In 1956, the alien invasion film was in its full āglory.ā The Thing From Another World, War of the Worlds, and many others had displayed an external threat. THEY are out there and are coming to get us! The UFO craze put flying saucers everywhere. Invasion of the Body Snatchers made the threat internal. It was no longer āThe Othersā that were to be feared, but our own friends, family, and neighbors. This is a much more frightening concept, and it created a smarter and more tension-filled picture than its relatively simplistic contemporaries. Invasion of the Body Snatchers wasnāt the first film where alien possession/replacement was the means of attack, but it was the best, and the one that has been remembered.
Doctor Miles Bennell returns from a medical conference to his idyllic, Californian small town. Heās thrilled to find his high school sweetheart, Becky Driscoll, is back in town, free, and interested. Heās also got a mystery as the large number of people who made appointments while he was gone all cancel, and the few people he does see all have a strange disorder where they āfeelā that a family member has been changed. Accepting it as some kind of mass delusion, he carries on normally. But he is summoned to the home of Jack Belicec, a writer and friend, who has found a dead bodyāone with no wounds, no finger prints, and few features. It soon becomes obvious that people really are changing, or being replaced, and it is impossible to know who to trust. Now thatās the stuff of paranoid nightmares.
Based on Jack Finneyās novel, The Body Snatchers, screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring weaves a tight tale, with likeable, multi-dimensional characters, and snappy dialog. Thereās no wasted moments. Director Don Siegel adds a Film Noir look to crank up the hopelessness. Darkness hides the malevolence until it is too late, and then it is āgoodā that has to take refuge in shadows.
The acting is excellent, a rarity in 1950s genre films. Much of the movie rests on the shoulders of Kevin McCarthy, who creates a very human Dr. Bennell. Dana Wynter is equally good in a less taxing role, though she gets the films most chilling moment, laying on the ground, looking up with nothing behind her eyes (see the pic above); Iāve seen viewers shudder at the sight. The two of them, charming on their own, have chemistry together. That makes the story not just a paranoid dream, but a tragedy.
Taken as a horror film, without examining its context or theme, it is amazingly effective, even fifty years later. It ignores cheap jump-scares in favor of slowly building anxiety that leads to real fright. But as a straight story, it does have a few flaws. How can people tell when their loved-ones have been replaced? Iāve seen people go through massive psychological changes, and never felt that they had been taken over. Anyone on the proper drugs will appear to have all of their emotions sapped away. The answer for the film, though never stated, is that people are seeing the lack of a āsoulā (taken in its broadest sense). As a symbol, this works well, but for straight ahead storytelling, it is problematic. Also, Bennellās proposal to leave the odd corpse on the table for the night and watch it is out of character, not to mention stupid. And Iāve always wondered what medicine heās giving the hysterical child early in the film. The biggest plot hole comes late in the film, when pod-Becky opens her eyes. Itās a great scene, but how was Becky replaced? Yes, she fell asleep for a minute, but was there a pod in the cave with her? The replacement always took time before, and involved a new body, but this time it plays like a sudden demonic possession. But these turn into minor problems because it is nearly impossible to watch Invasion of the Body Snatchers and see only its surface. The implausible events and situations bow under the weight of symbolic meanings.
Theme vs. Theme vs. Politics
I canāt imagine anyone watching Invasion of the Body Snatchers without being overwhelmed by levels of meaning, and thatās why it works so well. It isnāt frightening because youāre afraid that pods from outer space are going to take over (well, unless you actually are afraid of pods from outer space, in which caseā¦), but rather because it suggests that everything you believe in, everything you hold to be of value, could be stripped from you, not taken by outside forces, by attack from foreign countries, monsters, or aliens, but taken by those close to you, who willingly give up their individuality. Even worse, you might do it to yourself. The danger that Siegel preaches against is conformity (in some interviews, heās claimed it was just an invasion film with no theme, but in others he contradicted that, stating it was about conformity and going on at great length about it). The pod-people are those who have given up thinking for themselves, who have accepted the party line (where the āpartyā is not limited to political groups).
The trick with that message is that no one saying it ever means it entirely. Donāt conform, but who arenāt you supposed to conform with? Itās hard to find anyone who would suggest that you shouldnāt conform to non-murdering (in your society). Think for yourself, as long as you donāt come up with certain answers (like chopping up the neighbors is OK). Some kind of conformity is required. So, what is Invasion of the Body Snatchers warning you against? Well, it was 1950s America. It doesnāt take much work to find the dangerous ideologies of the day: Communism and McCarthyism. And the film is filled with hints that weāre on the right track. What does it give us:
The pod-people are emotionless, specifically lacking love.
They are efficient, all working together.
They are fanatical about their system.
They meet together at night in cells
They are not trying to keep things stagnant, but alter them to their āutopia.ā
The town of Santa Mira is a pretty nice, all American place to live.
This pushes things pretty firmly into the anti-communist camp. Those first five are all part of the typical view of communism at the time. If McCarthyism had been the target, Iād expect the pod-people to be uniformly emotional, shouting about how they must keep things pure. Itās not that you canāt make an anti-McCarthy message fit the film, itās just that you have to do a lot more stretching of the metaphors while the anti-communist one slides in easily.
In 1962, the U.S. Department of Defense teamed with Warner Bros. to produce the propaganda movie, Red Nightmare, a thinly veiled take off on Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Narrated by Jack Webb, it showed a peaceful small town that could have been Santa Mira. In it, Jerry Donovan (Jack Kelly, TVās Bret Maverick) goes to sleep (remember, they get you when you sleep) and wakes to find his town taken over by communists. Everyone has changed, with his wife now a good party member, his children ready to go off to state run institutions, and the church converted to the Peopleās Museum, where everything is claimed to have been invented in Russia. This is a deadly serious work, and my personal favorite propaganda film. While Red Nightmare smashes you over the head with its anti-communist stance, Invasion of the Body Snatchers does the same thing with a touch more subtlety.
Itās not uncommon to hear people proclaim that the message is more general, or that it covers other changes that society was having problems with, such as the role of women. But such interpretations are unlikely. First, because in the mid-50s, these other issues were rolled into the communist hysteria: women wanting to work was an attack on American values and an aid to the communists. Second, and more importantly, communism and McCarthyism were too omnipresent; any artist would have to address these if touching on a close topic or know that they would be misinterpreted. If you were going to discuss conformity via mindless takeover, youād have to state that you werenāt talking about communism or McCarthyism. It would be similar to someone making a film after 9/11 about planes crashing into two towers. Without any mitigating statements, this would be about al Qaeda. Actually, even if the filmmaker claimed, and truly intended it not to be about al Qaeda, but about violence in general, it would still be about al Qaeda to everyone who viewed it. You canāt escape context.
But does this weaken the present impact of the film, particularly to those who found the right-wing, anti-communist rants to be dangerous? No. Because times have changed. Weāve got a new set of fears and new bogeymen in the form of terrorists. The specific political arguments of the ā50s arenāt important now, but the philosophical message is. So, after ā50 years, Invasion of the Body Snatchers has become the general anti-conformity statement that it couldnāt be when it came out.