Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Don Siegel’s fetching sci-fi thriller of 1956. The story of a small town taken over by “pods” that appropriate the bodies of human beings and destroy their souls—and that become feelingless, conformist nonentities hell-bent on eliminating any remnants of genuine humanity—was particularly timely then. Although it was apparently Siegel’s comment on Hollywood, liberals of every stripe were able to interpret it as an attack on McCarthyism, which, indeed, the film may also have intended.

What made Siegel’s movie interesting to me was that it did not waste footage on elaborate pseudo-scientific explanations and special effects, but concentrated instead on showing what happens to a decent young man in a provincial town who finds that his fellow citizens are, one by one, becoming pods out to get his soul; who never knows which of them is still human and which isn’t; and whose girlfriend, to his horror, is eventually turned into a pod that lures him into abjuring his soul. There was a routine cop-out forced on the director, to the effect that the FBI was going to stop this plague (how?), but otherwise the film was honest, unassuming, and scary in the profoundest sense: morally.

JS

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John Simon

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Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Don Siegel’s fetching sci-fi thriller of 1956. The story of a small town taken over by “pods” that appropriate the bodies of human beings and destroy their souls—and that become feelingless, conformist nonentities hell-bent on eliminating any remnants of genuine humanity—was particularly timely then. Although it was apparently Siegel’s comment on Hollywood, liberals of every stripe were able to interpret it as an attack on McCarthyism, which, indeed, the film may also have intended.

What made Siegel’s movie interesting to me was that it did not waste footage on elaborate pseudo-scientific explanations and special effects, but concentrated instead on showing what happens to a decent young man in a provincial town who finds that his fellow citizens are, one by one, becoming pods out to get his soul; who never knows which of them is still human and which isn’t; and whose girlfriend, to his horror, is eventually turned into a pod that lures him into abjuring his soul. There was a routine cop-out forced on the director, to the effect that the FBI was going to stop this plague (how?), but otherwise the film was honest, unassuming, and scary in the profoundest sense: morally.