Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is one cult film that has also won over the cultivated buff. As Peter Morris remarks (in his Dictionary of Films): “Though one of the subtlest films of the genre, containing little graphic horror, it is also one of the most passionate and involving.” Jean-Luc Godard quotes the film in his futuristic Alphaville. So does François Truffaut in Fahrenheit 451. Even Eugene Ionesco, the brilliant playwright, may have had Don Siegel’s pods in mind when he wrote his Absurdist masterpiece Rhinoceros. There, humankind turns into thick-skinned, insensitive, conformist rhinos—pods on the hoof.
In any case, the film stands on its own thirty years after its modest release. Indeed, for its pacing and complexity many people still prefer it over the more opulent 1978 version by Philip Kaufman. The original began as just one of those “B” films that in the ‘50s lured us to the drive-ins for chills and thrills. But its stark effects and serious concerns made it a cult favorite, first in Europe, then in North America. For years it was one of the most requested films on television, and a film society standby. Even today it seems a unique combination of the nightmare world of horror movies, the prophecy of sci-fi and the shadowy, webbed paranoia of film noir. This Invasion crosses all sorts of lines, including the one that separates pop entertainment from high art.
The giant pods that sprout those cold, sinister clones have received all kinds of interpretation. For some, the fear of these unemotional creatures expressed America’s fear of communist infiltration in the early ‘50s, especially as typified by Senator Joseph McCarthy. For others, the pod creatures themselves represent a society terrified of a minority idea or a new freedom. The film’s themes of the threat to the individual’s will and the dangerous pressure to conform speak to people on any point of the political spectrum.
The film may have seemed more topical in the early ‘50s, when the papers were full of stories about brainwashing in the Korean War and suspicions of Red subversion in North America. J. Edgar Hoover articulated this fear in his book Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1958, p. 9): “Remember, always, that there are thousands of people in this country now working in secret to make it happen here.” Clearly the film touched a naked nerve. In addition to such obvious cases as I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951) and My Son John (1952), this political context colored the whole cycle of Alien Invader films.
The nerve is still naked. It’s a matter of not just politics but of nightmare. The film evokes the terror we may all have felt when we dreamt—or experienced—a loved one suddenly turning cold and unfeeling towards us. What makes this movie so chilling is that the aliens here are not foreign creatures but our intimates, our loved ones and most familiar friends. The film is so unsettling because it depicts threat and psychological violence within the nuclear family. After all, the ‘50s were also a period of “Togetherness,” when happy family sitcoms ruled TV-land. The film’s locale of Santa Mira is just this kind of Americana—and we witness its exposure.
There is also the fear of becoming vegetable, here as in The Thing (1950). In an older horror tradition, we dread succumbing to our animal nature. Hence the werewolf and Frankenstein monster sagas and all Them Other Beasts—from 20,000 Fathoms, Outer Space, Beneath the Sea and Black Lagoons. In the bland ‘50s this fear of unbridled animal energy was mirrored by the opposite fear of turning into an unfeeling creature, such as a zombie or (in this case) a vegetable. Like the vegetable in the Gray Flannel Suit. For the ‘50s were also the age of Sloane Wilson’s dissection of the corporate mentality and David Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd. In Invasion, Miles Bennell becomes the alienated loner in the conformist society. Wherever people suppress their emotions and their character differences, you have the kind of “pod” society that threatens here.
In reaction against the ‘50s we began to want to be nonconformists—like everyone else. Our heroes reaffirm the validity of holding one opinion when the whole world maintains the contrary. Dr. Bennell opts for the life of love, madness, even pain, because to cut out those experiences is to fail to be fully human. He rejects the pod psychiatrist’s rationalization: “There is no need for love or emotion. Love, ambition, desire, faith—without them life is so simple.” So, let’s hope, do we. After all, we’re still children of the ‘50s, quaking under the same shadow of The Bomb and the same fears of humanity dwindling before mass technology and our heavy social pressures.
- Maurice Yacowar, The Current, Criterion Collection, 1986
The original 1956 trailer paints an atmosphere of inescapable terror and fear.
YOUTUBE TRAILER OF THE INVASION OF BODY SNATCHERS
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Invasion of the Body Snatchers 65 Years Later
The cast are competent and convincing, if unremarkable, and the film benefits from none of them being big names. (It would have been far harder to believe in Miles’s plight if he’d been played by, say, Joseph Cotten as once intended). Carmen Dragon’s score, similarly, is mostly mundane though it can be unsettling and effective on occasions, most notably at the opening of the chase sequence.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers is very much a film about what is depicted rather than how it’s depicted. The big question is what it all means; beyond recounting a rather far-fetched apocalyptic sci-fi scenario (and the last transition of a human into a pod person is famously baffling, since it seems to break physical laws that have been respected by the film up to that point), what is Invasion of the Body Snatchers trying to say? Seeing the pod people as a metaphor is almost irresistible. In reality, this might not have been intended by the filmmakers in anything but the most general sense. Siegel said:
… many of my associates are certainly pods. They have no feelings… The pods in my picture and in the world believe they are doing good when they convert people into pods… It leaves you with a dull world, but that, my dear friend, is the world in which most of us live.
But that hasn’t stopped the film becoming the object of multiple interpretations, in which the pod people could represent communists — like the giant ants of Them! (1954) — or they could stand for the inhumanity and repressiveness of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade… rendering the lead actor’s surname somewhat ironic! They might simply be symbols of 1950s conformity. “You’re reborn into an untroubled world”, a pod person explains to Miles. One of their most interesting features is that they’re aware of their nature, and enthusiastic about it. “Where everyone’s the same?” he responds dubiously. Or perhaps the movie’s talking about tranquillizers (which started to be widely prescribed in mid-1950s America). Or perhaps, as Grant says, we shouldn’t look for such a specific, literal explanation. “it is above all a centrist nostalgic lament” about changing society. Not so much homeland insecurity, then, as things not being what they used to be. That’s persuasive, but still — despite the impeccably liberal credentials of veteran producer Walter Wanger, who was heavily involved with shaping the film — a reading of the pod people as communists seems credible. The erasure of family attachments in favor of the wider society, the highly organized way fresh pods are distributed in the town square to spread pod-ism further, the elimination of private enterprise (at least two businesses are seen closing, while a farmer’s greenhouses are turned over to mass production for the common good) all point to the pods being Reds rather than McCarthyites.
Whatever they do or don’t represent, though, the disturbing possibility they hint at is much more fundamental, and explains why the film’s ensured as a cult classic long after the political circumstances changed. As film historian Carols Clarens (author of
An Illustrated History of the Horror Film) wrote:
The quote: The ultimate horror in science fiction is neither death nor destruction but dehumanization, a state in which emotional life is suspended, in which the individual is deprived of feelings, free will and moral judgment [LIKE GET OUT]… This type of fiction hits the most exposed nerve of contemporary society: collective anxieties about the loss of individual identity, subliminal mind-bending, or downright scientific/political brainwashing.
Or, as Miles puts it: “Only when we have to fight to stay human do we realize how precious it is.” It’s perhaps significant that near the end, he and Becky are forced to hide out in a cave, reduced to the state of the earliest humans. Released in the US on a double bill with the now little-known The Atomic Man (renamed Timeslip in the UK), Invasion of the Body Snatchers was shot in only three weeks on a budget greatly reduced from the original proposal, and received the sniffy critical reception that such pictures often did. The Los Angeles Times, for example, noted “suspense and some sharp acting” but opined that it “degenerates into a rather trite, hectic chase with a thoroughly unresolved ending.”
The influence of Invasion of the Body Snatchers has been felt in other works for the screen. It’s been remade overtly three times — under the same title by Philip Kaufman in 1978, as Body Snatchers (1993) by Abel Ferrara, and as The Invasion (2007) by Oliver Hirschbiegel. It also strongly influenced countless other movies, from Seconds (1966) to The Stepford Wives (1972) and Get Out (2017), as well as much of the zombie genre. There’s even a reference in Gremlins (1984).
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YOUTUBE OF INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956)
Scene where the Pod people surround the doctor and try to get him.
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