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My whole family is full of horror hounds. My uncle is obsessed with Kong Kong. My mother used to tell me the plot of Jaws as my bedtime story when I was little. But most of the reason I'm such a genre freak today is my grandma, who let me watch the original Halloween on VHS way too young. She still talks about one movie in particular that scared the shit out of her when she a kid. She says she was convinced my great-great grandmother was a Pod Person and was scared to sleep.
So here's a review for you, Grandma: The original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a movie that has been overshadowed by its 1978 remake, much as Carpenter's The Thing overshadows The Thing from Another World. How does the Fifties version hold up?
Pretty darn well, actually. A lot of American horror movies from this era might have worked better as half hour episodes of The Twilight Zone. This one largely justifies its eighty minutes.
This is only Day 6 and this is already our third movie about aliens secretly replacing humanity. Body Snatchers holds a special place above all of these, even though It Came from Outer Space and Invaders from Mars predate it by three years. The original short story, The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney, had to compete against Robert A. Heinlein's novel, The Puppet Masters of the same premise - only Finney's version presumably has less nudism than Heinlein. (Heinlein was a weird dude.) This concept is everywhere in Fifties SciFi, even Britain did it with Quatermass II.
I would not be the most innovative or cutting edge writer to if mentioned how Body Snatchers exists in its Cold War context. (Have I not done this already, in fact?) People have debated over seventy years now what this period meant, whether these films were anti-Communist or anti-McCarthyist. Body Snatchers does not make any coherent political statement on that spectrum. That is not why this movie stands out above the others.
I'd say, all these visions of mankinds' replacement are not about Communism per se, rather more a response to modernity itself. The 20th century is a brutal battle over all visions of the future: the fascist, the communist, the liberal capitalist, no matter what, it's always a march forward. Conservatism will not have a place for another few decades. The goal of global conquest for any mode of thought required vast arsenals of mechanization, computerization, standardization, as more and more metal and machinery replaced nature, religion, and traditional culture. The world was pushed from agrarian economies to industrial economies to already the beginnings of the post-industrial over the span of just a century. Your costume designates you as a Nazi, Bolshevik, or a Ford salaryman, but the methods are still the same. You're still increasingly alienated from every way of life your ancestors had for centuries. Conformity and reprogramming was required of every regime. With the rise of nuclear warfare, it also felt out of control, Progress was a glorious promise towards comfort and ease, until it suddenly became apocalyptic madness.
"Love, desire, ambition, faith - without them, life's so simple, believe me." Tells an alien to our heroes. There is no choice whether you join or not.
This is the how the counter-culture begins in the Sixties. That's how this bloodless rationalism has to make way for new spiritualisms and cultural revolutions, a demand that human feelings exist and matter, be them sexual or religious. Even the UFO stuff will become another kind of esotericism competing with Evangelical Christianity, Neo-Paganism, whatever. The Satanic Panic is another front in the war against modernity.
As much as Quatermass and the Pit despised humanity, Body Snatchers cherishes it.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a dystopian movie. The characters just do not know they're in a dystopia at first. Our two heroes, Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) and Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter) with quickly become the last humans left in the town of Santa Mira. What is their method of rebellion against this soulless modernity that has beset their home? That is merely continuing to exist, being in love, acting as human lovers could. It is the same resistance tried by Winston and Julia in Orwell's 1984. Feeble as it is, it is still a threat to the State, which must have infinite power over its subjects. Only the Body Snatcher State does not need torture to reprogram its dissidents; it can simply replace them with loyalists. There need not be any difference between the governors and the governed, the Alien State truly is all. We see masses of Santa Mirans marching in step, a proto-zombie film, only their movements serve a unified, thinking purpose of expansion.
The awful flaw to Body Snatchers is the frame story. This seems to have been added by producer meddling, the film has no need for it. All it does is let us know that Miles will survive these events and some human authority will fight back. Which, if you're going to make a horror movie, don't undercut your own threat. It also means Kevin McCarthy narrates much of his own character's internal thoughts, which is never needed. Internal monologue narration is a huge pet peeve for me. I hate it.
Besides that weakness, the mystery of Invasion of the Body Snatchers evolves well. It starts with Miles returning home on the train, slowly noticing odds things about Santa Mira. Harmless things like nobody is eating at the hot date restaurant lately, and the family farm stand has closed up business. Then there's a running delusion all through town that people are not themselves, children afraid of their mothers, young women afraid of their guardians. Miles can chop it all up to mere hysteria, until one of his friends finds a half-finished replica of themselves in the living room, becoming more and more detailed. Then they the pods in the green house, spitting out little growing alien homunculi of the cast. Which are a nice gross special effect, perhaps the other reason Body Snatchers stands out.
Another great detail: the aliens eat you when you're asleep. Nightmare on Elm Street would capitalize on this critical human weakness as well. Nobody can stay awake forever. The Pods will get you eventually. Miles has to watch his beloved finally fade away, replaced by yet another member of the collective.
Don Siegel shoots this movie pretty darn well. There's a great shot where a young woman in the background sees the Pod Person version of her husband in the foreground open its eyes, both figures stay mostly in focus. We got some slanted Dutch Angle shots when Miles finds the Pods. The movie gets darker and gloomier, starting with sunny California days and our horny doctor flirting with the ladies of the town, and by the end he's ranting in the darkness for anybody to listen to him. Siegel will go on to have a heck of a career shooting westerns and action movies.
There would be a perfect ending to Invasion of the Body Snatchers if only the studio had interfered. We have Miles shouting at passing cars in the streets. "THEY'RE HERE ALREADY!! YOU'RE NEXT!! YOU'RE NEXT!!" Cut to credits and that's an ending to a movie. Guess America was just not ready for such a gloomy conclusion in 1956.
Well, one Vietnam War later and by 1978, the remake will have one of the greatest horror endings of all time. We'll get there soon.
Next Time! It creeps and leaps and glides and slides across the floor and right through the door. The Blob!
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