<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

For the 1978 film see: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978 movie)

Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Release Date	February 5, 1956
Genre	Science Fiction
Director	Don Siegel
Screenwriter	Jack Finney Daniel Mainwaring Richard Collins
Stars	Kevin McCarthy Dana Wynter Larry Gates King Donovan Carolyn Jones Jean Willes Larry Gates
Studio	Allied Artists Pictures Corporation

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) was the first film version of Jack Finney's novel The Body Snatchers, which appeared in magazine form in 1954 and as a paperback in 1955. His story of alien invaders who duplicate and replace humans, complete with their memories, is a thinly disguised allegory for the Red Scare of that period, the conviction that communist sleepers were hidden among us. The movie, a classic black-and-white thriller starring Kevin McCarthy and Carolyn Jones, appeared the following year, released as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which title has been applied to the novel in most subsequent reprintings.

Directed by Don Siegel, the story unfolds slowly but inexorably, with McCarthy eventually becoming aware of what is happening but unable to convince others. There are variant versions of the film, some of which indicate that the authorities have finally recognized the threat, but even in these the ending is downbeat, quite unusual for SF films from that era. Earlier movies had explored similar themes, most notably Invaders from Mars (1953), but always assumed that, in the end, the human race would triumph. Finney and Siegel suggested otherwise.

The first remake appeared under the same title in 1978, directed by Philip Kaufman and starring Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, and Leonard Nimoy. Although the premise was the same, there was very little relationship to the book in its details. The setting was moved from rural America to a large city, there was an active band of humans opposing the invaders, and the pods themselves seemed more effective, depleting the ranks of the resistance very quickly. Kaufman kept the downbeat ending; in fact, he gave it a shocking new twist. In effect, it is more of a sequel than a remake.

The same is true of the third and least successful version, which appeared as Body Snatchers (1993), directed by Abel Ferrara from a screenplay by Stuart Gordon. Gabriel Anwar, Meg Tilly, and Forest Whitaker make a solid attempt to turn this alternately slow moving and chaotic version into a suspenseful film, but other than an effective sequence in which the replacement operation is interrupted, it offers nothing new. The conflict is out in the open now, and it seems unlikely that humanity can survive. The emphasis is on special effects and action sequences, and the eerie, relentlessly unsettling atmosphere of the first two films is almost completely absent.

Popular Culture References

• In the Vortex episode of The Dead Zone (TV Series), Johnny Smith refers to cult members as "pod people"