I think it’s about time for another remake of the 1956 film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, this time instead of aliens taking over human bodies, we should have a far-right leader who creates a cult of personality that turns normal people into mindless, worshipping zombies he and his henchmen control. Oh, right: that’s not fiction. It’s actually happened: MAGA is the prominent contemporary example, but we can also turn to other rightwing parties emerging in democracies across the world, which themselves in thrall to the cults of personality created in Russia and China under Putin and Xi.*
Wouldn’t that be appropriate? Perhaps another remake is already in the works by Warner Brothers… or so it was rumoured in 2017 and the rumour was still circulating in 2023, although the suggested writers don’t seem to be involved anymore. Allegedly Justin Lin (Star Trek Beyond) will be the director, although I am still searching online for confirmation. Smallscreen UK noted about a remake:
In a world that continues to grapple with unseen threats, societal divisions, and questions about our own reality, the Invasion Of The Body Snatchers film series remains eerily relevant. Whether exploring fears of infiltration during the Cold War or navigating the complexities of modern-day anxieties, the story continues to find new ways to terrify and engage audiences. As we look toward the upcoming remake, one can only wonder: how will the timeless tale of silent invasion be reimagined for a new generation?
I’m not sure if any horror film will be as scary as reality under Trump. MAGA is far more dangerous than mind-controlling aliens. But clearly not as smart as zombies: if MTG is the average MAGA cultist, I am surprised any of them can tie their own shoelaces let alone lead a country… but I digress.
In his introduction to the 60th anniversary edition of Jack Finney’s novel, The Body Snatchers (Simon & Schuster, 2015), Dean Koontz wrote that the novel “expresses profound truths through a compelling metaphor.” Let’s take a look at that metaphor, the book, and the films made from it (the 1950s’ films were also replete with metaphors about the atomic bomb). In all of them, the aliens believe they are helping humans, that the transformation will improve us, and that enforced conformity is for our own good.**
Back in 1956, when the first Invasion of the Body Snatchers film was released (only a year after the novel was published), the McCarthy witch hunt was barely over and still very much alive in people’s memory and imagination. McCarthy raised his paranoid threat of Communists taking over positions in the US government and industry and eventually the country. His accusations and hearings created a lingering firestorm of suspicion and distrust that continued for many years. The film melded Jack Finney’s1955 novel, The Body Snatchers, and those contemporary fears.
It also captures deeper psychological concerns. For many viewers and later critics, the film embodied the second Red Scare under McCarthy, but as Koontz also writes,
In the twenty-first century, so many powerful forces have reshaped society so rapidly, compared to the more measured pace of change in previous centuries, that it’s no surprise we feel besieged and in danger of losing our humanity. Communism and fascism are the obvious examples of ideologies that not merely devalued the individual, but denied legitimacy to the very idea that the masses exist for any purpose other than to serve an elite and die for the philosophies of that elite.
Koontz then writes about the “collapse” of those ideologies, but we have to keep in mind he was writing in 2015: pre-Trump and the subsequent rise of the new MAGA fascism. Fascism, it seems, didn’t collapse: it metamorphized into a modern American political movement run by billionaires, now being spread across other democracies through its disciples like Elon Musk and Kevin O’Leary.
The original novel was first serialized in Collier’s magazine, then published as a standalone novel in 1955. Wikipedia adds the novel “was also the basis of the 1998 movie The Faculty and the 2019 movie Assimilate.” Neither of which I have seen. Den of Geek also suggests Finney’s novel was “inspired, at least in part, by Robert Heinlein’s 1951 novel The Puppetmasters and possibly William Cameron Menzies’ 1953 [film] Invaders from Mars.” The idea of aliens taking over humans and controlling them is a frequently used trope in science fiction novels and film (In The Faculty, high school teens believe their teachers are aliens, and is sometimes included in the canon).
Seeing it today, America’s Cold War fears about brainwashing Communists don’t come across as clearly as a metaphor for societal alienation. Director Don Siegel himself later said he did not intend any political message in the film, just entertainment. This was only a decade after WWII and people were still feeling the sense of displacement and anxiety over social changes the war created (also portrayed in films like 1946’s The Best Years of Our Lives and 1953’s The Wild Ones). This is even more evident in the 1978 remake (see below; similarly, films like 1978’s Coming Home showed the conflicts of returning vets). Soldiers returning from war often felt the world they left had changed in their absence in ways they could not understand or adapt to. This new world was, for them, alien. In fact, all of these films were made in the shadow of a recently ended war.
I can imagine making a modern version where the aliens invade digitally via a social media app like TikTok to create their zombies. Oh, you mean that’s already happening? (The 1980 film, Virus, was about an alien invasion via a computer virus. And then there’s the whole Matrix franchise…)
The first Body Snatchers film was set in a small, somewhat isolated town, and part of the action takes place in even more isolated homes around it. It’s common to set the action in horror films in remote areas where help or safety is not immediately available. It enhances the ‘you’re on your own’ feeling of the protagonists. The traditional small-town setting, much like you see in It’s a Good Life, also means that there are old, deep connections between characters: families, friends, and schoolmates all know one another well enough from years of interaction to see even small changes in their personalities when the aliens take over. It’s only towards the end when the aliens have taken over and stop pretending that we can see them clearly, but before then, it’s a rollercoaster of growing suspicion and paranoia.***
The main protagonists (relatively unknown actors: Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter, playing Dr. Miles J. Bennell and his love interest, Becky Driscoll) are separated by geography from the infrastructure and agencies of the state which might be able to rescue them. As one after another of their friends and family fall prey to the invaders and the townspeople are replaced by exact duplicates, the sense of the two fighting alone against the tightening grip of the horde is heightened and harrowing. There is no place to escape, and the sense of doom accelerates through the film. Special effects were, for the period, extremely well done, given the $15,000 budget for them.
For a low-budget (originally $350,000 but ended up just over $382,000) film, the 1956 original, shot in B&W, stands up remarkably well today and for a B-film has rare quality in its effects and cinematography. Surprisingly, the director, Don Siegel, chose to shoot the night scenes at night: most Hollywood films (at least in that era) shot night scenes in the daytime using various lens filters to simulate the darkness. Siegel’s decision added a lot of shadows and visually impenetrable regions; it gives the movie a noir feeling none of the subsequent remakes have. (There is a colourized version of the film on YouTube, but that process not only removes the noir feeling but creates a pastel version of the original; I don’t recommend it).
Den of Geek provides an insight into how the director, Don Siegel, and the studio clashed over his vision for the film. The result took some of the terror away from his planned version:
…Allied studios chopped down both the budget and the shooting schedule, which meant the producers had to abandon plans to cast a couple of name actors in the lead roles…
The real trouble, though, came in post-production. Daniel Mainwaring’s original script (which stuck fairly close to Finney’s novel) and Siegel’s final edit contained a good deal of humor and what you might call overt humanity. The thinking was that characters with undisguised emotions, characters who actually smiled and laughed now and again, would provide more of a contrast with the increasing pod population. But at the time Allied executives were dead set against mixing horror and humor in any way, so ironically took the film and lopped out most of the humanity, leaving it much cooler and more clinical.
Then, just to double up on the irony, they decided Siegel’s original ending, with McCarthy running down the freeway banging on cars screaming, “You’re next! You’re next!” was too much a bummer, so they ordered Siegel to shoot a cheap framing device. By making the body of the film a flashback and leaving off with a more potentially upbeat ending, they changed the entire tone of the picture, and not for the better in most eyes. Certainly not Siegel’s, who remained bitter about it to the end. Skip those bookends, though, and it remains one of the most chilling endings in film history.
The second film adaptation came out in 1978, directed by Philip Kaufman, with Donald Sutherland and a stellar cast that included Brooke Adams, Leonard Nimoy, and Jeff Goldblum. It is considered a masterpiece itself. Rather than simply replicate Siegel’s work, the film was reimagined, set in the contemporary urban environment of San Francisco only a few years after the end of the Vietnam War.
Cities offer a different form of isolation where individuals feel less connected and more anonymous in the hive of activity and strangers around them. There’s a greater sense of anxiety in the individual trying to resist the masses and avoid being co-opted into the hive. The infrastructure becomes both the enemy and the place to hide. It becomes harder to recognize the aliens among so many strangers.
This is a solid, tense, and well-crafted film. Because it was shot in colour and in a contemporary city, it appealled more to a many critics and viewers than the by-ten-dated, B&W original. The acting is flawless and the pacing as good as you can get. The ending is chilling, with no reprieve from the horror. While the setting wasn’t true to the original, there were the same characters and relationships: it was certainly a superb homage to the ’56 version and proved a box-office success. It does feature one brief nude scene with Brooke Adams, by the way, which rather than being prurient is shocking.
The third film was the 1993 The Body Snatchers was directed by Abel Ferrara, and had “invasion” removed from the title. The setting is returned to a smaller venue: an isolated military base, but after that it veers wildly from Finney’s novel. Where the two previous films featured adults, this one brings alienated (excuse the pun) and rebellious teenagers into the act. A large part of the film is the teenage coming-of-age-and-sexuality interactions of various characters. Maybe that was meant to appeal to a younger audience, but it feels like a distraction. It uses basic ‘jump scares’ in many places, and at 0:52:00 Carol Malone (Meg Tilly) makes the ‘screech’ the aliens use to communicate when they recognize non-aliens(as Donald Sutherland did at the end of the 1978 film). That screech would also be used again in the film by minor characters. Tilley is the best of the actors and plays her part well and spooky as the alien; Forest Whitaker is good, but not given enough screen time to properly develop his character.
The aliens (in human garb) give themselves away around an hour into the 87-minute film as a group of them close in on Major Matthew Collins (Forest Whitaker). “Only unity guarantees survival,” says one. “The human race is doomed…” Ironic that it took until 2024 and Trump’s re-election to fulfill that. Oops. I digress again. I would say this film is better described as “inspired by” rather than a remake. The special effects are generally good, albeit dated.
Although Roger Ebert considered it superior to the previous adaptations and gave it four stars out of four, and the Birmingham Star called it “criminally underseen,” it doesn’t quite make the status as a cult film these days and feels weak today. The military base setting, although it emphasizes the ‘war’ aspect of the invasion (the Gulf War had ended in 1991), was too separated from the rest of the world.
The teenagers’ antics make it seem less than serious. And the sight of teenage boobs (remarkably without silicon enhancements) seemed egregiously unnecessary for the plot. Although, tossing the kid out of the chopper was cool. The ending was violent and rather predictably vague, given how the previous two films had ended. For me, it was a watchable, but pedestrian film, not any better than the many, many B-films I’ve watched. Despite the nudity, I didn’t feel it contributed significantly to the canon as the previous versions had.
A fourth, big-budget remake starring Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman, titled The Invasion, was released in 2007. While both actors are big names, they were perhaps not the best choices for this film because they are generally restrained and unemotional in their art, Kidman in particular. Together they seem just too distant for the audience to relate to either. I had hopes for the producers making a woman the central protagonist, but Kidman seems just too stiff for empathy.
In this one, the aliens spread themselves as a virus by vomiting on others or into their drinks. Yuck (a sneeze might have worked too, but then mask mandates could have stopped them…). The screech that was a highlight of the ’78 film, and repeated in the ’93 version, is not to be heard here. It’s a bit high-tech/medical/virology in places, as if The Andromeda Strain was blended into the script. As for wars, by 2007, the USA still had troops fighting or stationed in Iraq (began 2003) and Afghanistan (began 2001). But this film seems less a metaphor about the trauma of war than the threat of big government.
While the earlier films ignored Finney’s more upbeat ending in the novel — where the aliens decide it’s too much work and too hard to convert humans, so they give up and leave the planet — this one ends on a positive note: every snatched person is returned to normal through a cure. Whew. World domination by aliens aka government drones is averted. Compared to the cliffhanger, desperate, and generally negative endings of the ’78 film (and the ’56 film without the extraneous final scene), this ending felt weak and jarring after the lengthy build-up. It erased the previous tension and threat of the film in one ‘happily ever after’ scene. It’s like all they had to do was click the heels of their ruby slippers and mutter, “There’s no place like home…” and the aliens would be vanquished. Okay, it’s not so neat, but you get the idea.
Invasion suffered from a troubled production history, massive rewrites, re-shoots, and delays (see video, below), and has some glaring plot holes identified on many sites. Compared to the previous entries, much of it initially felt restrained, more cerebral than active, and too talkative (although it has many action scenes later).
Despite the revived, contemporary setting, and the solid if uninspired acting by Kidman, Craig, and others, it felt derivative rather than an original or even fresh interpretation. Still, it has some good moments; it’s generally well shot (the chase scenes are a bit too fragmented by short cuts, however), and despite critics’ generally negative views it deserves to be watched by fans of the first two, if only to see how a bigger budget ($64-$80 million) doesn’t necessarily produce a better movie. Roger Ebert called it “…the least, of the movies made from Jack Finney’s classic science fiction novel.”
These, then, are the four films of the canon. Every fan of the genre should see them all, and in order, to appreciate how the interpretation of the story evolved over six decades. We had Invasion of the Body Snatchers, then just Body Snatchers, then just Invasion. What next? Will a future remake simply be called Of The…? Or just The…? Let’s hope any remake goes back to the source material and looks at the ’56 film for inspiration. However, combining the virus idea from Invasion with the experiences with COVID-19, and the anti-vaxxer/pseudoscience/anti-masking cults that sprang up during the pandemic, perhaps a new version could portray an an alien virus being helped to spread by the anti-vaxxers. Too realistic?
And finally there was Invasion of the Pod People, an even lower-budget, softcore 2007 takeoff where the aliens turned women into lesbians, with the egregious tits-and-ass scenes. You might think that it’s a spoof, like Spaceballs, but it was released the same year as the Craig-Kidman film, probably to coattail on what the company hoped would be a successful remake. Asylum, the company that produced the film, is a low-budget studio that had a minor success when it released War of the Worlds 2, the same year the Dreamworks/Tom Cruise remake was released. These are called mockbusters: “a film created to exploit the publicity of another major motion picture with a similar title or subject.” Some mockbusters develop a cult audience for themselves by simply being so bad, some, like this, are simply bad. I know a lot of actors get their start in B-films, learn to perfect their craft in them, and go on to bigger and better things, but I don’t think anyone involved in this one did.
The film title combines not only the ’07 Invasion, but that of a 1983 low-budget mockbuster aimed at 1982’s E.T. The Extraterrestrial market, called The Pod People (a Spanish/French production originally titled as Los nuevos extraterrestres or Extra Terrestrial Visitors but edited with scenes added for US release). Spoiler alert: the aliens arrive via a ginger root that no one in the film seems to recognize even though you can buy it in any grocery store… but the point of the film was not the logic. It’s jam-packed with plot holes, bad dialogue, and worse acting. Not recommended, except for bad-film junkies who feel the obsessive need to own all the films related to the novel, regardless of their quality. Like me. Don’t get me started on my collection of Godzilla films. Or Gamera films. Mothra films…
Let’s talk about the remaining items: the book and the audiobook. Like with all movies made from books, you really should read the book as well, if for nothing more than to appreciate how the director re-imagined the author’s words, what was added, and what was removed. In this case, you will get a better sense of the humanity of the protagonists Miles and Becky than the ’56 film offered. You will also delight in Finney’s clear, crisp, and fast-paced writing style. It’s a short novel that can be read in a day or two. And, of course, reading does better things for your brain and memory than watching videos does.****
The original paperback and hardcover editions are collector’s items; both expensive and hard to find. The 60th anniversary edition, in paperback, with an introduction by Dean Koontz, was released in 2015; it may be out of print, but is worth looking for in your local used book store. AbeBooks has several editions in various formats, many used, including the audiobook.
The audiobook of Finney’s novel is 6½ hours long, on 6 CDs. It was published in 2007 by Blackstone Audio and is read by Kristoffer Tabori. I’ve listened to it twice and the reading is excellent. It will keep you listening to the final words. Both may be available at your local library, too. I heartily recommend them.
Notes:
* Of course, the original mind-controlling system is religion, and spreading from the USA is an aggressively infectious and toxic form of authoritarian religion called “Christian Nationalism.” This is, of course, only pseudo-Christian and is better known by the nicknames Talibangelism and Chrstofascism. It is not about faith, but rather about power, money, and controlling others.
There is an unrelated Japanese film whose title translates to Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell, available from Criterion. Nothing in the description entices me to want to watch it, however, despite my general affection for Criterion titles.
Also note that there was a short story by Robert Louis Stevenson titled The Body Snatcher, but it is unrelated to Finney’s novel. A film based on Stevenson’s story was made in 1945 with Boris Karloff. The words “Invasion of” were prefixed to the 1956 title to help keep its identity separate from that earlier film (the proposed original title was They Came From Another World).
** From Chaddossman.com an alternate interpretation: “… the movie manifests a generalized fear of a homogenized American culture. A pod person is discovered in an intermediary state, totally devoid of individual characteristics, like a mannequin. Perhaps America’s fabled melting pot, brought to an absurd conclusion, could result in a dead-end monoculture of uniform religion, politics, and behavior.”
*** The town in the novel is Mill Valley, California, the same town that BJ Honeycutt from M*A*S*H comes from. However, after scouting Mill Valley, the producer and director decided it was too expensive to shoot there, and found locations around Los Angeles to make the film, and gave the fictional town a new name: Santa Mira.
**** Not that one is necessarily a better medium than the other, but books and films are very different in what they do to the brain and our memory. And, yes, some movies are better than the books. But you will never know that without reading the book. For more on the neuroscience of reading, I recommend Maryanne Wolf’s Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. Her earlier work, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain is also very good.
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