the pod people, with their uniformity, has reduced the need for talk, for going anywhere unplanned, for noise. Despite their horrifying screech, the emptiness of the sound of the world is what truly scares. The naturalness of the world has faded. Now it is simply a factory of the pods, a greenhouse for empty husks.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers has everything you could want. A great cast, direction that mostly stands up (there are unfortunately some parts when Kaufman decides to go for some egregious camera movements which betray the camp B-movie roots and lodge in the cinematic throat), an all-consuming tone, and some of the most iconic scenes of all science-fiction and horror. It has to be seen to be believed, and, even with the odd misstep, remains an all-time classic.

Score: 20/24

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
Director: Don Siegel
Screenwriters: Daniel Mainwaring
Starring: Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter, Larry Gates, King Donovan, Carolyn Jones, Jean Willes, Ralph Dumke

In the 1950s, American sci-fi horror entered an age of two new zeitgeists. One was the atomic age fear, which gave us our big monster movies such as Them! and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. The other came slap bang in the middle of the Red Scare, fuelled by anti-communist fears and sentiments roused by McCarthyism and Hollywood blacklisting. Here, the genres found a way to direct these feelings into their films. Movies such as The Thing from Another World (based on the novella “Who Goes There?!” by John W. Campbell) and It Came from Outer Space played heavily into these ideas, presenting alien threats that appeared like humans, wanting to take us over invisibly, substituting our individuality for a like-minded, homogenous whole, as an allegory for the individual-identity-stealing threat of communism. Around the same time, John Wyndham over in England published “The Midwich Cuckoos”, and Robert A. Heinlein wrote “The Puppet Masters”. It was a whole craze. And although Jack Finney, who penned Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ original novel in 1954, would go on record to say that there was no anti-communist themes present, it is ironic that the book, and the first of four adaptations, would be perhaps the most influential of all Cold War sci-fi horror stories.

In this 1956 film, Dr Miles (played by Kevin McCarthy) is brought into a police station in the dead of night, ranting and raving that there’s not much time left to stop “it”. He then proceeds to explain exactly what needs stopping, and what unfolds is a story of alien possession in the small town of Santa Mira and a conspiracy to replace everyone in the world with emotionless duplicates formed by giant alien seed pods.

What is perhaps most pleasing about Invasion of the Body Snatchers is its pacing. Whilst the first half is mostly the build up towards the unveiling of the conspiracy, it nonetheless has to manage multiple issues at a time. It must build up the feeling of dread, of something lurking under the surface. It must introduce and keep us entertained with our main characters. And it must stop us getting bored whilst its slow, creeping menace worms its way into our thudding chests. Invasion manages to do this wonderfully, with every scene advancing character and plot and menace incredibly deftly. By the time the reality of the situation is revealed, you understand that you’ve been watching it all happen, too slow to put the pieces together, and now it’s all hopelessly too late.

Handled by Don Siegel’s wonderful direction, we have chilling moments such as a whole town descending on a square to begin distributing the pods to the world, and the ‘birthing’ of the clones from the great gooey seeds. With the striking and memorable final moments of a character screaming “They’re here already! You’re next! You’re next!” in the middle of a busy highway, low angled, tilted, harsh lighting, surrounded by uniform car lights not heeding his warning, we suddenly understand that an outside invasion isn’t the only form of hive-mind takeover in the world. Mass consumerism, the dazzling lights of 20th century industry, the inability to heed the individual fellow man, it’s all here. We are all pod people in one way or another. The sense of futility and nihilism has rarely been matched since.

There are times when the voice over (an incredibly common trope for sci-fi movies of the time, especially very low budget ones) is not needed, and can get in the way of the action unfolding on screen, which itself is a visual representation of this same recounting of events by telling exactly what we’re already seeing, but thankfully this interjection only occurs a few times throughout the film and is in no way overbearing. It is mostly gone for the final half of the film, when the momentum kicks into overdrive and everything runs at a thousand miles per hour as the conspiracy unfolds, so at least it knows to keep back when our attention is needed the most.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1954) teaches us that nobody can be trusted. Everyone is in on the conspiracy, and even law enforcement, phone companies, doctors, mayors, grocers, are out to get you. Decades later, in 1987, Andrew Tudor would outline his definition of ‘paranoid horror’ in his textbook “Monsters and Mad Scientists”, claiming the fundamental shift was in 1960 thanks to the killer-next-door films Psycho and Peeping Tom. The breakdown of the authority figure, the terror from within the circle of safety, the transmutation of the flesh, disease; all these ideas he outlines as part of his theory. He does acknowledge, however, that some films before 1960 played up the paranoid nature of the threat not coming from outside, but from within. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is right on the cusp of this transition, and in an incredible 80 minutes worms its way into our minds, our hearts, and cinematic culture. With remarkable ideas, direction, staging, and some great central performances, locked into place by a terrific open ending, Don Siegel’s classic is right to be revered as such, going above being a schlock horror picture show to become something far more important.

Score: 20/24