Invasion Of The Body Snatchers

Miles Bennell, a GP in the small Californian town of Santa Mira, returns from an out-of-town meeting to find himself inundated with calls from locals insisting that members of their family are not the same people anymore or have changed in some way. Believing it some type of mass hallucination, he refers them to a psychiatrist. He meets his old girlfriend Becky Driscoll and starts seeing her again. They are interrupted at dinner by mystery writer Jack Belicec who takes them to see a body found on his pool table, one mysteriously lacking any type of distinguishing marks, even fingerprints. As Jack sleeps, his wife sees the body form into a likeness of Jack, even down to a recent cut on his hand. Miles finds a similar body forming in Becky’s basement. But when they try to show the bodies to the police they have vanished and they think, in the rationale of daylight, that they have succumbed to the mass delusion too. But as night falls again they find pods in Miles’s glasshouse. When they try to run they find everywhere that the whole town has turned into hostile, emotionless pod people trying to stop them. 

This brilliant, terrifying film is one of the best things the science-fiction genre produced in the 1950s.  Film noir took the standard G-Man and detective films of the 1930s and remade them with a darker spin where the edges of the world the films inhabited was foregrounded to suggest a world of near shadowy darkness, where morals were blurred such that the detective heroes seemed less resolute fighters for law and order than they were the world weary bastions of hope in a world that was morally decaying.  In the same sense Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the other alien takeover films, as well as works that would follow such as British copies like Quatermass II/The Enemy from Space (1956) and Village of the Damned (1960) and tv’s The Outer Limits (1963-5) and The Invaders (1967-8), psychologically externalized the central conflict of the alien invader film – they were less films about aliens than they were about alienation. Of these films Invasion of the Body Snatchers in particular looks back and draws from the physical and photographic style of noir in its creation of shadowy tension and paranoid uncertainty. 

The original title for Invasion of the Body Snatchers was Sleep No More, which is telling. For it is really a film that is all about the divide between the fear that nightmares hold and the rationalism that the waking world offers. It seems less about the literal mechanics of alien invasion that it does about a wide-awake nightmare slowly occluding the everyday world and reason itself. Beginning amidst the everyday, the film slowly overturns normalcy in quiet, unexceptional way – oddities and peculiarities are introduced then dismissed with perfect rationalizations. And when the slip into nightmare comes, it is something that has already arrived and overwhelmed with a slick ease, gathering all the details littered throughout about it. Suddenly we are confronted with shock images – like that of a blank unformed body lying on a billiard table, or a duplicate of Dana Wynter discovered growing in the cellar. 

The film quite remarkably allows all of this to take place in half-shadow at night-time, but then when it returns to the day it is like a tromp d’loeil optical illusion where everything suddenly reverses itself and what happened is made to appear as though it belongs in the realm of irrational nightmare – the body is gone, there are only shadows in the cellar, and the aunt and kid who thought people were different are now acting perfectly normal. The psychiatrist’s explanation the morning after that the pods are all part of a mass hallucination becomes so convincing the film’s entire perspective changes about in a single moment – one believes it because it sounds so rational. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a film that uses the fear of night probably more so than any other horror film ever made – night and sleep are the realms of fear, day is the realm of reason. What is interesting though is that the film sides with irrationality and night, rather than day and reason. Much of the latter half of the film builds with the relentless sense of spinning out of control that a nightmare does. Indeed the climactic scenes with Kevin McCarthy running on a highway and his cries for help being ignored by the passing cars and his leaping onto the back of a truck only to find it filled with pods makes much more sense in terms of dream logic than rational storytelling. 

When the nightmare arrives true and proper, director Donald Siegel dips into his bag of film noir tricks and lets go with everything in its arsenal – shots down tight corridors, silhouettes running against streetlights, tilted angles, closeups on sweaty faces. Some scenes are moments of classic terror – the shots up from under the planks under which Kevin McCarthy and Dane Wynter hide, with the pod people crossing above calmly assuring them there is nothing to fear; the wide-angled shots out of the office window down onto the public square, which becomes inexplicably frightening the moment all visitors are cleared and the bustle of everyday chaos suddenly turns into something ordered and people start organizing the pods to be distributed about the country. There’s a wonderfully chill scene eavesdropping on a house where a married couple discuss the baby: “Is the baby asleep yet?” “No, but she will be soon. There’ll be no more tears then.” And the scene in the mine where Dana Wynter draws Kevin McCarthy down into a slow kiss, and the camera moves into closeup on her face, showing her black, expressionless wide-open eyes as we joltingly realize she too has been taken over is genuinely scary, a really classic moment. 

Director Donald Siegel had made a career out of career out of snub-nosed crime thrillers – indeed he made many of these in the film noir era of the 1940s and 50s. His two other forays into genre territory were the original Dirty Harry (1971), a psycho-thriller that made frequent Siegel collaborator Clint Eastwood’s name, and the lesser-known Eastwood vehicle The Beguiled (1971), a great Southern Gothic melodrama. Siegel also appeared as an bartender in Eastwood’s psycho-thriller Play Misty for Me (1971).  (Moria) 

Maybe there was something in the water. Maybe all those years of breathing in the fumes of leaded gasoline had finally started to affect people’s minds. Hell, maybe it was sunspot activity. I don’t know, but whatever the reason, the mid-1970’s saw the beginning of a remake frenzy that didn’t abate until well into the 1980’s. And for whatever reason, this spasm of nostalgia ended up producing a few movies of astonishing quality, more than balancing, in my estimation, the drag exerted by such films as Blackenstein or the 1976 King Kong. Philip Kaufman’s version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is one of these masterworks. 

The first big difference you’ll notice between this version and the original is the change of setting. Instead of a small village on the edge of the southern California desert, this Invasion of the Body Snatchers takes place in downtown San Francisco. Matthew Binnell (Donald Sutherland, from Die, Die, My Darling! and Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors) is an inspector for the city health department. We meet him as he goes about the course of his regular duties, completely oblivious to a peculiar, subtle change in the landscape around him: all over the city, small parasitic flowers have begun growing on plants of every imaginable species. No one on Earth realizes this yet, but these mysterious parasites grew from gelatinous spores that had drifted, probably for millenia, across the vacuum of space from some alien world. 

Among the first people to notice the plants is a friend and coworker of Matthew’s, named Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams, from Shock Waves and The Dead Zone). Elizabeth is a dedicated gardener in her spare time, and she realizes that the flowering pods are unusual even before she tries to look them up in one of her reference books without success. Impressed by the strange beauty of the pods, she takes one home and places it in a tumbler full of water by her bedside.  Those of us who have seen the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers know already what a terrible idea this is. And sure enough, the very next day, Elizabeth notices her husband acting strangely. He wakes up much too early, for one thing, and his demeanor is inexplicably secretive, as if he were trying to conceal something from her. And on top of everything else, Elizabeth’s flower is gone. 

Unnerved by her husband’s behavior, Elizabeth calls in sick to work the following day and spends her time following him around at a distance instead. Oddly, he never goes to his office, but devotes the entire day to meeting with people Elizabeth has never seen before, exchanging large packages wrapped in heavy brown paper. By evening, Elizabeth is convinced that her husband isn’t really her husband at all, but some sort of imposter. She goes to Matthew with her story, and Binnell scarcely knows what to make of it. He can tell that Elizabeth is scared out of her wits, though, so he suggests that they pay a visit to another friend of his, a psychiatrist by the name of David Kibner (Leonard Nimoy). Not in any formal context, mind you— just as friends seeking advice. Kibner has a book signing that night, and Binnell figures that offers as good an opportunity as any to introduce his two friends to each other. 
 
Kibner turns out not to be the only one signing books that evening. Another friend of Matthew’s, a somewhat paranoid poet named Jack Bellicec (Jeff Goldblum, from The Fly and Mr. Frost), is also there, though his book signing isn’t going nearly so well as Kibner’s. Jack and Matthew talk while Elizabeth stands in Kibner’s line, and while she’s waiting for the psychiatrist, Elizabeth overhears a very interesting conversation between Kibner and one of his fans. This woman is frantically telling Kibner that her husband has been replaced by a doppelganger! After the book signing has broken up, it comes out that Dr. Kibner has been seeing tremendous numbers of people suffering from this particular delusion, which he believes is some sort of hysterical defense mechanism for coping with a disintegrating relationship— if a person’s mate is no longer really his or her mate, than he or she need feel no qualms about breaking up with the “imposter.” Elizabeth, naturally, doesn’t buy this for a second, but even she must admit that it sounds a hell of a lot more reasonable than her contention. 

We all know Elizabeth’s right, though, and confirmation comes in the next scene, when the camera follows Bellicec to the sauna and mud bath parlor owned by his equally flaky wife, Nancy (Veronica Cartwright, from Alien and The Birds). Jack falls asleep in one of the saunas, and after all the customers have gone home, Nancy finds a body in the stall next to Jack’s. Now finding a stiff in your sauna is bad enough, but Nancy’s situation is even worse, in that the body she finds seems somehow unfinished. There are no lines on its face, its features are so vague that you’d never be able to describe it to someone if you met it on the street, and every inch of its skin is covered with thin, white filaments that don’t quite look or feel like hair. But for all its nondescriptness, the body somehow resembles Jack. Nancy’s screams wake Jack up, and he instantly calls Matthew Binnell to come over and have a look at the thing in the sauna. Binnell’s examination of the body turns up yet another disturbing detail: the body has no fingerprints! Suddenly, Elizabeth’s story doesn’t sound so crazy anymore, does it? 

Matthew doesn’t think so either, and he rushes over to Elizabeth’s place to check up on her. He finds her husband awake, but refusing to acknowledge the doorbell, and so Binnell sneaks around the back of the house, and breaks in through the basement door. When he gets up to Elizabeth’s room a few minutes later, he sees his worst fears confirmed. Lying among the flowers on the balcony outside Elizabeth’s room is a perfect duplicate of her. Matthew just barely sneaks out with Elizabeth without her husband discovering him, and returns to the Bellicec place. By this time, they have called in Dr. Kibner, as per the instructions Matthew gave them on his way out the door. But when Kibner arrives to look at the body, there is no trace of it anywhere. Nor is there any sign of Elizabeth’s double when Matthew foolishly insists on sneaking back into Chez Driscoll with Kibner in tow and calling the police to meet them there to look at Elizabeth’s “other body.” Only Kibner’s formidable powers of persuasion save Matthew from a stay in the municipal jail. 

But because Mr. Driscoll is a pod person, there can really be only one explanation for Kibner’s ability to elicit his trust, and before long, it will be obvious to everyone but Matthew, Elizabeth, and the Bellicecs whose side the psychiatrist is really on. Evidently, Kibner brought a quartet of pods with him to hide in the garden the last time he visited Matthew, because on the night after the debacle of the missing bodies, while all four protagonists are staying over at Binnell’s place, those pods sprout, and begin developing into
vegetable doppelgangers. If Nancy weren’t such a light sleeper, it would have been all over then and there, but her shrieks of horror awaken everybody in time for Matthew and Jack to destroy the growing doubles. From this moment on, the four will be on the run constantly, as it becomes increasingly clear that the entire city of San Francisco is under the pod people’s control. And as is only fitting for a film made in the pessimistic late 70’s, this Invasion of the Body Snatchers ends not by raising the question of whether humanity will ultimately be able to survive the alien plants’ silent onslaught, but by suggesting an answer to that question: well, no... probably not.